Watching Christopher Nolan’s spectacular, if idiosyncratic, The Odyssey this past weekend, I was reminded of Barack Obama’s own odyssey, the one crafted by his muse for Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
That muse would be unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. Ayers knew his Homer. Early in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, he tipped his Homeric hand. “Memory sails out upon a murky sea—wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable,” he wrote with a knowing wink. “Wine-dark” is quintessential Homer. Best-selling author Thomas Cahill named his book on ancient Greece, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea.
In his 2009 book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage, bestselling biographer Christopher Andersen described how the muse intervened to save Obama’s bacon. In 1994, at Michelle’s urging, a floundering Obama turned over to friend and neighbor Ayers “his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes.”
As I deduced, the muse took this ungainly draft, infused it with the structure and spirit of Homer’s Odyssey, and retitled the book Dreams from My Father. On December 28, 2008, I published a piece in American Thinker on this subject. I argued that in Dreams Obama “assumes the role of both Telemachus and Odysseus, the son seeking the father, and the father seeking home.” Having spent two years of high school Greek classes reading the Odyssey, I thought the pattern pretty obvious.
Cahill learned his Greek at my high school as did Ayers’s comrade Brian Flanagan
If I needed validation, I got it three weeks later in the New York Times. The paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic, Michiko Kakutani, described Dreams almost exactly as I had: “a quest in which [Obama] cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.” Hmmm!
[In the way of digression, Google AI tells me, “Mainstream historians and critics have widely dismissed Cashill's theories, characterizing his work as speculative and politically motivated conspiracy-mongering.”]
The Dreams’ muse left scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama’s “personal interior journey.” Before he completed his heroic cycle, Obama would confront green-eyed seductresses, Sirens, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the “ghosts” of the underworld, the God-guide Hermes, a “menacing” one-eyed bald man, and about a half dozen sundry “demons.”
Athena rings up Telemachus
Dreams and the Odyssey both begin in media res, a literary technique in which the narrative starts in mid-story and not from the literal beginning. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, is 20 when the Odyssey begins. Obama has just turned 21. Each saga begins with the young protagonist receiving an unexpected call that inspires him to seek out his missing father, Telemachus’s from Athena, Obama’s from his Aunt Jane in Nairobi.
“Listen, Barry, your father is dead,” she tells him. Obama has a hard time understanding. “Can you hear me?” she repeats. “I say, your father is dead.” The line is cut, and the conversation ends abruptly.
Apparently, Ayers so liked the dramatic structure of the Dreams’ opening sequence that he repeated it in Fugitive Days, which also opens in media res with a dramatic phone call. The call comes from future wife Bernardine Dohrn.
Ayers learns that his main squeeze, Diana Oughton, had been killed in a Greenwich Village bomb blast. “Diana is dead,” says Dohrn. Ayers has a hard time understanding. “Diana is dead,” she “repeats slowly.” Ayers drops the line, and the conversation ends abruptly.
Hoisted on her own petard
After the opening sequence, Obama takes the reader back to his “Origins.” There he tells us that Barack Sr. quit the isle of Hawaii and abandoned his son for Harvard in Obama’s third year of life. (In reality, it was his first.) Odysseus too had quit the isle of Ithaca and abandoned his son to fight in the Trojan War in Telemachus’s first year of life.
As a former merchant seaman, Ayers often thought in terms of charts and maps when plotting life’s journey. In Fugitive Days, he yearns for a “mariner’s chart of the past” to help navigate the future.
Obama uses the imagery of maps and charts much as Ayers does. In the introduction of Dreams, Obama talks of the book he had originally intended to write, a prosaic analysis of race and law. He describes it as “an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary.” He changed his mind, of course, and settled on “a record of a personal, interior journey--a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.”
Obama in his lotus-eating phase
As Obama becomes aware of his blackness, he begins “to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications.” When Obama leaves Hawaii for college in Los Angeles, he leaves his white mother and grandparents “at some uncharted border.”
From this point on, he himself will be responsible for “charting his way through the world.” Feeling himself “unanchored to place,” he adds, “What I needed was a community.” Obama’s effort to locate that community in black Chicago, like Odysseus’s effort to regain his troubled Ithaca home, is fraught with peril and temptation, some of it factual, some of it finessed from facts, some of it fully invented.
Obama is not the first writer to see Hawaii as the land of the lotus-eaters “Junkie. Pothead,” he writes in retrospect of the experience, “That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” In Los Angeles, change comes slowly. Finding his way as a black man, he resists the allure of his own Calypso figure, the “good-looking” Joyce.
This Occidental co-ed tries to lure him from his inexorable journey to black self-fulfillment with the worldly equivalent of immortality, namely assimilation and “multiracial” anonymity. Despite her “honey skin and pouty lips,” Obama resists the “gravitational pull” of her post-racial promise.
Even liberals were outraged by Iran’s actions, not Obama/Ayers
While still in Los Angeles, Obama finds his own private Cyclops in a college library. The Cyclops in question is an Iranian student, an “older balding man with a glass eye.” He sits across from Obama and a black friend and, for no good reason, chides them about the failure of American slaves to rebel in any meaningful way.
Obama’s friend falls strangely mute before the Iranian’s “menacing look,” but Obama leaps to the slaves’ defense. “They did fight. Nat Turner, Denmark Vescey (sic),” snaps Obama. He adds, “Was the collaboration of some slaves any different than the silence of some Iranians who stood by and did nothing as Savak thugs murdered and tortured opponents of the Shah?”
This conversation allegedly takes place in early 1980, a few heated months after 52 Americans were taken hostage in the newly Islamic Iran. At the time, liberals were as outraged as conservatives. I suspect the self-described communist Ayers inserted the scene to strengthen the Homeric theme and settle an old score with the American-friendly Shah.
Obama exploring some unchartered waters in New York
Obama leaves Los Angeles for Columbia later that same year. As might be expected, Manhattan proves more seductive than Hawaii or Los Angeles. Obama finds himself as attracted as he is repelled by “the beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess” of the city. There was no denying “the city’s allure,” he writes, nor its consequent power to corrupt. Smitten by the Siren song of the city, and his awakening bi-sexuality, Obama feels himself “uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation.”
It is in Manhattan too that Obama meets his Circe. “Her voice sounded like a wind chime,” he would later tell half-sister Auma. “We saw each other for almost a year.” Odysseus too shares the temptress Circe’s bed for a year.
Like Obama’s unnamed girlfriend, Circe lives in a “splendid house” on “spacious grounds.” She, too, wants her lover to stay forever, but Odysseus knows he has a journey to complete. In a similar spirit, Obama rejects his Circe, steels himself against New York’s Sirens, and manages to find his way to Chicago and an adventure as a community organizer.
What Obama still lacks, however, is a “guide that might show me how to join this troubled world.” He still feels the “incompleteness” of his identity as a black American. Thinking Kenya might make him whole, Obama leaves on his African pilgrimage immediately after his weepy first visit to Reverend Wright’s church and just before he begins Harvard in fall 1988.
Obama finds Jesus or something like him at Rev. Wright’s church
As told in Dreams, Obama spends eight weeks on this journey, an inexplicable luxury for a chronically broke young man. His first stop is allegedly Europe. I say “allegedly” because most of the specifics sound like they were pulled from a Michelin Guide. The one exception is a sojourn to the Spanish boondocks whose details sound like they were pulled from Ayers’s memory. At a roadside tavern about halfway between Madrid and Barcelona, Obama shoots pool at what might be the only pool table in any bar in Europe.
Here, emerging “out of nowhere,” is a classic Homeric guide-god in the persona of a Senegalese traveler. This man is “somehow making the same journey”—that is the journey of all dispossessed third-worlders struggling to find their way home, to their own Penelopes. (If only!)
The traveler shows Obama a photo of young wife with whom he would reunite as soon as he saves the money. Home, he seems to be telling Obama—in Spanish no less--is where a man and his wife make it. Unsurprisingly, in Fugitive Days Ayers tells us he was a pool player who, during his merchant seaman days, frequented roughneck bars in that part of the world.
Whether Obama actually went to Europe or not, he realizes that this side trip was a “mistake.” Like Odysseus, he knows he has to find his way back home. Obama hopes to find that home in Kenya. He will not. He soon realizes how much he still looks and thinks like an American. Africa is not Obama’s home. It is his Hades.
Needing to consult the blind prophet Teiresias, Odysseus makes a long and difficult journey to “Hades’ murky home,” specifically a stream called Acheron, which branches off the river Styx. There, he is instructed to pour libations to the deceased.
Obama in Hades 1988
Once he does, he is swarmed by the many and sundry “shades of the dead.” Once in Kenya, Obama makes a similarly difficult journey of several days duration by train, bus, jalopy and finally on foot to “a wide chocolate- brown river,” besides which rests the grave of Obama’s great-great grandfather in the heart of “Obama Land.”
His trip to the interior serves the same purpose that Odysseus’ trip to the underworld serves, a chance to reconcile with the spirits of the past. “The Old Man’s here,” Obama thinks, “although he doesn’t say anything to me. He’s here, asking me to understand.”
Here, Obama meets, among other relatives, a blind great uncle who pours him his own home brewed libation. The night passes for Obama as in a dream. Men come and go, drinking “ceremoniously,” perhaps six men, perhaps ten. Obama is not quite sure. They “merge with the shadows of corn.”
If the blind seer Teiresias gives Odysseus involved instructions on how to return home, Obama’s great uncle cuts to the chase. He tells Obama that many men have been lost to the “white man’s country,” including his own son. “Such men are like ghosts,” he says, adding that if Obama hears of his son, “You should tell him that he should come home.”
Obama leaves the land of his ancestors wiser than when he came, his great uncle’s “blind eyes staring out into the darkness.” He knows that he too will become ghost-like unless he finds his own home.
Obama did not need to leave home to find Michelle
What Obama pulls from his African experience, in a sequence that feels heavily indebted to his muse and largely contrived after the fact, is that home is where the heart is. Cultural “authenticity” is an illusion, and there is “no shame in confusion.” There was only shame in the silence that leads the individual to try to form an identity without help from a community of others.
From Africa, the book passes at warp speed through Obama’s Harvard experience and culminates with his wedding to Michelle. Just as the Odyssey ends with Odysseus reuniting with his wife, Penelope, Obama rounds his circle by marrying into the African American culture that has beguiled him all his life. Michelle is “a daughter of the South Side,” the real McCoy. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves,” Obama would remind America during his briefly celebrated Philadelphia race speech. With the promise of fatherhood implicit in marriage, the abandoned son claims the potential to be a father and the father of authentic African Americans at that.
Like Nolan, Ayers did a solid job in retelling the life story of his subject, but in the final accounting, he took more liberties with Obama’s life than Nolan took with Odysseus’s. For what it’s worth, if you can deal with a little Oscar-pandering wokeness, I would recommend Nolan’s movie. A movie of this scale may never be made again.
About the only thing non-fictional about Barry is his dishonesty.
Wonder what Barry thinks his real Truth really is?
The dudes a fraud…like Clint Eastwood proclaimed in 2008!