All the President's identities

Barack Obama: The Making Of The Man
David Maraniss
Atlantic Books
643 pages
Rs899

Talking Heads was a New York City band that started out as New Wave in the mid-1970s and went through stages of gospel, African and World music before they disbanded around 1990.

Their fans were college students, artists and intellectuals; when I visited a high school friend at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire during the summer of 1981 (US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a vacation home here), not only was I the only non-white person there, I was also the only one who had heard Talking Heads.

It turns out that President Barack Obama, three years older, also loved Talking Heads.

It makes sense: a man born of a white mother and an African father listening to a band which at the zenith of its popularity drifted from being arty white folk to a half-black, half-white ensemble.

According to David Maraniss’s book Barack Obama: The Making of the Man, Obama danced with various girls to Talking Heads at college parties in Los Angeles and in New York.

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, who published a short book this year on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, calls the band edgy, paranoid, funky, addictive, rhythmic, repetitive, spooky and fun. In a posting in The New Yorker, James Verini calls “This Must Be The Place” (from Speaking in Tongues) the definitive Heads’ song: “Home, is where I want to be/Pick me up and turn me around/I feel numb, born with a weak heart/Guess I must be having fun”.

This search for home defines Obama’s life story, as he put it in his literary, poetic memoir Dreams From My Father; the search also defines Maraniss’s biography, but in a severely different way.

It turns out that Obama’s memoir was flexible with the truth on many details (Obama, to be honest, did state in his introduction that some characters were composite and some events appear out of chronology).

Maraniss, a Washington Post editor who earlier wrote a biography of Bill Clinton, says this was to a purpose: to sharpen Obama’s identity as a black American finding himself. The purpose may have been political even earlier than we would suppose.

Opponents have often charged Obama with being cold, calculating and even cynical. Is it true? It can’t be dismissed as an aspect of Obama that is Hawaiian, where he grew up and where the local saying went, “Cool head, main thing”. Perhaps adopting that Hawaiian ethos was part of the plan. Maraniss repeatedly returns to Obama’s memoir, to reveal the truth about a specific fact or another, to show how it fit into a deliberate purification of self-identity. The warmth of Obama’s memoir is replaced by the eerie chill of Maraniss’s biography.

This is not enough, however, to recommend Maraniss’s 643-page book, perhaps written as the first of a definitive biographical series (like Robert Caro’s opus on former US President Lyndon Johnson). The main drawback is the mind-numbing detail that bogs down the first 150-200 pages.

Even the most patient reader will be tempted to abandon this book and its unnecessary listing of the people who encountered Obama’s grandparents in Kansas and in Kenya. I nearly did. A comprehensive job of editing was criminally neglected.

Maraniss’s book was recently publicised for its details of Obama’s days of sex and drugs: he and his friends putting the “high” in high school, and his intense college-days and post-college relationships with “white” women. Yes, these things figured fleetingly in Obama’s memoir, so the shock value, if any, was minimal. It is telling that Obama himself dwelt more on the drug-use than on his relationships.

On the matter of being in love, Obama perhaps used the white woman to define the fact that ultimately he was a black man; he shows, having got as close to another human as someone can, that he reached the core of his identity and saw what it was not. Perhaps it is not surprising that he reserved some anger towards his mother for her neglect (he was raised by his Kansan grandparents in Hawaii while she lived and worked in Indonesia, where he spent only four pre-adolescent years).

As Maraniss finds, Obama’s relationships — with Genevieve Cook in New York and with an unnamed woman in Chicago — were not so simplistic, and in fact, Obama exaggerates details of life with them to conveniently shape his narrative of peeling off the layers of his identity to its black core.

Maraniss reproduces entries from Cook’s diary to show the intensity of the relationship, and the frustration that Cook felt because Obama ultimately did not give of himself. She has her suspicions, as she writes on June 20, 1984: “…Somehow splitting himself off from people is necessary to his feeling of following some chosen route? Which basically remains undefined. And am I to be left behind also? That he may feel he’s striking out? Shedding encumbrances, old images, the known and the comfortable…”

When Obama leaves NY to become a community organiser in Chicago, he begins to find purpose and identity, and though his efforts at mobilising people are not as successful as he claimed in his memoir (a magazine journalist is largely responsible for the city administration’s response), what becomes clear is that two-and-a-half years later, when he decides to leave his job and go to Harvard Law school, realisation dawns on those who work closely with him: that this stint as community organiser was part of a plan. The others, rooted in the community, could not think of moving on; nothing stopped Obama and he left. As Maraniss states, “Perhaps his behaviour was not so much passive as strategic.” The moral of the story: to become the most powerful person in the world, you must get started very early.

The book does have its light moments. Some may find the Kenya bits far more enjoyable than the Kansas parts, such as Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango being described by the Luo metaphor of having “ants in his anus”. Or the Luo (the minority tribe in Kenya) having nicknames for the British colonial officials: “HR Tate was Arm Swinger; PL Deacon was Long Neck; DR Crampton was Hard Hitter; SH Fazan was Ladies Man; WE Brock was Bull Neck; HH Horne was Tall Hen… and Major FC Jack was Can a Leopard Answer Questions”.

Finally, from whatever may have been excavated from Obama’s past, the nugget for this reviewer was his enthusiasm for Talking Heads. It speaks deeply from one fan to another. Obama may be struggling with job creation, and he may not derive much political mileage from the victory on healthcare, and the tottering global economy may do him in. But from one fan to another, I wish him all the best.

The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai