SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

I think the recurrently resurrected argument that "Americans are deciding whether or not they are ready for a white woman or a black man President" is bogus. So simple to say because it easily reinforces the (falsely) imminently secure belief in a "white" man as the standard and sensible answer, the intuitive authoritative figure for this position of power, particularly as this position of power continues to be socially infused with religious, even divine meaning. But time is up on this charade. Obama has marked the time.

As we know, because there is historical evidence for this, white (colonial, specifically British) women have been loathsomely speaking to and for people of color (specifically, let's say, so as to be consistent in this image, though we know this is not limited to said imperialism, throughout former English colonies) so as to function as their feminine version of a savior. That is to say, the nurturer, the healer because of the universal sympathy inherent, natural to mothers, a potential all women are perceived to have by virtue of having a womb (see, also, Virgen Mary, Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, et al). I don't think that anyone is really staging such a dubiously organized claim in his or her head as the thing to consider in this election, on which to base a decision. Though I do find it thoughtfully retarded that "liberals" in this country continue to let this pretentious division proliferate while McCain, Mr. ‘They Are All God's Children,' walks around like the King of the Western World, confusing Shiite and Sunni histories, confusing Iranians with any other brown people out there in the ambiguous desert-cartography of The Explosive Middle East, letting his new stance as war-monger grow taller than his former veteran-cynic posture when he was trying to affiliate himself more with "the center" and less with Georgie and Christian Capitalist War Company. I think that they, that anyone allows this argument to persist is a distraction to various actual conversations, arguments that should be engaged at this time.

Enough of this, though. It becomes irritating to become polemical, and so soon. I want to make a few points about the figure of Obama and his recent "Race Speech," a brilliantly designed document with key turns that became more meaningful to me as I recently re-read Derek Walcott's, the West Indian poet and essayist's, chapter from What the Twilight Says, "The Muse of History." I encourage anyone who has not actually sat and read either of these documents to do so. I think the actual layers of objection to Obama is magnified in language that Walcott uses to speak of the common historical or social experience of colonialism in The Antilles, in The Americas, in The New World, specifically traced in the work of various poets in his essay, specific, also, to the connection between religion or religious histories and language in the colonial experience, which are adaptable to this kind of conversation here.

I don't want to spend time talking about Hillary now-though I may in the next piece for next month's "Political Issue"-because it will convolute things. Besides, I don't think she or her baggage or her shared dirty laundry are truly welcomed for candidacy by anyone except the socially fearful or beyond touch (the super elderly liberals), the unusually anachronistically angry ("shoulder-pad feminists," as Maureen Dowd calls them), and Dem. party members and the slightly center-of-right ‘whites' who are otherwise confused by the fact that Obama does not appear angry enough to be American Black enough (this collective is more expansive than what I name above or could offer in the way of concise but not necessarily nice categorizations, but you likely get the drift), as much as she is tolerated. Simply tolerated as an easier-to-classify juxtaposition to arm wrestle with McCain (there's nothing more North American, pragmatic, useful, than easy classifications), or tolerated because age, despite what Thoreau wrote to us long ago, seems to be precisely equal to credibility, or tolerated by people like me who couldn't vote with any conscience in the opposite direction.

Let's get one major note out into the air: Obama scares the shit out of patrician liberals, Anglo or Jewish or otherwise, because he's not entertaining. He scares the shit out of American conservatives because the most wild image of Obama that their media can smear everywhere is not even an image of him. But his Pastor. Random clips of what to the average American looks not like a church, a house of God, but a raucous secular session conducted by a man sometimes wearing Ethiopia's colors who speaks between a roar and a song. There's no Jesse Jackson style three-ring circus around Obama otherwise. He's not performing minstrelsy. Not being the subject he's expected to be. When a black man comes on television there is still a dominating social desire in this country for Sanford and Son, Martin, Fresh Prince, on and on. Why else would Reverend Wright's clips have some so comforted within being "appalled"? Because, finally, reassurance-the crazy black man viewers have been waiting for. (Can you hear the Anglo Christian echoes: Tisk, tisk, we gave them God and look what they've done with it all. They've turned it African, Wild!... Think that sounds severe. Watch Fox News. Sean Hannity, Shepard Smith, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Inghram, they're deeply offended because their historical concept of a White Christian God is not being worshiped properly, quietly, and independently of contemporary social or cultural realities. Because religion, particularly Christianity, is, like, supposed to be their thing. The Right's thing. There's a correlation here to their objection of Obama vis-à-vis their image of blackness. They are befuddled again by his Race Speech, evident in that they are clinging to these clips because it is the only not sane-looking simulacra of blackness that they can associate with Obama rather than taking the challenge that is being articulated in that speech to stop being distracted from talking about race in a contemporary context and with studied historical sensitivity).

I think it is significant that the first real effort to take Obama down has been at a religious angle. But let's look to a brief part of his recent speech where the commentary on his experience in the black church in this country is multiply instructive: "In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity: ‘People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters... And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild.' That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America."

There are several things to dwell on within this description as Obama makes significant micro- to macro- moves to define his trajectory of thought, belonging, his self-definition within his definition of what America needs. This scene within a church building, during a sermon, this spiritual experience is interpreted by Obama as an event that informs or inspires directly his sense of social duty to this country. He "heard something else" in translating these Bible stories to stories of black experience, to a particular, "unique" story within which he also heard the word "universal." There is a process implied here, as well. He did not hear all of these sermons in one day, surely. But this accretion of knowledge and feeling formed in time a simultaneously played note of hope, as he calls it. The black church became "a vessel" that would not, for him, be like an island in an isolated sense, but in a connected and moving one. The reclaiming of historical memories, stories, experiences through Old and New Testament stories cum socially applicable allegories is crucial. Crucial to his interpretation of black experience as his start to understanding immigrant experience, as he's spoken of in many venues, of his own story as a combination of these elements. (Note, he uses these terms as broadly connective as possible, though there are certainly flaws in collapsing all black or all immigrant experience into clumped notions. But he's a politician, not a poet, so that, one can anticipate, will continue to be the line.) In this articulation, he speaks directly to the American Black Christian community's interpretation of things like the Exodus story, for instance, as having a distinct application that one would not hear in a largely Anglo church because of a clearly different approach to thinking and living this otherwise shared historical experience. But he also, and he does this openly and unmistakably and clearly in the Race Speech from the very beginning, is speaking to the "side-stepping" of slavery since this nation's inception, since its break from, negation of British colonial power as something that is today not only a "black problem," but an American problem, a structural problem, a historical responsibility that must stop being side-stepped. Diverted.

Two other things from this quotation, quickly. He notes that the "untrained ear" would not know how to receive, interpret the environment of Trinity and other black churches. I think this is one of his subtle moments of addressing the unmistakable racism embedded in comments like Sean Hannity's, just one example, about Reverend Wright's sermons. He may speak like he is offended and finds there to be "historical" or "factual" flaws to the "incendiary" talk of Wright, but I think it is an objection to the authority and also to the speech patterns, rhythms of Wright's talk. I think the invalidation of Wright's isolated lines from sermons is an effort to invalidate Obama entirely, to invalidate, also, black experience, particular claims and interpretations of history that are not mainstream-white. Needless to say, no one has a trained ear to deal with decontextualized fragments of whole sermons. The context for the clips became, emphatically, the objection to Obama that pre-existed their being shown, the mutli-formed attempts at nuancing American racism. Lastly, I want to connect the quote from "The Muse of History" that begins this piece with the last aspect of this extended quote from Obama's speech before moving. He, Obama, writes of the love and also the bitterness that persist within the black church, within black experience, recalling the metaphor of Walcott's for New World poetics, "Rather, like its fruits, its savour is a mixture of the acid and the sweet, the apples of its second Eden have the tartness of experience. [...] For us in the archipelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration." For Obama sitting in a black Chicago church, feeling the weight of his American history, its bitter if not complex connection to that of members at Trinity as it fits within the nation writ large, the love and sweetness of experience are tasted, but as Walcott has written, it is the bitterness, the tartness that last leaves the tongue. This persists.

Can you recall why people got so upset with Dave Chappelle when he broke away from his third season? Not because he went to Africa-whatever that was really about; why people still write that image like there aren't distinct places within an entire continent is beyond me. Anyways, they were upset because he stopped making people laugh. He stopped performing. Disappeared completely from view... What happened when he left? The show went on. Eddie Murphy's brother kept things rolling. There are episodes where he and another usual to the show are asking the crowd how they feel about Chappelle's comedy in these strangely non-Chappelle-like, multicultural, touchy-feely, opinionated conversations. Is it basically reinstating, reiterating the racism that Chappelle stands against, wished to expose, exfoliate through his skits, with laughter, they asked. But  he laughter was always measured by the touchstone sense of "God damn, we're trapped in a slave structure," the feeling of morbidity that his skits as social critiques also evoked in demanding, like Obama, perhaps, that we must start from there, thinking from this position first toward what he imagines, like the "founders," is a more perfect union. That beginning from this position may, in fact, be the only way of starting to realize this vision.

What Obama is certainly not doing is playing to the roles that have been available in this country for centuries. Because Obama, we might say, is American black but he is also a postcolonial black man. Which is why Walcott's terms become so useful here. He's not saying that blacks are different than whites and then calling for equality through a reproach to both groups. He's not an example of the magic possible because of Affirmative Action. He's not screaming, Black Power! as a call for destruction leading to alienation. There are no escapist cries for breaks, breaks off or away or out to some elsewhere. Because there is not some elsewhere. But here and now, where his claim on the way of things is as meaningful, intimidating, significant as said other citizen. No calls for upheaval to one isolated audience resound. He doesn't have an exotic accent, or trivialize his education, or deny his material status. He also refuses to distance himself from the black community and refuses to estrange the black experience in this country as he, instead, makes it analogous or linked to other immigrant experiences within a certain line of thought, yet without eliding the historical specificities required to responsibly make such a claim. Not radical or authentic enough for the orgies of American liberals. Not scandalous or typical enough for the fantasies of American conservatives. And, let's not forget, not yet old enough to be totally sour, for his record of lies and contradictions to be listed and aired as swiftly as, say, the Clintons'. He satisfies no stock characteristics of American blackness: happy darkie; discontented; violent; easily imitated or imitative mode of speech; self-loathing; savage; nostalgic. He is no one's imperial romantic object of self-assurance.

On the contrary, he calls out the historical fraudulence of all such claims, on their currency in the present. He presents us with another sense of history, which is to say, as he pointed out in his quote of Faulkner in the Race Speech, he presents us with another sense of the present, as the past is not only far from but is not even the past. An immediacy that is historically measured and felt is what Obama seems to be speaking, representing. Which has many, for now, by the balls, and others, as some say, "by the ass."

I argue that Obama embodies complexity, not simplicity. The newness of Obama's appeal, what so many have been trying to articulate but are not finding language for yet is not symptomatic of the fact that there is nothing "substantive" to say about Obama, which is what conservatives and liberals alike blabber blunderingly in their critique of where Obama comes up short. I think what there is a shared language for this newness of complexity though it is not being spoken in the mainstream media, again, and perhaps, yet. I think those in opposition to Obama, whether or not they consider themselves religious vaguely or Christian specifically, when they imagine God, the face of God, as so many centuries of art of the Western world has instructed viewers to do so, encounter a white face. Authority over language, over a state, over representation of a nation to other nations, there is a correlation between the white body of Christ, the white face and white beard of The Father and the resistance to Obama, his face, him as a representation of Americanness.

The connecting factor, for me, is that of all the images to loop, of all of the scandals or dubious affiliations that I am sure are possible to claw into and pull out and leave on display, the first effort at turning things to dirt is through the image of a black preacher. A black Man of God. He was not described in the newsbreak as an intellectual, well educated, one who has been invited to lecture internationally on various secular topics, but as a Pastor, Obama's Pastor, his Shepherd. And because Obama has already been portrayed as a new MLK Jr., as more of a divine intervention than a human one, already cast as a potential for the martyr category in American politics in his endorsement from the Kennedy political enterprise, because of the mixture of religious and social content within the hyperbolic speech, characteristic of any or many public speakers, of Wright, and because, as we just reviewed above, Obama has written extensively of the connection between his religious experience to his social or political experience, his drive at this moment in history to engage the American people and political process, there is a transposition being made: that the nation will become something like Obama's church in racially-divided Chicago, or that he'll talk to "us" like "that," or that he really, deep-down holds the same "static" views, as he has termed them, of Wright but just hasn't said so yet. Or worse still, that God's face is not really white after all. That sharing the Eucharist is not the eating of a white sacrificed body at all. That such a construction, white, is, in fact, shown to be less stable, convincing, relevant, than many may need for it to still be but that many others do not need for it to be. That the Presidential voice of authority need not come, per se, from a whitish-pinkish man's mouth with whatever privileges and triumphs over tribulations and easy patriotism that it may signify.

From Walcott's essay, finally, an important turn as it relates to Obama's embodiment, in his particular particular-universal style of politics, of a better voice to speak, perhaps, to this variegated, disparately linked nation, a voice framed more like a prophet's than only as a presidential hopeful, a voice significant not because it is sufficiently globalized for the future (see Roger Cohen), or just not Hillary Clinton's or another bodily manifestation of George Bush's (see Maureen Dowd), or because it's only value, albeit vulnerable, is that it's young and fresh (see Fox News talking heads), but because of something that can actually be written in both an affirmative and substantive syntax. It is significant in how it speaks within a language of hope or change that is a negation but also a proposition to do something with the remainders of the destroyed and reconstructed-both-stories of American history as they relate to the variations within America itself and how these elements, people, the economy are infinitely connected beyond this nation's borders to others': "But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or revenge? The pulse of New World history is the racing pulse beat of fear, the tiring cycles of stupidity and greed. The tongues above our prayers utter the pain of entire races to the darkness of a Manichean God: Dominus illuminatio mea, for what was brought to this New World under the guise of divine light, the light of the sword blade and the light of dominus illuminatio mea, was the same iridescent serpent brought by a contaminating Adam, the same tortured Christ exhibited with Christian exhaustion, but what was also brought in the seeded entrails of the slave was a new nothing, a darkness which intensified the old faith" (39). I think that Obama is indeed a darkness. But, as Walcott says of the writer Wilson Harris, this is a "luminous darkness." That the "something" to which people refer but cannot describe about him is that he intensifies so many layers of history, politics, culture that the "two" parties in this country themselves are brought into definitive and productive crisis to redefine, reshape, rethink the union, the nation itself. I think Obama as a figure becomes a perceived risk because he calls people to think and think on this history, this relation, this structure that Walcott speaks, in which all are implied hemispherically, to which the beginnings of the Race Speech also connect.

See: ‘"We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.' Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America's improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787. The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations. Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time. This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story" (1, emphasis mine).

Again, "But who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or revenge?" Obama stakes his claim in this declaration, this "original" moment, its extension through time. Note the progression of nouns: "a group of men"; "patriots"; "experiment in democracy"; "founders"; "slaves"; "men and women of every color and creed"; "citizens"; "Americans"; "civil disobedience"; "gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time"; "long march"; "same direction"; "my own American story." There is no lack of substance. Not yet an abundance of political record to site, legislative actions and reactions, hours on the Senate clock, but a sense of historical urgency within flows, a redefinition of that which calls itself American.

Walcott writes about how the pliability of the slave that at once and over time led to an amnesia, the giving up of elements of an old faith also led to the integration of the ‘magic' of these African faiths with the ‘mysteries' of the Catholic or Christian doctrines proselytized so as to perfect their submission, their seemingly impossibly inalterable position as labor force only. But he also argues that, eventually, the slave, blacks in the New World came to possess Christianity, and in this came to possess language, a claim on being. "The slave converted himself, he changed weapons, and as he adapted his master's religion, he also adapted his language, and it is here that what we can look at as our poetic tradition begins. Now began the new naming of things" (48). I think it is powerful for us to pause and dwell here in this connection between language and spiritual experience. In thinking of this conversion as both in the orders of religion and language. Precisely, that which was subtracted from just such a conversion, in taking the master's religion, inscribed and known in his language, the dominant ordering of things, not only slaves but an entire social structure that relied on their submission was also converted through this "colonial experience of language" in which authority over language, authority over being became differently possible. I think that the same thing will be possible for Obama after this attack in a specific sense. I think he knows this history all too well. That his political philosophy is a derivative of this. Sections from Obama's books, speeches, the discourse that surrounds him, speak to his awareness of precisely this process through language and the reordering of experience. I think that his claim on this country is far more convincing, more resonant with meaning to far more people than some may yet think. The meaning is not as quickly stated as "must protect our borders," "must be vigilant against radical Islam," "must help middle-class America," whatever, but I think people understand this. "It is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes" (51).

As this relates to poets, I will not comment. As this statement relates to politicians in general, I am not necessarily concerned at this time. As it relates to the recent efforts of swift-boating Obama, I am intrigued. Because I think that in the end, this effort at destroying him, his campaign, his position of authority, particularly in beginning what is surely only the beginning of a long attack on the grounds of the social and political within the religious that became a not-so-subtle bashing of black community, black churches, black history, black agency or authority in the United States, will only finally destabilize the attacking position and magnify, validate further, his. I think the authority of his language, of his position, will be historically prevailing. To reconfigure Walcott above down here, Now begins the new naming of things. With his renaming the declarative moment of independence, renaming the last two centuries as not a failure or a time only of persecution but a long process, long march, a continuing motion towards the perfection of an idea, renaming the quality of claims on an American future. "A political philosophy rooted in elation would have to accept belief in a second Adam, the re-creation of the entire order, from religion to the simplest domestic rituals." I don't know if this political philosophy of elation, or hope, will dominate, or if history will demand too much of this figure who walks riskily not into a garden but a mire. Or if less like Adam, and more like Ezekiel, to use a figure he himself has named, if so many disconnected and dead but not buried bones will come together, come to life to form the union of which he speaks. Regardless, the re-calling will continue.