Author: Kevin Batton
Since the remarkable details of Barack Obama’s heritage and biography are coming to be some of the most important aspects of his campaign for the presidency, it is no surprise that journalists from major news organizations are out for whatever details from Obama’s life they can get their hands on. Obama’s years at Occidental are not being overlooked, with the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post having already reported on them. Now, as the race for the 2008 presidential nominations begins in earnest, and in anticipation of even more reporters descending on Oxy to track down former classmates or perhaps dust library books for the man’s fingerprints, the Weekly is publishing its own scoop in the category of Obamanalia. On this page are two poems of his published in the Spring 1982 issue of Oxy’s then-student literary review, Feast.
The longer poem, “Pop,” is a clearly autobiographical evocation of a moment between a very young Obama and, as reader of Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father will be quick to identify, his maternal grandfather, with whom Barack lived for many years of his youth. The shorter, more imagistic “Underground” is obscurer in content, and reads like an exercise in tone and rhythm. The question that necessarily follows reading these poems now is, what do the poetic juvenilia of a 19-year-old undergraduate have to tell us about the man who will contend for the presidency 26 years later?
Eric Newhall, professor in the English and Comparative Literary Studies department, is listed as a faculty supervisor of the issue of Feast in which Obama’s poems are featured. He read over the poems briefly at the Weekly‘s request and offered his thoughts. Newhall played pickup basketball basketball games once with the young Obama, and has already answered questions for Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune reporters about his memories of those games. He makes it clear, however, that his contact with the future senator was limited. “I did not and do not know him well,” he said. “I’m not someone creeping out of the woodwork claiming to know him.” Yet Newhall does understand the interest in examining details of Obama’s student days. “What students do as undergraduates does not tell us how things will turn out [in their lives], but when I read Faulkner’s first published poetry, even though it is not great poetry, I see a facility with language. Obama showed certain talents as an undergraduate, but we should judge him [as a politician] on his more recent deeds. But he does have a way with language and with imagery,” Newhall said.
The poems themselves deserve even closer attention. One’s first impression on reading them might be that they feel quite accomplished. In their attention to image, rhythm, tone, line length, and emotional tenor, “Pop” and “Underground” are clearly the work of a poet who reads poetry. The biographical information in Obama’s Dreams From My Father makes lucid some of the meaning behind the images, especially in “Pop.” The scene described in that poem, in which Pop is “Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken / In, sprinkled with ashes,” is remarkably similar to the first description of Obama’s grandfather Stanley in the memoir: “I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair after dinner, sipping whiskey and cleaning his teeth with the cellophane from his cigarette pack.”
His grandfather, a Midwestern furniture salesman who settled in Hawaii, is perhaps a natural choice for the subject of a poem. He, like Obama, had literary inclinations himself. Obama writes in his book, “in the back of [Gramp’s] mind he had come to consider himself as something of a free thinker-a bohemian, even. He wrote poetry on occasion, [and] listened to jazz.” The memoir describes a challenging relationship between Barack and his grandfather-one certainly based on mutual love but complicated by the different racial and generational categories which each had to assume. At the risk of reading the poem as too patly autobiographical, the emotional dynamic at work in “Pop”, where the grandfather appears to the uncomprehending young speaker as alternately jaded, unhappy, and finally laughing, shows Obama’s willingness to examine the relationship in all its facets. The tonal shifts mirror the progression in the memoir in which Obama assesses the roots he has in many places, but without a single home from which to forge a unified identity.
“Underground” has much less going on in terms of biographical resonance, though the images may have their origins in Obama’s years living in Indonesia, as the apes and figs of the poem are reminiscent of the vividly rendered animals and fruits in the Indonesian section of Dreams From My Father. What “Underground” certainly shows is Obama’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, which anticipate his later writing style. In the opening image of his memoir’s first chapter, for example, he writes “The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a back Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”
But Obama’s mature prose style is not the reason we are so interested in him today. We want to know his politics and his character, and in these respects his poetry is less helpful. It is important, however, to remember that in the same year these poems were published, Obama was getting his first taste of leadership as a student activist in his protest of the college’s investment in the South African apartheid. Obama’s efforts in the cause were, besides basketball, how he made his name known among Oxy faculty. Prof. Newhall remembered admiring the students who took part in the demostrations. “[Obama] was trying to do something for one of the most pressing political issues of the time,” Newhall said. “I like students who try to make the world a little better.”
Underground
By Barack Obama
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue
Pop
By Barack Obama
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies…
But I don’t care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his
shorts that I’ve got on mine, and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink,* my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.
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