Four years into her husband’s first term as the 44th president of the United States
Of America, Michelle Obama was only then coming to grips with her position as a
First Lady whose power she described thus: “a curious thing, as soft and
undefined as the role itself”.
She had no executive authority, did not command troops or engaged in diplomacy.
The role required her to carry a “gentle light”. But after nearly four years of
practice, she says, “I was beginning to see though, that wielded carefully, the
light was more powerful than that. I had influence over being something of a
curiosity: a Black First Lady, a professional woman, a mother of young kids”.
This later realisation may seem exaggerated, after what must have been
gruesome months of campaigning along with Barack. But set against the existence
of black people in the America from slavery to segregation to whatever its current
form is, her becoming the First Lady was once the most likely.
“I’d lived invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility” reflects Obama of her
decision to speak to students of a London school whose high- achieving students
from lower income African and Caribbean backgrounds was regarded as a peculiar
feat “I liked to mention that I was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave
named Jim Robinson who was probably buried in an unmarked grave in a South
Carolina plantation”.This and more is revealed in “Becoming” the first biography by Michelle Obama
charting her childhood in Chicago, her years at Princeton university and as a high
achieving lawyer, courtship with Barack, raising their daughters Malia and Sasha
and of course the eight years she spent as the First Lady Of America from 2009 –
2017.
Surprised that her choice of clothes, shoes and hair size routinely made headline
news – as if they wouldn’t – she decided to repurpose the attention lavished on
her towards the goals she’d set for her time at the White House which included
securing employment for military personnel and their families, reducing
childhood obesity rates concluding that ”I was learning how to connect my
message to my image and in this way I can erect the American gaze”.
“Becoming” is a remarkably frank and satisfying account of the years she spent
erecting not just the American gaze but that of the rest of the world by virtue of
the office her husband held.
Obama has deepened the experience of “Becoming” by reading all 450 pages of it
herself for the audio book, a total of 20 hours on Audible. She does not
dramatise, as would a voice actor, employing flair and theatricality. The narration
is strait laced but not joyless. Every passage is read with a steadiness of tone and
timing in a manner that squares easily with her persona, and dare I say psyche, as
portrayed in the book; that of the steady hand to Barrack’s ease with
improvisation.
For Barack, she says, marriage was a “loving alignment” of two parties with
shared and separate life goals while for Michelle it was “a full on merger, areconfiguring of two lives into one with the well-being of a family taking
precedence over any one agenda”.
Watching on at Barack’s first address to a joint congress of democrats and
republicans leaders in 2009, a long-established fact acquired immediate power:
“it was an unusual bird’s eye view of our country’s leaders. An ocean of whiteness
and maleness dressed in dark suits. The absence of diversity was glaring.
Honestly, it was embarrassing for a modern, multicultural country”.
She may have taken four years to learn how to wield her power, but she needed
little time to recognise the level of opposition Barack’s presidency faced from
right-wing Americans and republicans and who she says “stayed seated through
most of it, appearing obstinate and angry, their arms folded and their frowns
deliberate, looking like children who hadn’t gotten their way. They would fight
everything Barack did, I realised, whether it’s good for the country or not”.
Occupying the highest office in the country also made her husband a focal point
of just and unjust grievances which she would later describe in unequivocal
terms: “the hatred was old and deep, and as dangerous as ever. We lived with it
as a family and we lived with it as a nation”.
Obama is most acerbic towards Donald Trump who succeeded her husband and is
succeeding in overturning some of his predecessor’s achievements in international
trade, gay rights, immigration, health care reforms and so forth. Particular
disgust is shown to Trump’s misogyny and brutishness; “dominance, even a thread
of it, is a form of dehumanisation. It’s the ugliest form of power”.As burdens of responsibility go, that of the First Lady, as she tells it, is the most
tiresome and most fulfilling. It offers an intimate proximity to the full scope of
power without any formal influence over it. It is a role she fulfilled with infinite
amounts of grace and control, the stakes seeming higher for her and her husband
by any previous holders of the office.