South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Claiming her story
Michelle Obama describes her life from Chicago to White House
Black feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Michelle Obama, the nation’s first black first lady, is too aware of the “angry black woman” trope to use such jarring, if appropriate, verbs of destruction in her new, highly anticipated memoir, “Becoming.” Her version: “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately described by others.” But the same unrelenting pursuit — exercising her agency to maintain her identity — surfaces again and again.
History will judge Michelle Obama’s success. But as in all things, she trusts in the power of hard work and optimism to rise above, to go high when others go low.
The courtship and subsequent marriage of Michelle Robinson and the future President Barack Obama were distilled long ago for political consumption. If their story was woven into a fairy tale, in “Becoming,” Michelle Obama turns the fabric over to reveal the rough side. Her account of their path to parenthood is particularly gripping. Persistence was no match for infertility. Barack Obama was then an Illinois state senator, and initial attempts to procreate were coordinated with the Illinois
‘Becoming’
By Michelle Obama, Crown, 426 pages, $32.50
legislature’s schedule, not ovulation. Michelle was left mostly alone to navigate the process, including giving herself daily injections.
“It was maybe then that I felt a first flicker of resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work,” she writes. “I sensed already that the sacrifices would be more mine than his.”
She was right. It was a pattern that continued throughout their marriage. After Malia and Sasha were born, Michelle forced Barack, who sometimes comes off as selfish, into couples’ counseling. “I feared that the path he’d chosen for himself … would end up steamrolling over our every need.”
Many black women can imagine Michelle Obama as a good girlfriend; her struggles Former first lady Michelle Obama, shown in June, is on a book tour to promote her memoir, “Becoming.”
are relatable. It’s comforting to read that she, too, battles insecurity, wondering if she’s good enough. She tries to ignore what others think of her — both a high school counselor’s assessment that she wasn’t Princeton material and political adversaries’ racist and sexist barbs — but she admits it all stings.
And she answers, indirectly, women’s perennial question: Can I have it all — a family, marriage, career? No. Obama’s ambition and career were subsumed by her husband’s. But she made the best of it, controlling what she could.
Defying tradition, she stayed in Chicago with her daughters when Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. She noticed when bios of her erased her career and bristled when her life dissolved into her marital status.
Her reluctance regarding her husband’s political
ambitions faded in the bright light of his passion. And while previous first ladies were generous with advice, they could not tell her how to be the first black woman in this “strange kind of sidecar to the presidency . ... If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me.”
Michelle Obama manages to be inspirational, direct and naive about race and gender politics. She wonders after the 2016 election “about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president.” The misclassification is glaring: More than 90 percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton, but more than half of white women voted for Trump.
But now, her life in politics is over. No, Michelle
Obama will not run for office. The attendant “tribal segregation” of the politics soured her to the prospect.
Obama names her husband’s successor fewer than a dozen times over 426 pages, but her loathing is clear. His lies about President Obama’s birthplace were “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts,” she writes. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? ... Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”
Obama chooses to focus on the victories: passage of the Affordable Care Act; nearly five years of job growth; the right of samesex couples to marry; and the soft power she seized as FLOTUS to launch initiatives to fight childhood obesity, encourage students to get to and stay in college,
and support job training for veterans and their spouses.
Obama recounts personal triumphs, particularly raising Malia and Sasha to be independent, to give them as normal a childhood as possible, even as cellphones and social media exposed them to never-before-seen scrutiny.
Perhaps Obama’s most remembered accomplishment may be the White House garden. It serves as a metaphor for the Obama administration, for that hopeful moment in time, for optimism as a “form of faith, an antidote to fear,” despite years of brutal political attacks. And it calls to mind the poem attributed to Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos: “What didn’t you do to bury me/ but you forgot that I was a seed.”
Wendi C. Thomas is the editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism.