Hugo Schwyzer

Among the various books I read on our trip to New Zealand was Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I’d put it off for some time, but started it on the long flight down to Auckland and finished it in a Sydney hotel room. It’s the best book I’ve read by a president (or president-elect), and I’ve at least glanced at most of what our recent office-holders have produced. (I tried to read Bill Clinton’s massive autobiography, but ended up getting overwhelmed by detail, and skipped about.)

It’s not original to note that Barack Obama is an extraordinary figure, absolutely unlike anyone we’ve ever seen in American politics — at least, absolutely unlike anyone who has risen so far, so fast. Dreams from my Father, which is all the more powerful because it seems to be written by a man without any conscious sense that his words might be used against him someday, reveals Obama to be more exceptional than I had previously imagined.

It would be a bit ridiculous to say that I identify with our president-elect. I not only have not achieved what he has achieved, I have not had to overcome the obstacles he has had to overcome. (Though addiction and mental illness posed challenges that my socio-economic and ethnic circumstances did not.) But all good autobiography contains universal themes; we all have parents, after all, about whom we have often mixed feelings. Many of us struggle to discern a purpose and direction for our lives, and go through a quarter-life crisis of confidence. Barack Obama’s journey, in a broad sense, is a common one, though in its specifics it is both unique and jaw-droppingly impressive.

One of the things that I like best about Obama is that he has lived abroad; indeed, more than any other president in recent memory, he spent a significant portion of his childhood outside America (in Indonesia). Obama doesn’t hold dual citizenship as I do, and despite the slurs of a handful of ignoramuses, his devotion to the United States is unquestioned by any serious person. But he has tasted living abroad, and not only doing so, but doing so in comparative poverty. Not all international experience is the same. It’s one thing for the scion of a wealthy family to do a junior year at the Sorbonne, living off parent’s money; it’s another thing altogether to live as Obama did as a child, playing with street children in rural Indonesia. Anyone who is going to make claims for American exceptionalism ought to have had some first-hand experiences of living in — and not just visiting — other parts of the world. Though the child is not always the father of the man, reading Obama’s biography makes me hope that it will be so, particularly in regards to how he thinks about America’s place in the world.

Barack Obama has encountered racism first-hand. A childhood in multicultural Hawaii and Indonesia only partially insulated him from the racial turmoil of the Sixties. No other American president grew up with the same degree of antipathy and mistrust directed towards those who shared his skin color; no other American president has been on the receiving end of the kind of ugliness that Barack Obama has been. It is axiomatic that those who are most inclined to believe that America has overcome all of its racist heritage are those who have never been the targets of racism; Obama, whose patriotism is profound and sincere, nonetheless is perfectly aware of just how nasty some Americans can be. It is good to have a president who loves this country very much, but is under no illusions that Americans are the “best” people in the world. Those who believe that our citizens are uniquely immune to the small-mindedness and intolerance that seem to afflict so many human beings are the sort of folks who ought not to be running this country. A physician cannot cure someone whom she doesn’t believe is ill.

I connected with Obama for another reason. Barack also has a father who, like my own, came from another country to the USA in order to go to graduate school. Growing up, I confess I often resented my father’s “foreignness.” Carmel in the 1970s was remarkably homogenous and white; of the friends whom I played with, none had a parent born outside the United States. My Dad, born in Austria and raised in England, stood out as different. Other boys’ fathers talked about American sports with their sons; my father had little interest in sport, and the one he knew best, cricket, was incomprehensible to me. I remember, as a fourth-grader, having a fight with another boy over that very subject. The son of a little league coach, Mike asked me whether my Dad played baseball with me. I explained that my Dad knew cricket, not baseball; Mike snorted: “Cricket is for faggots.” I hit him; he hit me back harder and put me on the ground. I went home that day in tears. And I remember crying for several reasons, not least because I was torn between wanting to protect my father’s good name — and being enraged that my father wasn’t “normal”.

My father came to America when he was 24, and except for a few teaching stints in England and Canada, lived here until his death at 71. Santa Barbara was his home from 1965 until he died in 2006. But my Dad never lost his accent, which was the precise and proper English he had learned as a schoolboy. (My father was educated at a grammar school in Wantage and then at a public (private) Catholic school near London.) When I was a teenager, I began to envy my Dad’s accent, particularly after he came to see me in a high school play I had been. I introduced Dad to one of my fellow actors, a girl on whom I had a huge and unrequited crush. Later, she came up to me, gushing about my father: “I love his accent; Englishmen are so charming. I wish you sounded like him.” My view of my father’s foreignness became instantly more positive!

Like President Obama, I also lived abroad as a child. When I was five, my parents moved for nearly a year to Vienna, the city of my father’s birth. Their marriage was in trouble, and though it sounds odd, they decided that moving to a new place — at least for a while — might give them a new perspective and a fresh start. I was put into an Austrian kindergarten; I spoke no German and the other children spoke no English. Even the teacher could barely say a few words to me. I was miserable, and cried a great deal. Eventually, my parents pulled me out of the school, but I’ve never forgotten the experience. I’ve always had immense sympathy for those who are exposed to “forced immersion’ as a result; though I acknowledge problems with a bilingual education system, my own vivid memories of being a terrified five year-old who couldn’t communicate with those around me have left me ambivalent at best about forcing every child into an English-only environment.

My later experiences abroad were far more positive. I grew to be grateful to have family around the world, grew to cherish the fact that I had two passports (with all the possibilities, in particular, that one now has as an EU citizen.) Today, I do describe myself as a world citizen rather than solely as an American. The affection I have for this country and its people is real and deep, but it is an affection born more of familiarity than of patriotism. I do not rule out moving abroad at some point in the future, as my brother (who makes his home in England) has done. When I travel around this country, I realize that I am less of an American than a Californian; rural Mississippi seems stranger and more alien to me than Paris or London (and I’ve spent some time in rural Mississippi, driving the lovely Natchez Trace.)

Barack Obama is, presumably, far more deeply attached to America than I. But his promise as a global leader — as well as an American one — is enhanced tremendously by the circumstances of his birth and his upbringing. His sense of having an (often absent) Dad who was “foreign” in ways both wonderful and stupefying is beautifully familiar to me. Obama brings something new and desperately needed: the perspective of an insider who is also a consummate outsider, someone who is “in” but not entirely “of” America. That is a very good thing.