Boston Bureau

Cape author writes Obama bio

Obama is the Real Deal

By Libby Hughes (author of an upcoming biography on Obama)

Barack Obama may be a gifted and eloquent speaker, but he is authentic-the real deal. Forget race, forget party allegiance, and look at character. What you see is what you get.

My main vocation in life is writing biographies about international heroes and heroines for young adults. These are people they can admire and hope to emulate. The list is not very long. Obama is the 13th, and there are only two women: Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto (recently translated into Vietnamese). The one on Obama is titled Barack Obama: Voice of Unity, Hope, and Change. It will be out the end of May or early June.

Like many Americans, I was wowed by Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention (on right) in Boston. He was a fresh voice with some unifying ideas and memorable phrases. When he announced his candidacy for president, I knew this was a role model for young adults (and adults, too). Thus, I embarked on the research.

But what drew me even more to the biography were some common ties that made me feel connected to Barack Obama. He had lived in the enchanted land of Indonesia as a boy from the age of six to ten. Barack's mother had met her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. After they married, Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro and her young son followed Lolo to Jakarta, where they lived in primitive conditions on the outskirts of that capital city.

My Indonesian tie to Barack

I, too, had lived in Jakarta the same year Barack and his mother arrived in 1967. My former husband was writing a book about the coup of Sukarno, who had flirted seriously with communism. Temporarily, we moved with our babies from Hong Kong to the heart of Jakarta in an embassy official's house to do the research.

At their home in Jakarta Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, poses in this undated photo with her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, their daughter, Maya, and a young Barack Obama.Indonesia has a mystique about it. At night, the frangipani bushes and trees fill the air with a sweet fragrance similar to our honeysuckle. At that time, the street lamps were a soft yellow, leaving people, bicycles, and cars in shadowy silhouettes. The Indonesian people radiate such a sweetness and are soft-spoken. They are irresistibly likable. The turmoil of the coup (which happened in 1965) and the students, who had protested so vigorously, had subsided.

When young Barack landed at the Jakarta airport and drove with his parents to their new home, he would have seen what I did-the water buffaloes sloshing through rice paddies; he would have sniffed the fragrant air and felt the humid days; he would have seen the women in colorful batik long skirts and blouses and men in batik shirts; he might have attended shadow puppet shows at dusk and heard the gamelon (like a xylophone) orchestras playing as they sat cross-legged behind their instruments. It was all very mysterious and romantic.

Barack's mother found a job at the American Embassy, teaching English to Indonesian businessmen. Her greatest concern was for her son's education since they couldn't afford to send him to a private school. First, he attended a Catholic school and then a public Muslim school. The religion was of no interest to her, but the academics were. To supplement his learning, Ann Soetoro sent to America for education tools. Every morning she would awaken Barack at 4:00am to work with flash cards. Barack yawned, but cooperated through most of these sessions.

Finally, when Barack was ten-years-old, Mrs. Soetoro decided to send him back to Hawaii to live with her parents. There, he went to the Punahou School to complete his high school education. Like many teenagers, Barack had some identity problems, but eventually outgrew them as he attended Occidental College in California, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

My second tie was Kenya

The other common tie I felt to Obama was to Kenya, the land of his father. We had lived in Africa six years and in Kenya a couple of times. So, I was familiar with the landscape. Outside of Nairobi is a hilly area called the Highlands where coffee and tea farms grow in abundance. Barack Obama senior began his childhood in a village near Victoria Falls. He was part of the Luo tribe, known for its superior intelligence. Eventually, he moved to Nairobi to attend a British school. Then, because of his intellect, two American ladies wrote 26 letters to American universities to find a scholarship for him. He was accepted at the University of Hawaii where he met 18-year-old Ann Dunham in a Russian class. They married and lived with her parents. Young Barack was born in August 1961. Then, Barack won a scholarship to Harvard University in economics. The family couldn't go with him. They divorced. Father and son met only once after that when Barack was ten-years-old. He missed the father figure desperately.

And so, in the biography, there is some history and description of Indonesia, Kenya, and Hawaii-the backdrops to Barack Obama's extraordinary life thus far. Caroline Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama because she claims that his political values are closest to those of her father. A landslide of endorsements have come for that very same reason.

You should know that Barack Obama can turn a bitter enemy into his best friend. The last line of my book refers to his nickname, "Healer-in-Chief." Whether he wins or not, his future will be spectacular, be it in the Oval Office or elsewhere.

Libby Hughes is an author of 17 books and 45 plays. Her musical about Ginger Rogers was produced in Palm Desert, California, in February and will go to LA in 2009. She writes columns for Cape Cod Today as their Boston Bureau chief and drama critic.  See her website.