A PROMISED LAND: OBAMA’S PRESIDENTIAL MEMOIRS
‘THERE’S NO POLITICAL WRITER LIKE BARACK OBAMA’
The book has some relevance in Fiji: our own Lost Paradise. Only the other day I read a piece written by Nemani Delaibatiki in my favourite daily with reference to a few local Fijian politicians in their 70s: a passing generation?
Satendra Nandan’s GIRMIT: Epic Lives in Small Lines was published recently. His new book, LIFE journeys: Love & Grief, will be published later this year. He’s currently working on a book on Mahatma Gandhi for Australasian readers at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Charles Sturt University, Barton Campus, ACT.
Agreat joy of Christmas for me, even during these unusual and pandemic times of COVID-19 and Trumpism, is the small gifts one gets from family members and a few friends.
My delight is receiving books, especially from my children and some of my writing friends in many parts of the world.
Being a small writer helps; they think I need to read great writers! I usually send them my publications in return.
This Christmas I was happy to get at least a dozen books that I’ve yet to read.
The book, given to me by one of my literary children, I’m reading now is A Promised Land by the first Black President, Barack Obama, the 44th President of the USA.
It’s around 750 pages: and this is the first volume of a projected two-volume enterprise.
It’s a fascinating reading written by a thinker and self-reflexive Nobel laureate for Peace.
Few politicians, minor or major, have Obama’s gifts of writing: his selfintrospection and wide reading of literature, philosophy, law and politics. And how these are intertwined with poetry and poetics of life, relationships, and a rare inwardness of a genuinely gifted individual with his sustaining, loving family and a belief in the ideals by which men and women live, survive and build enlightened societies wherever they live with selfrespect and a sense of integrity. Anyone who has read his Dreams From My Father, the story of race and inheritance, published in 1995, would see the shaping of his vision, the making of the most remarkable President of the United States of America in recent history.
He showed the possibilities of a great democracy with all its limitations and audacity of hope. With his mixed ancestry, mother from Kansas and a Kenyan father, he brings new perspectives on the American experience on global affairs.
His childhood in Hawaii adds the essential dimension that no man or woman is an island sufficient unto oneself. We live in a community of common humanity.
It’s a candid and deeply readable portrait of a man whose depth and reach remain unmatched in current world politics.
As he says, ‘first and foremost, I hoped to give an honest rendering of my time in office…where possible, I wanted to offer readers a sense of what it’s like to be the President of the United States….’ You are unlikely to get a better portrait of our world’s most powerful President, but also glimpse the limits of his exercise of power if you believe in the law of the land, no matter how deeply flawed its origins.
His conviction is that democracy is to be built day by day by individuals and their institutions.
The insights, the doubts, the wisdom, the wit, and, above all, his imagination and an extraordinary empathy show us the man this President was and how remarkable were his two terms in office in a decade of grim turmoil in world affairs, some created by the world’s most powerful military force.
His reading of literature and his belief in its shaping power appeals to me immeasurably: how we imagine the other and try to walk in the shoes of those different from us.
The common road we all travel wherein we discover the shared humanity of others and the humility essential to understand others. Literature and life are the two sides of the same road.
We walk alone on it, on the footprints of others, hear the echoes of other voices.
In reality we’re never alone. We carry multitudes within us.
No political writer like Obama
That Obama took over from George W Bush, and after eight years, the mantle fell almost accidently on Donald J Trump will be seen by many as the great irony of American history. There’s no political writer like Barack Obama.
The one who comes nearest to his genius is Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, free India’s first Prime Minister, the golden disc that shone over the ruins of an empire and the blood-stained dawn of a terrible partition.
Within the USA he can be compared to Abe Lincoln, a man without the contemporary advantages of the Black American president.
A Promised Land should be widely read to inspire the young and make the old ones think for themselves. It has some relevance in Fiji: our own Lost Paradise.
Only the other day I read a piece written by Nemani Delaibatiki in my favourite daily with reference to a few local Fijian politicians in their 70s: a passing generation?
The most important thing in politics is to know when to leave and live and let live.
Most post-colonial, post-coup politicians are unable to do so: to find new ways of creating a fairer society. Most think they are indispensable and raceriven, religion-oriented politics is the only way.
Mohandas Gandhi was never even an MP; and Nelson Mandela didn’t want a second term as President of a free South Africa for which he spent 27 years in jail. These are the greatest legacies of remarkable leaders. We remember them today.
Barack Obama mentions these two mighty souls in the shaping of his own pursuits and purpose.
In Fiji, alas, no prime minister has really explored the journeys within during which they were in power, or out of power. Yet they have had plenty of time to think and rethink.
Think for a few moments if two of our former living prime ministers had written something about their inner lives and what that has meant to the Fijian people and their national psyche.
Is there a world outside immediate politics in which one can serve and inspire? Are the means more important than the ends?
That is how the soul of a country, big or small, is created. And they have stories to narrate, some noble, some ignoble.
But we haven’t yet created that quality of political consciousness: we think of the next election, not the next generation and its education.
We mistake these men and women as leaders of action.
No one was more preoccupied with politics than Mohandas Gandhi and no one was more a man of action. Even on the last day of his life he was walking towards the centre of a public stage.
Yet no hand has written more than his.
It’s in his writing that Gandhi envisioned answers to the myriad, multitudinous problems of the Indian continent through the dust and mud of history, and the blood of reality and myth; but he also found extraordinary courage and faith among the ordinary. He showed us a unique way.
Even in a recent cricket match the Indians ‘won’ in Sydney through passive resistance!
It’s in his thoughts on paper that he found solace and comfort for his deepest disappointments and palpable failures.
He told them publicly in utter nakedness in the light of Truth.
Obama mentions Erik Erikson’s remarkable analysis of Gandhi’s ideas of Truth in his book Gandhi’s Truth. Gandhi has been his great inspiration as the mahatma was for Dr King.
Obama writes: ‘I’d never been to India before, but the country had always held a special place in my imagination. Maybe it was its sheer size, with one sixth of the world’s population, an estimated two thousand ethnic groups, and more than 700 languages spoken. Maybe it was because I’d spent part of my childhood in Indonesia listening to the epic Hindu tales of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or because of my interest in Eastern religions, or because of a group of Pakistani and Indian college friends who taught me to cook dahl and keema and turned me on to Bollywood movies.’
Out of such things, come lofty and life-shaping thoughts. Nothing is too small or too insignificant. After all Christmas is celebrated of a birth in a manger not in a palace. And the child born to change the world was a refugee for whom there was no room in the inn.
‘More than anything’, writes Obama,
‘my fascination with India had to do with Mahatma Gandhi. Along with Lincoln, King, and Mandela, Gandhi had profoundly influenced my thinking. As a young man, I’d studied his writings and found him giving voice to some of my deepest instincts. His notion of satyagraha, or devotion to truth, and the power of non-violent resistance to stir the conscience, his insistence on common humanity and the essential oneness of all religions, and his belief in every society’s obligation, through its political, economic, and social arrangements, to recognise the equal worth and dignity of all people-each of these ideas resonated with me. Gandhi’s actions had stirred me even more than his words; he’d put his beliefs to the test by risking his life, going to prison, and throwing himself fully into the struggles of his people.
‘His nonviolent campaign for Indian independence from Britain, which began in 1915 and continued for more than 30 years, hadn’t just helped overcome an empire and liberate much of the subcontinent, it has set off a moral charge that pulsed around the globe. It became a beacon for other dispossessed, marginalised groups--including Black Americans in the Jim Crow South-- intent on securing their freedom.’
On his first Presidential visit to India, Obama and Michelle visit Mani Bhavan in Mumbai which had been Gandhi’s home base for many years. Here he sees the guest book which Dr King had signed in 1959, when he’d travelled to India to draw international attention on the struggle for racial justice in the United States and pay homage to the man whose teachings had inspired him.
Obama writes warmly about this great Indian experiment in political democracy: the largest.
We, in our region named the Pacific, are connected to both democracies through oceans and ideals and our diverse, enriching inheritance.
Reading A Promised Land during Trump’s tamasha gives one hope of a promised dawn in the 21st century despite COVID-19.