Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father
To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to
pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in
inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the
vocative absolute.
—Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
But this is amazing, you know, the first black president. I know
you're bi-racial, but, the first black president. You're proud to
be able to say that: "The first black president." That is, unless you
screw up. And then it's gonna be "What's up with the half-white guy? Who
voted for the mulatto?"
—Wanda Sykes, White House Correspondents' Association Dinner,
May 2009
I.
While many commentators have held forth on the possibility that
Barack Obama might be our first "post-racial" president, and while
others have subjected this notion to a perhaps deserved derision, few
have been as interested in contemplating another, equally likely
prospect: Obama would be, and now is, our first post-colonial
president. This silence bespeaks the degree to which "empire" remains a
name that is still, on most public occasions, forbidden to pronounce.
And isn't the difficulty with registering Obama's relationship to the
colonial-modern obvious, in the way that is so often the case with
things conspicuous, yet hard to hold in one's vision, like the nose on
one's face? Barack Hussein Obama has a Swahili first name, a Luo
surname, and that notorious middle name. He was born in Hawai'i and
raised there and in Indonesia. Only the best political image-making team
money could buy could have convinced a critical percentage of the voting
public to actively disattend—or remain sufficiently ignorant of—the
postcoloniality of his blackness long enough to select him as their
surrogate to redeem the national crimes of slavery, segregation, and
anti-black racism. But now that American presidentialism has finally
secured to itself the black male body that has so long served as its
abject, generative foil, how is this interstice between the national and
non-national to be navigated?
The "irony" of the first black president being born of a white mother
and a black Kenyan father has been pointed out so often that one starts
to suspect that said irony is really something else: a point de
capiton, Lacan's term for the anchoring point in discourse "by which
the signifier stops the otherwise indefinite sliding of
signification."[1]
The repeated national assertions that Obama's mixed-race birth is an
irony subject to anxious and jokey allusion is one such anchoring point
for the national imaginary. That is to say, as exemplified in the joke
Wanda Sykes told before the gathered press, political and celebrity
corps (see epigraph), American mixed-race discourse as a point de
capiton gathers up the other amorphous discourses circulating around
Obama's nativity, and halts the ceaseless spread of their signification
just before they spill over onto non-national, postcolonial
terrain.[2]
Sykes' comic repetition of the phrase "first black president"
deliberately taunts any who imagine they do black people any favors by
looking "beyond" race, including, presumptively, those who fix such a
gaze on a transnational horizon. Equally telling is Sykes' half-serious
joke to revoke Obama's "firstness" should he disappoint. With this
declaration, Sykes evokes a powerful, historically symbolic archetype in
black feminist discourse: the black woman with the public capacity to
name. Is it possible, I ask in this essay, to articulate this black
feminist discourse within and against a U.S. national formation, with a
discourse that does justice to the postcolonial trajectory that produced
an outer-national figure like Obama?
To explore this question, we must account for how the phrase "Kenyan
father" within the discourse of Obama's racial heritage is both an
explanation and obfuscation. It anchors him to the sign "black" (to
which, by contrast, the Republican rising star, Bobby Jindal, also of
non-U.S., non-white parentage, is not stably secured). But
paradoxically, it does so by partly obfuscating the sign "Kenya," which
is wrested from its context only long enough to explain Obama's racial
heritage, and stripped of its colonial historicity. In other words, the
phrase "Kenyan father," as a new point de capiton within an
American discourse about race, obscures the history and present of the
Republic of Kenya.
Erroneously but frequently characterized as an immigrant (even by the
Obama campaign itself), the elder Obama's student days in Hawai'i were
narrated during the election as the story of one among the world's
huddled masses gazing at America, yearning to breathe free.
Anti-colonial desires for a future other than an American one—desires I
explore further below—were excluded from this characterization. As a
discourse, the fact of Obama's outer-national Kenyan paternity remained
subservient to the more powerful symbolic significance of the American
Dream—the national demand that the U.S. remain the object of the other's
desire.
A brief glance into the mirror of paranoid U.S. xenophobia confirms
the doubled logic of this exclusion. The conspiratorial right,
determined to expose Obama as a Manchurian candidate sent to steal our
national enjoyment (which is just a mirror image of the mainstream
left's desire to see the world's admiration renewed in the election of
Obama as president),[3]
launched two lawsuits against his presidential
victory. The less interesting of the two claimed that Obama was secretly
born in Kenya, and had forged his birth certificate.[4]
But the more intriguing suit began with the claim that Obama was born with a right to
Kenyan citizenship as well, and therefore could not be what the U.S.
Constitution intends by a "natural born" U.S. citizen. In truth, Obama
was born merely with a paternal relation to the status of British
colonial subject, because the Republic of Kenya did not yet exist in
1961.[5]
What the lawsuit missed was how Obama's father traveled to the
U.S. during, and precisely as part of, the transition from colonial rule
to Kenyan national independence. Not an immigrant at all, he was part of
the famous "Airlift" masterminded by the Kenyan nationalist and trade
unionist Tom Mboya, who envisioned a cadre trained outside the colonial
metropole who would return and govern the new
nation.[6] The xenophobic
claims articulated in the two lawsuits missed precisely this movement of
postcolonial subjects out from under colonial suzerainty. The figure of
the younger Obama as an alien being whose citizenship claims preyed upon
the American heartland thus occluded the historical event of
Kenya's emergence as an independent nation, (itself a complex,
precarious, and ongoing political process that ran concurrent to the
U.S. election in early 2008).[7]
As this glance into the mirror of xenophobia suggests, doubling back
upon the question of Obama's nativity becomes a way of plucking out the
point de capiton that secures his Kenyan paternity to a stable
and finished African past, and of restoring to that event all the messy
and multiply-determined set of discourses that are proper to it. The
argument that follows takes its shape through a selective reading of
Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and
Inheritance. I do not believe any special acumen is required to
predict that this book will, in years to come, be included among the
canonical twentieth-century African American autobiographies. If it is
so included, it will in part be for the unusual circumstance of its
having been composed before its author settled on the political career
that went on to make history. It is, for this reason, suggestive to a
degree that a campaign book scarcely is. However, since I interpret this
revealing text with the help of psychoanalytic theory, I should state up
front that my intention is not to offer a psychological portrait of the
president. My aim is rather to productively "hystericize" an American
racial symbolic order—that is, to draw attention to its fundamental and
underlying anxieties. To do so I draw upon black feminist theory, in
particular upon Hortense Spillers' generative readings of the American
grammar, to argue that the desire of the mother is at issue in a manner
orthodox psychoanalysis is scarcely prepared to address. And because my
agenda is to insist, in line with Saidiya Hartman, on the complexity of
the historical, political, and discursive non-relation between
African America and post-colonial Africa, I employ the desire of the
mother, still traceable underneath the "paternal metaphor" of Obama's
title Dreams from My Father, to bring me to my perhaps surprising
conclusion that it is Obama's (white) American mother, as much as his
(black) Kenyan father, through which his symbolic accession to the
status of "first black president" of the U.S. is
achieved.[8] In so
doing, I turn briefly to a comparative reading of a classic black
feminist novel—centered upon a child born to a white mother and black
father, and similarly destined for a White House, therein—to serve as a
privileged interpreter of national dreams or nightmares.
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