What Memoir and Memory Teach Us About Barack and Michelle Obama
by Jordan McDonald
At Barack Obama’s first inauguration, in 2009, the 44th President of the United States gave his first official speech to the American public: “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” Nearly a decade later, the First Lady Michelle Obama recalled that fateful day on the National Mall in her 2018 memoir, Becoming. “There were people in every direction, as far back as I could see,” she wrote. “They filled every inch of the National Mall and the parade route. I felt as if our family [was] almost falling into their arms now. We were making a pact, all of us.”
During the Trump administration, mainstream reflections on the true impact of the Obama years and the nature of the “pact” the Obamas made with the nation were put on hold. Yet the couple has remained in the public eye, where they have both continued to author their legacies in real-time. Monopolizing on this moment in which most mainstream political scrutiny has been consumed by the political antics of their successor, they’ve made public appearances, started a media company, and most prominently, published two best-selling memoirs. They’re trying their hand at a highly profitable second act as political celebrities. The commercial leg of their nostalgia tour kicked off to great acclaim in 2018 with Becoming, the top-selling book in the United States that year and the basis for a cross-country arena tour. Following Michelle’s opening act comes Barack’s A Promised Land, published in September and part one of a two-part presidential recollection.
After a tumultuous four years, it is ironic that the backlash to the man who vowed to “Make America Great Again” is yet another wave of nostalgic political action: A testament to the hold the Obamas’ time in office still has on the populace, the American people rallied in 2020 to pick none other than Barack’s former Vice President, Joe Biden, as their President-elect. Nostalgia, for all the charms of sentimentality, is known to wither in the face of hindsight. Without the promises of new perspectives, however, nostalgia lights the past as impossibly bright and favorable to the present. One would think we did not know our history, or worse, that we were too complacent to resist it.
Enticing readers with the interior life of Michelle Obama, one of the nation’s most significant political spouses, Becoming strives for aspirational messaging. It begins in the Midwest in the mid-to-late 1960s when its author was still a precocious little girl named Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Born on the Southside of Chicago, Michelle was raised by her mother Marian Robinson, a diligent homemaker, and her father Fraser Robinson, a worker at the city water plant, who suffered from multiple sclerosis throughout her life. Growing up in a working-class household, she and her older brother Craig had the value of education and discipline instilled into them at an early age by their parents. Thus, within the first few pages of the memoir, we meet a young Michelle who is already ambitious, hard-working, and family-oriented, hints of the woman she is to become.
As she matures, Michelle’s successes lead her into new educational and corporate environments, in many of which she experiences alienation, discrimination, misogyny, and anti-Blackness. Of these moments, she writes, “It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet, cruel nuances of not belonging — the subtle cues that tell you to not risk anything, to find your people and just stay put.” In her own words, she was taught that “everyone on earth [...] was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.” In its approach to divulging small truths about the cruelty and mistreatment Black people face in the United States, the memoir is a careful exercise in restraint; her personal narratives are used to signify the embodiment of her infamous line from the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “when they go low, we go high.” With care and intention, Becoming refuses to linger on cruelty or launch any true social critique. Rather, in these moments, we are asked to awe at Michelle Obama’s enduring resolve in the face of disrespect or disregard.
Michelle is measured in her honesty about the position of presidential spouse and the weight she felt in assuming such a role. “I was humbled and excited to be First Lady, but not for one second did I think I’d be sliding into some glamorous, easy role,” she writes. “Nobody with the words ‘first’ and ‘black’ attached to them ever would. I stood at the foot of the mountain, knowing I’d need to climb my way into favor” The book asks that we consider her legacy as more than one of an enchanting Princeton-educated woman who reimagined the station of the First Lady but as a model for self-invention and political comportment.
Where the 448-page Becoming spared readers from an abundance of detail, A Promised Land, is a weighty 768-page tome on Barack’s political career, lingering in its own narrative. (He names his struggles with brevity and “boil[ing] things down to their essence.”) Now three memoirs into his writing career, he has situated himself as a skilled orator and memoirist. With this latest effort, however, he proves that this capacity for ambiguity and loquaciousness has been instrumental in his political life. Reviewers speculate about A Promised Land’s designation as an autobiography, with some arguing that the memoir operates more as a history of Barack’s time in politics. But there remains something to be said for his contributions to an entirely different genre: fiction. For, as A Promised Land asserts, the former President is a master of political platitudes and a contributing author to the myth of American exceptionalism.
Spanning the geographies of his childhood and those of his first term in office, the indulgent memoir allows Barack to sketch the political cartography of his life. Originally from the Midwest, his grandparents moved to Hawaii — a kingdom-turned-territory that was overthrown by American business interests in 1893 — in 1960, just a year after it was conscripted to join the union. Born in Honolulu in 1961 to a white American mother and a Black Kenyan father, Barack was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents on the islands of Hawaii, though he briefly lived in Seattle, Washington as well as Indonesia. Of his childhood in Oahu, he remarks that it was a place where “nothing seemed that urgent” and “a big ocean separated them from riots and protests and other such things.”
Without regard for his family’s role as settlers, he writes of Hawaii as a paradise from politics that made him the earnest easy-going politician we know today. Both poetic and preposterous, this omission of Native Hawaiian resistance and political life in the first chapter sets the tone for A Promised Land’s articulation of both Barack’s political vision and his blindspots. Though he questions whether his motivations for a career in politics were perhaps fueled by “blind ambition wrapped in the gauzy language of service,” this literary display of his own inner critic and capacity for self-inventory is rarely if ever, extended to the matter of U.S. empire or his role in it.
During his first term, public service only intensifies Barack’s belief in the ultimate and extraordinary authority of the United States. Of American foreign policy — particularly its institutions, treaties, and global initiatives such as the World Bank, the Marshall Plan, and the National Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) — he writes that “our actions often contradicted the ideals of democracy, self-determination, and human rights, we professed to embody. Still, to a degree unmatched by any superpower in history, America chose to bind itself a set of international laws, rules, and norms.” Curtailing all critiques of American imperialism abroad or mention of state-sanctioned domestic terror, he concedes that he is “not yet ready to abandon the possibility of America.” His statement begs the question: what and who is he willing to abandon in his enduring pursuit of American possibility?
Situating themselves as the embodiment of American possibility, the Obamas operate as a joint political partnership. Though they both stand on their own as powerful public figures, the couple realizes their visions most effectively as a unit, especially where their political authority and accessibility are concerned. Speaking in A Promised Land of the First Lady’s contributions to his presidential campaign—where she notoriously lit up audiences of supporters—Barack notes the importance of Michelle’s groundedness and magnetism before the American public. “With the girls in school, we limited her appearances to tight races and her travel mostly to weekends,” he writes. “But wherever she went, she was funny and engaging, insightful and blunt,” he writes. Describing his wife’s working-class background and “sister-girl” familiarity, President Obama remarks, “I didn’t know anyone more mainstream than Michelle.” Carrying this relatability into the Obama administration, as First Lady, Michelle infamously noted her most prized appointment as “mom-in-chief.” Barack concedes her significant role in raising their children as his vocation necessitated varying levels of domestic imbalance and separation from his family. Motherhood and pursuing a separate career would have been difficult under most circumstances. “My career in politics, with its prolonged absences, had made it even tougher,” he writes.
Of her marriage to Barack, her experiences with motherhood, her public health campaigns, and her time in the White House, Michelle admits to the disappointments, difficulties, and personal damage wrought by her family’s time in the limelight. But she actively weaves said experiences into a legible narrative of triumph. (Becoming breaks Michelle’s life into three discrete and digestible portions, “Becoming Me,” “Becoming Us,” and “Becoming More.”) In “Becoming More,” she writes, “I tried as best I could not to let the roiling uncertainties of the world impact my day-to-day work as First Lady, but sometimes there was no getting around it. How Barack and I comported ourselves in the face of instability mattered. We understood that we represented the nation and were obligated to step forward and be present when there was [a] tragedy, or hardship, or confusion.” This is, after all, what writer Hannah Giorgis noted in her review of Becoming, the “grueling parade of thankless labor” that marks the indispensable role of the political spouse.
Where Michelle excels is in making her displays of power participatory. Becoming centers her as a powerhouse in her own right, a political homemaker who stabilized the social and cultural identity of the Obama era (and who is now a highly lucrative figure able to capitalize on mainstream liberalism’s political yearning for a past administration). With impassioned words and an air of familiarity, she has mastered the art of allowing the public to identify with and claim her authority as an extension of their own. In effect, the memoir serves to usher in what critic Doreen St. Félix dubbed Michelle’s “new reign of soft power.” Where Becoming builds upon the relatability and admiration the former First Lady enjoys, it also reminds us that “soft power” is still a source of power.
Throughout the Obamas’ political career, Black voters, community organizers, and political figures have been crucial to their success. Despite only serving in the Senate for three years before his run for president, Barack Obama, and his family by extension, were largely embraced by Black media and mainstream political leadership, reaching far beyond the tight-knit communities where Michelle and Barack had lived and worked in Chicago. Cognizant of his image as a Black politician on a national stage, Obama noted a sense of pressure to “shake loose some vestiges of America’s racial past.” In fact, a major selling point of his 2008 campaign was the suggestion that his presidency, and image of a Black family in the White House, might provide a generation of Black children with a vessel for their own untapped potential.
Though Barack dedicates little energy to naming the U.S. government and its systems as endemic to the conditions which suffocate Black potential, he insists on noting a study that suggested his presidency improved Black student’s test scores. This choice hints at a lopsided investment, an interest in the Black American public insofar as we reflect his own image back to him and ask for nothing in return. Ever the contrarian, he reveals in word and deed a patronizing posture toward the strains of Black American culture and political history that threaten his worldview. In A Promised Land, he dismisses the “protective pessimism” — “pessimism” meaning “the notion held by some of the black people [he] knew that white people were irredeemably racist” — of Black Americans who feared he might be assassinated as mere paranoia. Yet, as a result of receiving unprecedented death threats, he finds himself assigned secret security well before he is even pronounced President-elect.
Considering his complex relationship to the Black public, it is no wonder then that Black Americans, who are traditionally thought to be Barack’s most passionate advocates, also make up some of his most damning critics. In 2015, during his second term, following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, riots ensued in the city of Baltimore. The candidate of “hope,” Barack wielded his moral authority as President to infamously call rioters “thugs.” Speaking to the former president’s engagement with Black discontent, the scholar Christina Sharpe writes that “Obama’s ‘moral agency’ was one that was willing to accept a calculus that required Black death—and that depends, to quote Joy James, on the ‘screening out of black demands.’”
Priding himself on being a romantic rather than a radical, Obama, who ran his unprecedented 2008 presidential campaign under the slogans “Yes We Can” and “Hope,” built his career on a brand of political optimism. As even he points out, this is in many ways the crux of his capacity to disappoint both his supporters and his detractors. Black studies professor Calvin Warren, in his essay “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” writes “the politics of hope [...] bundles certain promises about redress, equality, freedom, justice, and progress into a political object that always lies beyond reach.” Together, Sharpe and Warren’s interventions sound out the message embedded in Barack’s admonishment of rioters—the lesson being that hope is, in fact, a discipline without inherent virtue or liberatory aims. To hope for civility in the face of brutality is to pray not for justice but surrender.
We see this same insistence on a politics of hope in Michelle’s political narratives as well. In Becoming she acknowledges the “less-than-subtle messaging about race” which permeated political commentary during Obama’s run for President, only to disregard her elders' perspectives on the continued influence of anti-Blackness as “cranky mistrust.” As an orator, hers is a gift for repackaging historical trauma as a site for narrative victories—a position which allows her to declare in 2016 that she “wake[s] up every morning in a house built by slaves,” whilst actively placating slave descendants who question a government with such a history.
In mastering this art of placation, the Obamas have become adept at separating the reality of their political careers from the narratives fostered on both the left and the right about their alleged intentions to radically change the American political structure. Their respective memoirs remind us that so much of the fear and excitement surrounding them was predicated on political assumptions instead of expressed attitudes, presumptions rather than promises. Arriving on the scene in the wake of the Bush administration, during a time when “people were hungry for different,” the Obamas looked different and “sounded different” but made no such vow to truly differentiate themselves from the actual practice of power. Ushering in a political era defined by representation politics, the Obamas expertly sold a reboot as a revolution.
As is the case for many reboots, the Obamas’ recasting of state power drew in those who had already been primed by its source material — a centuries-old narrative of American history and governance that overwrites plunder to emphasize notions of progress. In the wake of the Obama years, as Trump’s presidency unfolded, fans of the previous era grew nostalgic for the pleasantries of a politer empire. Bringing Trump’s presidential reign to an end, Obama’s former Vice President Joe Biden ran for office in 2020 with former U.S. senator and attorney general Kamala Harris as his running mate and earned a sweeping victory. In her first speech as Vice President, Harris, who is the first woman, the first African-American, and the first Asian-American to hold her position, named herself as a catalyst for the transformation of yet another seat of empire. “I may be the first woman to hold this office. But I won’t be the last,” she declared. Perhaps, she is on to something. After all, what better way to follow-up a reboot, than with a spin-off?