Search for self began far away from Illinois
Published Monday, March 26, 2007
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."
The political narrative of Obama 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 political curiosity appear to have been planted in Hawaii.
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.
In 1967, he moved with his mother to live with her second husband in Indonesia. When he was 10, the family returned to Oahu, where he lived until graduating from high school.
Obama's grandparents enrolled him in the Punahou School, founded in 1841 by Congregational missionaries. It is among the largest private schools in the country. Punahou, with its rolling green lawns, imposing lava rock buildings and chapel in the center of a lily pond, was not an insignificant choice.
While power is asserted and social relativity established in Los Angeles by the car you drive, and in New York by the college you attended, in Honolulu, those things often hinge on where you went to high school.
But Obama's relationship to the school was more nuanced than that of other alumni, according to his book. He started out disoriented, unaccustomed to skateboards, wearing his sandals from Jakarta, ill at ease at his classmates' homes with swimming pools and large rooms. "I made few friends," he wrote.
When he discovered basketball, his lot improved. Punahou "has always been a school of cliques," said Dan Hale, who played basketball with Obama.
By the accounts of Hale and other teammates - who won a championship his senior year of high school - and his coach, Obama was a tireless player.
"He was on a very, very strong team," said his coach, Chris McLachlin. "Had he been on any other team in the league, he would have been a starter. But he practiced hard, and his work ethic might have been above everyone else's. He practiced at the 10 a.m. juice break; he practiced at the lunch break at noon; and he was the last one to leave each day."
The curriculum at Punahou - where library clocks give the time in some developing nations - centered on multiculturalism.
"He seems to have the skills that a lot of people in our class had, which is to pull diverse people together," said Bernice Glenn Bowers, another classmate.
But Obama continued to feel assailed by insensitive comments and by classmates and a coach, who used an epithet when they referred to black opponents. Obama also felt trapped between the black experiences of the characters in his library books and his life as one of the few blacks in the school.
"I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt, a self contempt that neither irony not intellect seemed able to deflect," he wrote.
He took refuge among older black men whom he challenged to games of basketball, a figure identified in his book as Frank, a poet and incessant crank, and college parties populated with blacks.
Those revelations surprised many former classmates. "I kind of feel bad," said Alan Lam, a teammate. "I didn't know."
"He was clearly bright," said a classmate, Debbie Ching, "but there are people in our class that are nuclear physicists."
He was not particularly political, nor was he the first one to speak up at assemblies or in class, several people said.
But he did have writing skills, composing poetry for the school's literary magazine. One poem, "An Old Man," lamented, "He pulls out forgotten dignity from under his flaking coat, and walks a straight line along the crooked world."
In the complicated racial dynamic of Hawaii, many students were, perhaps, too preoccupied with their own identities to worry about how Obama was puzzling out his own.
"I had my own issues to worry about," said Hale, who is white - or ha'ole (pronounced howley) - the Hawaiian term for white outsider. "Being a ha'ole from Punahou, now that was the worst," he recalled.
