Forget Barack Obama. Forget the face, the smile, the presidential candidate. This is the self-examination of a 33-year-old crying out on every page, “Who am I?” and finding an extraordinary answer.

Born to an 18-year-old white Hawaiian and a transient Kenyan, Obama has writted a memoir, penned long before his fame, that evokes the anguish of miscegenation yet culminates in a cry of faith in human community. “Dreams from My Father,” he says in a new preface, “speaks to the fissures of race that have characterised the American experience.” It deserves a leading place among the sagas of that experience.

The memoir was written when Obama was finishing law school at Harvard and returning to work as a community lawyer in Chicago. In the early 1980s he had spent barely a third of his life in mainland America, having been moved soon after birth to Indonesia, where his mother, Ann Dunham, had remarried a local businessman, before returning to finish his education in Hawaii.

Obama talks to everyone, reconstructing conversations as if spoken yesterday. Above all, he talks to his mother’s parents in Honolulu, the liberal “Gramps and Toot”, who had migrated from Texas after his mother had been bullied for playing with a black girl. Obama’s mother was thus

an idealistic escapee from a prejudiced America. To him she was “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism”. Obama was devoted to her and she to him. But he always knew that, for his parents, “I occupied the place where their dreams used to be.”

Brought up among whites to be colour-blind, Obama soon realises that a fellow student’s plea that he was “mixed race” would not do. He is traumatised by a Life magazine article about a black man who tried to peel off his skin. By his teens he has “stopped advertising my mother’s race” for fear of seeming “ingratiating” to whites. “People are thrown” when they find he is half white, as if they “no longer know who I am”. He knows he must “raise myself to be a black man in modern America”, even if his gut wrenches forlove of his mother when he hears blacks insulting “white folks”.

Feeling at such times “utterly alone”, he recognises that for a black person “the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness”. Black people, says an angry friend, “are the only people stupid enough to waste time worrying about their enemies ”.

Obama describes in vivid detail his emergence from this rage into a mature self-awareness. He sleeps rough on his first night in New York, finds a job in de-industrialising Chicago and realises that, to get anywhere, he must work his way through law school.

Law he at first finds intractable, seeing it as an explanation by “those who have power to those who do not of the ultimate wisdom of their position”. Yet the law is also “a memory . . . a long- running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience”. Often “conscience is sacrificed to expediency or greed”, but the young Obama is “modestly encouraged, believing that . . . what binds us together might somehow ultimately prevail”.

His mother might remark that he had “her eyelashes but his father’s brain”, but he clearly replicates her liberalism, honed on the harsh anvil of experience.

What of the father, the older Barack, an attractive, mercurial, talented but rootless ne’er-do-well who vanished back to Kenya (and more wives) soon after his son’s birth? He writes occasionally and the young Obama dreams of him often, waking in tears and craving “to search for him . . . to talk with him again”. Then comes a strange phone call from a Kenyan aunt telling of Barack’s death, and more calls about family feuds, homages and rituals. There is an elder half-sister, the remarkable Auma, who visits Obama, takes his hand and tells him simply, “We need to go home.” Kenya was ever that heart-stopping, magnetic word, home, and the family’s Luo village of Alego “home squared”.

Obama’s visit to Kenya in 1988 at the age of 27 forms the emotional climax of the book, as a young man, already wise beyond his years, struggles to straddle the many cultures in turmoil within him. He now has blood relatives on three continents, but Africa is the land of his father and the source of the overwhelming fact of his life, his blackness.

His first sensation is relief at finding a country in which to be black is to be normal, “where you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal”. Yet he is shocked on his first day to find whites ushered to the front of the restaurant queue in his hotel. His extended family is poor and obsessed with money, but stages proud feasts for this exotic relative.

We meet a bewildering array of relatives, their names reflecting their mixed backgrounds — Akumu, Sarah, Kezia, Bernard, Abo, Said, Zeituni, George.

Again, it is Obama’s grandparents who seem to hold the keys of identity. Gandmother Akumu reveals a background of mud huts, shamanic rituals and life under the British Empire. She tells of grandfather Onyango, the first man in the village to wear trousers, not a goatskin. A stern, independent man, he worked as a servant for the British army. He beheaded a goat with a panga, threatened a medicine man for casting spells and wandered at will between huts, wives and villages.

In a truly moving passage Obama visits his father’s grave and pours tears of remorse over a man who returned home but “could not outlive a mocking fate”, who died alone “trapped on his father’s island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother, gone, gone, away . . .”

In these incidents we soon smell the vivid odours of the African bush. Obama, smoking and drinking to excess, is depressed and mesmerised, aware of one thing that America has lost but here remains intact, “the insistent pleasure of other people’s company, the joy of human warmth”.

Obama’s recollections sometimes take liberties with credibility. Page after page is in direct speech which, written years after the event, he admits has to be an “approximation of what was actually said”. But the authorial voice is always real. Obama is a born narrator, with a mastery of colour, scene and personality, deftly stirring them into the melting pot of a shared American identity. Rarely has that identity found so vivid a portraitist.

Barack Obama dedicated the original 1995 edition of his memoir to his family, and in particular his mother Ann Dunham, right, holding the young Obama. Sales were modest enough to make a signed first edition rare (they fetch up to $5,000 online). Later editions have done better: the paperback has dominated The New York Times bestseller lists for six months and Obama's earnings from his writing last year are estimated to be at least £2m.

Dreams from My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance: by Barack Obama

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