In Hawaii, clues from Barack Obama's origins
In Hawaii, a young Obama walked in many worlds
HONOLULU: To his high school classmates, Barack Obama was a pleasant if undistinguished student, the guy who seemed happiest on the basketball court, the first to dive into the pumpkin carving at Halloween, the one whose oratorical prowess was largely limited to out-debating classmates over the relative qualities of point guards.
But Obama's family here in Hawaii saw a more complex young man, a person whose racial confusion and feelings of alienation were matched with equal parts ambition, disquietude and lofty notions about where his internal struggles might lead.
"There was always a joke between my mom and Barack that he would be the first black president," his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, said in an interview over tea. "So there were intimations of all this early on. He has always been restless. There was always somewhere else he needed to go."
It was his early search for a cultural identity on the island of Oahu, populated with people of diverse origins but relatively few blacks, that presaged his current political persona, Soetoro-Ng suggested.
"He couldn't sit back and wait for the answers to come to him," said Soetoro-Ng, who is the daughter of Obama's mother from another marriage and who remains close to him. "He had to pursue those answers actively. People from very far-away places collide here, and cultures collide, and there is a blending and negotiation that is constant."
She continued, "I think Hawaii gave him a sense that a lot of different voices and textures can sort of live together, however imperfectly, and he would walk in many worlds and feel a level of comfort."
Obama's political narrative was written about 4,500 miles and a cultural universe away from here, largely in Illinois. But the seeds of his racial consciousness, its attendant alienation and his political curiosity appear to have been planted in Hawaii.
There was, by the description of his classmates, coaches and teachers, their Barry, the one who still looks remarkably like the picture in his yearbook, smiling under his Afro, or posing somewhat stiffly with other children under a sign reading "Mixed Races of America."
That Barry had a confident gait, a cheerful smile and a B average.
"He had the same exact mannerisms then as he does now," said Eric Kusunoki, Obama's homeroom teacher at the Punahou School. "When he walked up to give that speech at the Democratic convention, we recognized him right away by the way he walked. He was well liked by everybody, a very charismatic guy."
And there was the other Barry, the child of a white American mother, Ann Dunham, who died in 1995, and a Kenyan father, also named Barack, who left when Obama was young and who is also dead. That Barry, described in Obama's book "Dreams From My Father," was the one whose young classmate once asked him if his "father ate people," who endured whispered racial epithets, whose sense of being a misfit haunted him into high school, where at times, he says, he hid behind a haze of marijuana smoke and unhappiness.
"He struggled here with the idea that people were pushing an identity on him, what it meant to be a black man," said Soetoro-Ng, whose own father was Indonesian.
"He was trying to balance that with a desire he already had then to name himself," she said. "There were not a lot of people here who were engaged in that process. Their identities were more solidly assumed. Having a community that embraced you without question was something that most people had. But he had lived in Indonesia, had a father who was absent but whose presence loomed large and a mother who had lived in 13 places."
As a result, she said, Obama, while "not a brooding young man - he played sports and formed close friendships and wasn't overly serious" - often "wrapped himself in his own solitude."
While Obama has several half-siblings from his father's other marriages, Soetoro-Ng, 39, his half-sister by his mother, is the only one he spent significant time with as a child. He spoke at her wedding, and he sees her each Christmas when he comes to Hawaii.
As a child, living at times with his mother and at other times with his maternal grandparents, Obama straddled the worlds of a cloistered private school and a comforting if knotty existence among family members, accompanied by a cast of marginalized older men and poets attached to his grandfather and largely unknown to his largely privileged classmates.
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