Becoming Memoir of a Country
For example, when Barack Obama was the U.S. President from
2009-2017, he had at his fingertips, the power to start a nuclear war or react
to one.
Like other presidents before him, wherever he went he was
followed by someone from the military who, as the author puts it was: “carrying a forty-five-pound briefcase
containing launch authentication codes and sophisticated communications
devices, often referred to as the nuclear football. That was heavy.”
President Donald Trump is the current babysitter of those
codes that can unleash weapons of mass destruction. Michelle Obama found many things heavy,
especially the loss of independence because the office of the President of the
U.S. comes with human shadows designed to protect it.
The book mentions secret agents, the different bullet proof cars
and their responsibility and armed men on rooftops where the president is going
to be, reminding me of Olympus Has
Fallen directed by Antoine Fuqua.
What was also heavy for Michelle Obama
was her daughters Malia and Sasha. She constantly
worried about them. She wasn’t sure how living
in a glass bowl would affect their development.
It turns out they adjusted pretty well.
After all, they were political babies.
Their father Barack Obama had been a senator in both the State of Illinois
and the U.S. Senate in Washington.
The book has three chapters Becoming Me, Becoming Us and Becoming
More. The first chapter is the most
important because it explains how the girl from Euclid Avenue in the South Side
of Chicago became a teenager with good grades, went to Princeton and Harvard,
became a lawyer, changed gears and left law to work in the non-profit sector
and the City of Chicago.
This chapter pays homage to her parents Fraser and Marian
Robinson for putting her and her brother Craig first. “They
never took beach trips or went out to dinner.
They didn’t own a house. We were
their investment, me and Craig. Everything
went into us.” P. 60.
Michelle and Craig were tight then and still are. She enjoyed the advantages of being the
little sister of a popular guy on the block and at Princeton University. “He’d created sunshine that I could then
just step into.” P. 56.
The author loves music, a legacy from her father Fraser
Robinson, great aunt Robbie and her grandfather Shields, also known as Southside,
whom she credits for her love for jazz. “To me, Southside was as big as heaven. And heaven, as I envisioned it, had to be a
place full of jazz.” P.10.
There are many lyrical sentences like this, something I don’t
associate with memoirs because I expect them to be cold hard facts. This is a plus because Michelle Obama got the
book deal to chronicle her life as First lady of the United States. That is why I bought it. How does it feel like to be a White House
tenant?
The bulk of the book however deals with what she wanted to
do once she left law and Barack’s obsession with ‘income inequality’. Make that politics. She asked him one night why he was deep in
thought and he said income inequality.
Michelle Obama loves Barack Obama, so she compromised a word
she wouldn’t use because he consulted her before every political leap and she
maintains that she knew from day one that he was different, not interested in
material possessions but bigger things, like voting to bring change to Chicago
and Illinois, but she drew the line when it came to moving to Washington, to be
a senator’s wife.
Michelle Obama’s parents kept encyclopaedias and schooled the
young girl very early that they had information. Becoming,
is an encyclopaedia about the life of a woman, a man, people and a country.
It now sits snugly at home, side by side with Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope, written by Barack
Obama, the guy with income inequality on his mind.
By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.
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