MICHELLE OBAMA--BECOMING

Becoming by Michelle Obama ; Published by Viking--Penguin ; Pages 428  ; Price Rs.999/-

                     **********************************

Michelle LaVaughn Obama  is an American lawyer, university administrator and writer, who was First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She is married to the 44th U.S. president, Barack Obama, and was the first African-American first lady.

Michelle is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She worked at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met Barack Obama. Michelle married Barack in 1992 and they have two daughters.

As First Lady, Obama served as a role model for women, and worked as an advocate for poverty awareness, education, nutrition, physical activity and healthy eating. She supported American designers and was considered a fashion icon.

The book under review is her memoir.She   has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady  she created the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, even as she established herself as a powerful advocate for women the world over, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through  its most harrowing moments. She  raised two down-to-earth daughters under severe  media glare.

Her  life is filled with meaning and accomplishment. Her memoir is  a work of deep reflection and mesmerising storytelling, she  chronicles the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With utter  honesty and boisterous  wit, she delineates  her successes and failures , both public and private, telling the tale in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, the book is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.

Michelle ,though born in an era where the racial/colour discrimination was riding  high  never played the victim card but she turned them all into her strengths to become the Michelle we know. One chapter reveals how her hostel mates quit sharing room with Michelle because she was black.

She was very fortunate to have found a perfect partner in  Barack   while she was working in a reputed firm. This book  probes  Barack’s life as well. Obama also came from a working middle class family like hers. She clearly  explains their Presidential campaigns and the much glorified life and also it's negatives  inside White House. We  also read how Michelle fought against child obesity, problems faced by veterans, women and Afro- Americans when she became the First Lady. On a different tack the First Lady herself  took the initiative in building a beautiful garden in White House and promoted farming of organic vegetables. She made White House more accessible to children, school and college students.

Her description of meeting and getting to know, then falling in love with, Barack, is really interesting. It was NOT love at first sight! They became friends, and then sweethearts, and then, over time, deeply in love.

We get to see what Barack is like--truly, that's the charming portion of the book. Michelle  struggles as a young adult and a working mother, then as a political spouse.

 The book is in two parts. The  first section, recounts her  youth, deal  with her sense of daughterly duty as she remembers the “striving” and the “dashed dreams” that lived with her on Chicago’s South Side, where her childhood was marked by the resource drain of white flight and the deteriorating health of her father. “Politics had traditionally been used against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded, leaving us under-educated, unemployed, underpaid,” according to her. Her  frankness regarding the media’s processing of her image is famous. She writes, “It was as if there were some cartoon version of me out there wreaking havoc, a woman I kept hearing about but didn’t know—a too-tall, too-forceful, ready to emasculate Godzilla of a political wife named Michelle Obama.” .

 During her time in the White House, Obama grew into a symbol for rejecting the cool distance inherent to symbolism; she was the first First Lady to court an air of “relatability,” and she retained it even as she became one of the most popular Americans in history.

She made a colourful  statement  “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.”

  “Becoming” serenely balances gravity and grace, uplift and anecdote. Regarding her alliance with  Barack  she declares, they are opposing forces, like Yin and Yang. Her  gregariousness is faced by Barack’s need for pensive solitude. She constructs an identity as if tucking and folding a piece of origami; he is an improbable American original, a hybrid of Kenya, Hawaii and Kansas with an Arabic middle name, a one-man melting pot whose mixed ingredients make him eternally ambivalent. 

Their relationship  develops as a disputatious comedy of manners. At their Chicago law firm, Michelle initially appraises him an “exotic geek”, then more politely reclassifies him as a unicorn. He also smokes, which disgusts her. All is forgiven, thanks to his “noble heart” and his encyclopaedic head.

 Once they are married, his political commitments turn him into a “human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew”. In the White House, where she makes clothing choices a month in advance and submits to endless primping by stylists, he maintains his “loose-jointed Hawaiian casualness” and is ready for work as soon as he pulls “the same dark suit out of his closet”. He doesn’t, she adds, even need to comb his hair.

 She complains about “the new heaviness” that the presidency brought with it, symbolised by a limo that is “a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tyres, and a sealed ventilation system” able to withstand a biological or chemical assault. The antidote to this onerous symbolism is her irrepressible lightness of being: her dance moves, her happy informality that made her ignore protocol and stoop from her great height to give the Queen a consoling hug when they first met.

The book  is enormously effective at distilling Michelle’s  poise, intelligence, and warmth into a single ,hefty book . It  evokes the idea of the Obama marriage as an aspirational partnership while letting us in on just a few secrets.

“I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine,” she writes. “I saw it coming already, like a barrelling wave with a mighty undertow.”

 Michelle’s  unapologetic belief in her own worth, in the validity of her own ambitions and her own priorities in the face of her husband’s political aspirations, is part of what makes her such a compelling figure. She is not, she maintains as she chronicles her experience living through multiple gruelling political campaigns, going to be swallowed up by her husband’s celebrity. She has no intentions of becoming an accessory to his career, and we love her for it.

Obama is straightforward about the ambivalence she felt when her husband decided to run for political office. She believed that he’d be good at the job, she writes, but “I feared that the path he’d chosen for himself — and still seemed so clearly committed to pursuing — would end up steamrolling our every need.”

  There is so much to like about this book, the little vignettes about life in the White House. The policy issues are less interesting; the human issues more so. All in all, a worthwhile and enjoyable read. 

                                                                      

P.P.Ramachandran.

19/05/2019.