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What were the dreams of his father?

Josie

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Obama's autobiography is called Dreams of My Father.

What were the dreams of his father?
 
that one day the US would be run by a muslim, kenyan, communist black man.
 
I've never read it (yes, I know I should to answer my own question). I just thought someone here would know.
 
The dreams of his father are basically the story of the narrative. His father had high hopes for his son after he was admitted to that prestigious school in Hawaii. His father died in a car accident and never got to see Obama rise to the presidency.
 
The dreams of his father are basically the story of the narrative. His father had high hopes for his son after he was admitted to that prestigious school in Hawaii. His father died in a car accident and never got to see Obama rise to the presidency.

What "high hopes" did he have? Just to be President?

Also this confuses me....I thought he and his father barely even knew each other. Why would he use his father in the title of his autobiography? Did he have more of an impact than I think?
 
I doubt he knows the dreams of his father- it's just a cool title for a book.;)

Hell, I don't know the dreams of my own father, and I grew up with, and spent time with him every single day for 18 years.:mrgreen:
 
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Obama's autobiography is called Dreams of My Father.

What were the dreams of his father?

After several readings of the book in question, I believe the title refers to Obama's dreams of his father. His dreams about his father. His fantasies about who his father was.
He only met his father once; he was around ten years old when the man came for a two-week visit.
He found his father abrasive, bossy, and quarrelsome, meddling and disruptive, upsetting everyone in the family, demanding that young Obama be forced to do extra schoolwork over the holidays instead of watching The Grinch Who Stole Christmas on television, causing his mother and grandparents to argue endlessly.
He was happy when his father left.

But he always felt a void, an empty place in his life where his father was not.
It was a void that neither his grandfather nor his stepfather Lolo Soetoro could entirely fill, although each, in his own way, tried.
As one of the only children of color in a private school, he lied and told his classmates that his father was African royalty.
As a young man struggling with racial identity, he went to Africa to find out what he could about his father, although the man, by that time, was dead.
It turned out that his father had not, in life, been the sort of person Barack Obama could look up to. But he found other relatives who he became close to, and who eventually helped him come to terms with his life.

Although the book was first published over 15 years ago, it was re-published in 2004 with a foreword stating that, had he known his mother would die the same year the book was published, he might have written it from a very different perspective, focusing more on her and her life and influence upon him.
As it was, he had no idea at the time he wrote the book that she'd be dying any time soon; she was still a relatively young woman. At the time he wrote the book, his mother was a constant in his life, whom he no doubt took for granted, while his father was the one who had always been an elusive and idealized mystery, and was now gone beyond recall.
So he wrote the book for his dad, about his dad, about how the absence of this man shaped his life and identity.
It's a young man's memoir. What's he supposed to write about, other than his own feelings and family dramas?
 
The dreams of his father are basically the story of the narrative. His father had high hopes for his son after he was admitted to that prestigious school in Hawaii. His father died in a car accident and never got to see Obama rise to the presidency.

BS. His father never knew him at all. His father had passels of kids from half a dozen women of all races.
It is doubtful he ever spared more than a passing thought to Obama. He did not maintain contact with him, as he did with others of his children who lived abroad.
 
BS. His father never knew him at all. His father had passels of kids from half a dozen women of all races.
It is doubtful he ever spared more than a passing thought to Obama. He did not maintain contact with him, as he did with others of his children who lived abroad.

It's rare that I step in and defend, applaud or cheer 1069 on...

BUT YOU GO GIRL.


YOU GO.

I have my suspecions as to how serious "The Dane" is as a poster, and you just boosted my suspicions. Thank you 10, and I mean that.
 
Ask the author... william ayers.

Yeah, because God knows there's no way a Harvard graduate who used to publish poetry in literary magazines would ever be able to write proficiently and movingly about his own life. :roll:

Just like there's no way an eighth grade drop-out would ever be able to write publishable material.

Oh, wait.... :doh

Have you read Ayers' autobiography? What similarities of style or syntax do you find between his work and Obama's? Or are you an astute-enough reader to even be able to competently compare and contrast the two?
 
It's rare that I step in and defend, applaud or cheer 1069 on...

BUT YOU GO GIRL.


YOU GO.

I have my suspecions as to how serious "The Dane" is as a poster, and you just boosted my suspicions. Thank you 10, and I mean that.

Thanks for the thanks; you'll probably remove them when you read my response to your "Bill Ayers" assertion.

You know getting editorial help isn't the same as having a ghost-writer, right?
 
Hm. It IS Dreams from My Father. I was about to say that 10's post made sense, but now I don't know.
 
Yeah, because God knows there's no way a Harvard graduate who used to publish poetry in literary magazines would ever be able to write proficiently and movingly about his own life. :roll:

Just like there's no way an eighth grade drop-out would ever be able to write publishable material.

Oh, wait.... :doh

Have you read Ayers' autobiography? What similarities of style or syntax do you find between his work and Obama's? Or are you an astute-enough reader to even be able to competently compare and contrast the two?

10.. it was a JOKE. There are peopel out there that claim Obama didn't write his books, Ayers did. I was playin' off that.
 
The sub-title of the book kind of gives away the title's meaning for me.

A story of race and inheritance...

So the meaning of the title...?
 
A story of race and inheritance...

So the meaning of the title...?

Obama struggled a lot with his racial identity.
I'd like to say "more than most men of color", but I don't- can't possibly- know that.
He was a biracial child born in a time of racial strife and political unrest.
He was abandoned by his father and raised by his white family, in a place where there were very few blacks (Hawaii).
He attended private schools where there were only a handful of blacks, and he was often the only one in his entire grade.
The whole "Indonesia/ Lolo Soetoro" interlude no doubt complicated things even more.
In young adulthood, he moved to the continental US for college and learned, for the first time, what it actually meant to be a black male in the United States. Because up until that point, he hadn't really experienced it.
He responded to this in a variety of ways, including stints of depression and drug use, moving to a ghetto in Chicago's South Side to work as a community organizer, and ultimately traveling all the way to Africa to meet his black relatives for the first time, although as I said his father was already dead by then.
Race and racial identity are a thread that runs throughout the book. This might not be the case if Obama were ten or twenty years younger, but he's not, and race was still a really big issue when he was young.
Obama was born in 1961; Jim Crow laws were not repealed until the mid-60s, and of course tension continued to brew for many more years. Obama's parents' union was against the law in a dozen states at the time of his birth. By US law, Obama should not even exist. His very existence is evidence of a crime. Anti-miscegenation laws were not repealed in all US states until 1967.
So.

The race part is self-evident.
The "inheritance" part? I don't know what he inherited from the father he only met once, briefly, in childhood.
Nothing material, that's for sure. The man died a penniless drunk.
I guess his entire identity struggle is the "inheritance".
That, and his Kenyan family, with whom he became close.
Like I said, if this memoir is a paean to his longing for his exotic, absent father, I'm sure it would've been a very different book had he known that his equally remarkable (and much more influential in his life) mother would be dead within a year of the time it hit the shelves.
 
A story of race and inheritance...

So the meaning of the title...?

I get the idea that the "Father" in the title has dual meaning. It is both literally referring to his actual father and poetically referring to his racial heritage, i.e. forefathers.
 
I get the idea that the "Father" in the title has dual meaning. It is both literally referring to his actual father and poetically referring to his racial heritage, i.e. forefathers.

Hm...interesting.
 
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