Democrats Abroad welcome Obama biographer

The Luxembourg chapter of Democrats Abroad welcomed author and cultural psychologist Dr. Dinesh Sharma to a discussion and book signing event on Monday.

A resident of the Princeton, New Jersey area in the United States, Dr. Sharma is currently on tour in Europe promoting his book, “Barack Obama in Hawai’I and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President.”

Book covers presidents formative years

Released in September, the book covers the first 18 years of the life of United States President Barack Obama as he came of age in Indonesia and on the U.S. island of Hawaii. These are years which Dr. Sharma believes formed the president’s view of civil society and globalization and shaped the way he leads the U.S. today.

“Whether you’ve left [the United States] to live abroad for three or thirty years, there’s no reason you can’t be marked when you go outside your bubble, to any new country. We have this global perspective, and that’s what this book is about, the making of a global perspective,” said Kathleen Connors Bouchard, vice chair of Democrats Abroad, who hosted the event in her home. “Luxembourg mirrors this global perspective. We have a very cosmopolitan mix of people living here. In Auchan, for example, you pass by 40 different languages in one setting!”

Appearance supports re-election campaign

Dr. Sharma’s appearance was a precursor to the Democrats Abroad’s plans to promote the re-election of President Obama in 2012, beginning with a voter registration drive in January. U.S. citizens living abroad are required to re-register to vote every year.

“Barack Obama is the first ‘global’ president. He is the first president from the Pacific having been born and raised in Hawaii. His father was foreign. He is the first president whose mother was doing development work in Southeast Asia and Indonesia and other developing countries, and the first president whose mother was well educated and well traveled,” Dr. Sharma maintains, describing his book as, “really the first cultural biography of the president, of his early years.”

Expatriate upbringing strikes chord

He believes that President Obama’s experience living overseas and off the U.S. mainland is an experience to which many expats living in Luxembourg and elsewhere can relate.

“I can really personally relate to Obama’s upbringing. I have a son. That’s what this book was about – he was raised in a bicultural, bilingual family, with a mother like me who is American. My husband is French. Obama and his mother lived in different countries. He visited other places, so did we,” said Ms. Bouchard. “It’s a hard life, you have to make new friends, deal with new cultures. In the end there’s also major benefits. We’ve always appreciated and focused in our family the global perspective.”

Meeting the family

Dr. Sharma was inspired to write his book while following the president’s 2007 primary bid and subsequent general election campaign. His real break, however, came while attending a 2009 event celebrating the release of the book “Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia,” the previously unpublished doctoral dissertation of the president’s mother, anthropologist S. Ann Dunham, who passed away in 1995.

There, Dr. Sharma met the president’s maternal half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, and told her of his plans to write a book about President Obama’s early years. Describing her reaction, Dr. Sharma says she was quite pleasant, supportive and thought that it would be an interesting book idea.

While researching the book, Dr. Sharma retraced the president’s steps in Hawaii and in Jakarta, Indonesia, going door-to-door to track down old teachers, family friends and former caretakers of young Barack Obama.

He recalled, “that’s where Maya approved of my line of thinking,” and noted that Ms. Soetoro-Ng contributed several details about her mother and about her brother’s and her own upbringing for the book. She has since participated in person or via video chat in a handful of Dr. Sharma’s book tour events and will appear via Skype once again at an upcoming stop in Rome.

Questions for a leader

What surprised him most while researching the president’s early years? “His almost Herculean ability to tie his genealogy and life story together,” said Dr. Sharma, who is impressed with the president’s self-awareness and ability to understand how his own upbringing and how he has woven it together with societal events at the time to create the leader he has become today.

While Dr. Sharma has never met the president, if given the chance, there are two questions he would like to ask. “My first question would be, if he had to do his early years all over again, is there something he would do over? Second, I would want to know how he feels about my thesis. He is an avid reader of history: how did he know it was his time to run [for president] and that the time would resonate with him to be the leader and shape his era?”

Perhaps, eventually, the answers will be fodder for a follow-up. “I am hopeful that this is my first book on President Obama,” he said.