A Promised Land by Barack Obama: A short note.
A Promised Land is a presidential memoir which reveals to the reader the thoughts and ideals of Barack Obama and his undying determination to perceive the world with rationality in all circumstances. The title suggests the utopian vision of reaching a place where hopes and dreams come true and as one reads one realizes that even the most politically influential people too can merely endeavor to create a ‘more perfect’ world, and this gives a humane aspect to the job in the White House. Obama shares in great detail his political journey and in each vividly described chapter he almost enlightens the reader to see the complexity of any problem, and then make the most suitable decisions and ultimately to bear the burden of those decisions. The purpose of the book appears to offer a sincere insight into the working of a presidential office with its privileges, challenges, and fortuity.
Obama takes the reader through his memoir with a compelling narrative that is lucid and easy to read, though it is largely set in the political context, he also comes across as a writer who attempts the ‘radical act’ of empathy which is evident in his description of people. The conscious use of the literary approach unfolds the beauty in the people around him and the reader feels an immediate association whether it is John McCain, David Cameroon, Toot or Hillary, and understand how hardworking and gifted they were.
Obama talks with a heady mixture of love and admiration for the women in his life, he describes his mother as an architect of her own destiny, and one who paid for her intellectual freedom with chronic financial struggles and amidst all that encouraged him to read! His admiration for his grandmother Toot is heartwarming - seeing her as a one who had dreams as a young woman, acknowledging her struggles and triumphs in life. His gratitude for his mother-in-law who stepped in to look after the two young girls and insisted on doing her own laundry in the White House is evident.
In his writing, Obama recognizes the double standards women politicians had to put up with, where they are expected to be nice in ways that is never deemed relevant to their male counterparts, and at a dinner hosted at the White House for …, he says he is aware that it is hard to unravel patriarchy in a single dinner, but – ‘Try anyway!’
When the Nobel Peace Prize was announced to Barack Obama, his response was – ‘For what?’ - a sentiment bereft of entitlement and the sense of commitment to do more, as a writer he does not harp on his greatness, and sees the prize as a ‘call to action’, giving credibility to American leadership which as we see now, has been transformed to a mere circus!
In the narrative of the unfortunate incident of The Deepwater Horizon – which the nay Sayers called Obama’s Katrina, functions almost as a metaphor for the unleashing of something pernicious from the ‘ghostly depths’ of the political landscape of the United States, and even after the hole was plugged and the cleanup was in place, the true extent of the poisoning was not known!
The book mentions of Trump’s ambition to be in politics emerging from his gimmicks of peddling assertions that Obama’s Presidency was illegitimate and describes Trump as an attention seeking real estate developer who Obama found difficult to take seriously. One cannot help but find oneself vehemently agreeing with the book and with time it came out that Trump was nothing but an elixir for the racial anxieties of the white supremacists. The book sees in the same taste, the rant of Obama getting into Harvard as fishy, and that Obama did not possess the caliber to author – ‘Dreams from My Father,’ should have been viewed as foreshadowing of the times to come.
Anyone reading the memoir of Barack Obama’s presidential years would yearn to learn about the Bin Laden episode from the horse’s mouth. The book saves it for the last in Chapter 27 which puts the reader on the edge again. Obama takes the reader through the Operation Neptune’s Spear, as it was called and gives the reader the name of the military dog as well – Cairo. He, very carefully, does not mention who fired the shot that killed Bin Laden. He echoes the sentiment of the world against terrorism and says that – ‘for the first time in his Presidency, they did not have to sell what they did!’
And I realized with a sudden sense of despair that the book had ended! The 701 pages of easy and lyrical prose had been written with a purposeful and meticulous effort aimed at the audience of young people who can and must reshape the world.
“I looked down at the street below, still thick with the rush- hour traffic – fellow commuters, I thought anxious to get home.”