Dreams from My Father

by

Barack Obama

Barack’s Father/The Old Man Character Analysis

The Old Man is Barack’s father, a Kenyan man who married Ann and had Barack during his time studying at the University of Hawaii. Barack’s father’s name is also Barack, but Auma (Barack’s half-sister) refers to their father as “the Old Man.” When Barack was a child, his father left him and his mother, so all Barack had of him was stories. Gramps, Toot, and Ann all paint the Old Man as an exacting, god-like figure. When Barack meets his father (for the only time) at age 10, however, he finds the Old Man frightening, overbearing, and difficult—but the Old Man also teaches Barack to dance, which is a particularly joyful memory. Barack and the Old Man lose contact through Barack’s teen years, then they briefly reconnect via letters just before the Old Man dies in a car crash. As Barack gets to know the Old Man’s other children, he puts together a more complete—and tragic—picture of his father. The Old Man was rebellious, independent, and very intelligent—he seldom attended school except for exams, he tutored his friends, and he always ended up at the top of the class anyway. He clashed often with his father, Onyango, who was ashamed of his son’s antics, and he left his wife Kezia and their young children Roy and Auma to attend school in Hawaii. After returning to Kenya, the Old Man married a white woman named Ruth and had two sons with her and two with Kezia. He worked for the government, but he spoke out against the tribalism and corruption he saw—so the president blacklisted him. He alienated most of his family members during his fall from grace and was only beginning to repair his relationships with his family when he died. Barack’s family members warn him that the Old Man was too generous, too concerned with fitting in, and that he wrongly believed that his Western education would allow him to bypass the familial relationships that guide life in Kenya. But Barack also comes to understand that his father was confused about how to be a Black man in the world and balance his American education with his Kenyan roots and traditions. This, Barack believes, was a result of not communicating openly, either with Onyango or with his children.

Barack’s Father/The Old Man Quotes in Dreams from My Father

The Dreams from My Father quotes below are all either spoken by Barack’s Father/The Old Man or refer to Barack’s Father/The Old Man. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family and Community Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Toot, Ann
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Auma
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Asante, Johnnie
Page Number: 261
Explanation and Analysis:

“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, David
Page Number: 266
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. [...] I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.

That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before [...]

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 276-77
Explanation and Analysis:

That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Ann, Lolo
Page Number: 278
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 322
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; [...] It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Auma, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 330-31
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” She said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Hussein Onyango Obama
Page Number: 371
Explanation and Analysis:

“Let me tell you, your father, he was a very great man. I was closer to him than to my own father. If I was in trouble, it was my Uncle Barack that I went to first. And, Roy, you would also go to my father, I believe.”

“The men in our family were very good to other people’s children,” Roy said quietly. “With their own, they didn’t want to look weak.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Billy (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 385-86
Explanation and Analysis:

“But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also he is writing Kenya’s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn’t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he’d grown up with.”

Related Characters: Sayid (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Bernard
Page Number: 390
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 430
Explanation and Analysis:
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Dreams from My Father PDF

Barack’s Father/The Old Man Quotes in Dreams from My Father

The Dreams from My Father quotes below are all either spoken by Barack’s Father/The Old Man or refer to Barack’s Father/The Old Man. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family and Community Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

In the end I suppose that’s what all the stories of my father were really about. They said less about the man himself than about the changes that had taken place in the people around him, the halting process by which my grandparents’ racial attitudes had changed. The stories gave voice to a spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness, a bright new world where differences of race or culture would instruct and amuse and perhaps even ennoble.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Toot, Ann
Page Number: 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Gramps, Auma
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

I wondered how much difference those posters would make to the boy we had just left in Asante’s office. Probably not as much as Asante himself, I thought. A man willing to listen. A hand placed on a young man’s shoulders.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Asante, Johnnie
Page Number: 261
Explanation and Analysis:

“I thought I could start over, you see. But now I know you can never start over. Not really. You think you have control, but you are like a fly in somebody else’s web.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, David
Page Number: 266
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change. [...] I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.

That’s the story I had been telling myself, the same story I imagined my father telling himself twenty-eight years before [...]

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 276-77
Explanation and Analysis:

That was one of the lessons I’d learned these past two and a half years, wasn’t it?—that most black folks weren’t like the father of my dreams, the man in my mother’s stories, full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment. They were more like my stepfather, Lolo, practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other’s choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Ann, Lolo
Page Number: 278
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

“That’s where it all starts,” she said. “The Big Man. Then his assistant, or his family, or his friend, or his tribe. It’s the same whether you want a phone, or a visa, or a job. Who are your relatives? Who do you know? If you don’t know somebody, you can forget it. That’s what the Old Man never understood, you see. He came back here thinking that because he was so educated and spoke his proper English and understood his charts and graphs everyone would somehow put him in charge. He forgot what holds everything together here.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 322
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled—the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway; [...] It was as if we—Auma, Roy, Bernard, and I—were all making it up as we went along.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Auma, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 330-31
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

Auma shook her head. “Can you imagine, Barack?” She said, looking at me. “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him. He is the only person whose opinion I think the Old Man really worried about. The only person he feared.”

Related Characters: Auma (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Hussein Onyango Obama
Page Number: 371
Explanation and Analysis:

“Let me tell you, your father, he was a very great man. I was closer to him than to my own father. If I was in trouble, it was my Uncle Barack that I went to first. And, Roy, you would also go to my father, I believe.”

“The men in our family were very good to other people’s children,” Roy said quietly. “With their own, they didn’t want to look weak.”

Related Characters: Roy/Abongo (speaker), Billy (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man
Page Number: 385-86
Explanation and Analysis:

“But I think also that once you are one thing, you cannot pretend that you are something else. How could he be a matatu driver, or stay out all night drinking, and also he is writing Kenya’s economic plan? A man does service for his people by doing what is right for him, isn’t this so? Not by doing what others think he should do. But my brother, although he prided himself on his independence, I also think that he was afraid of some things. Afraid of what people would say about him if he left the bar too early. That perhaps he would no longer belong with those he’d grown up with.”

Related Characters: Sayid (speaker), Barack Obama, Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Bernard
Page Number: 390
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America—the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago—all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.

Related Characters: Barack Obama (speaker), Barack’s Father/The Old Man, Roy/Abongo, Bernard
Page Number: 430
Explanation and Analysis: