On July 27, 2004 at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, 42-year-old Illinois state senator Barack Obama stepped to the podium and told the delegates:
On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln, let me express my deep gratitude for the privilege of addressing this convention. Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely. My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant.
The Kenyan Barack Obama was born in 1934 and in 1954 married Kezia Aoko, who bore him two children. Barack and Kezia were still married when the Kenyan arrived at the University of Hawaii in 1959. According to Dreams from My Father, in a Russian language course the Kenyan “met an awkward, shy American girl, only eighteen, and they fell in love. The girl’s parents, wary at first, were won over by his charm and intellect; the young couple married, and he bore them a son, to whom he bequeathed his name.” In the early going, the author gave readers cause to wonder.
“We have all seen too much, to take my parents’ brief union – a black man and white woman, an African and an American, at face value,” the author explains. “As a result, people have a hard time taking me at face value.” The author is normally addressed as Barry, and was in fact Barry Soetoro, stepson of Indonesian student Lolo Soetoro his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. Barry speaks of “a stubborn desire to protect myself from scrutiny,” but went ahead with the book project.
The Kenyan Barack Obama died in 1982 and the shy American girl Ann Dunham passed away in 1995, the year Dreams hit the bookstores. Barry rode his new identity into the U.S. Senate in 2004 and the White House in 2008 and 2012. In 2013 the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York discovered a trove of materials from the Kenyan Barack Obama. In all his writings and documents from 1958 to 1964, the Kenyan mentions nothing about an American wife and son born in 1961. In 2017, Barry’s narrative would get another challenge from Pulitzer Prize winner David Garrow, author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama:
Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel, and its most important composite character was the narrator himself. (emphasis original)
“He wants people to believe his story. For me to conclude that Dreams from My Father was historical fiction—oh God, did that infuriate him.” That was Garrow to David Samuels in “The Obama Factor” on Tablet last August. For Samuels, “there was something about this fictional character that he created actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.”
Back at the DNC in 2004, the keynote speaker predicted a win by John Kerry and John Edwards. That didn’t happen, but the fictional character unwittingly provided guidance for 2024:
We stand on the crossroads of history, we can make the right choices, and meet the challenges that face us . . . Out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.
For further reading on the fictional character see Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation and Yes I Con: United Fakes of America.
