Tavia Nyong'o,
"Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father"
(page 3 of 6)
Later on in the memoir, a post-adolescent Obama shares a drink with a
friend and is addressed by another by a name that surprises her:
She stirred her coffee idly and asked, "What did Marcus
call you just now? Some African name, wasn't it?"
"Barack."
"I thought your name was Barry."
"Barack's my given name. My father's name. He was Kenyan."
"Does it mean something?"
"It means 'Blessed.' In Arabic. My grandfather was a Muslim."
Regina repeated the name to herself, testing out the sound. "Barack.
It's beautiful." She leaned forward across the table. "So why does
everybody call you Barry?"[14]
Here, the sound pattern of the name, its foreignness, is tested in
the mouth like hot coffee and found, to a more mature palate than that
of the whooping sandy-haired boy, now beautiful. The sound of the name
possesses a musical rhythm that sounds across oceans and beyond any
effort at cross-cultural appreciation. For its beauty resides, as Regina
instinctively acknowledges, only in a repetition that takes place
after the revelation of it its proper meaning.
What remains constant in both these examples from the memoir is the
fundamental ambiguity of the "vocative absolute," which alternately
produces shame, hilarity, curiosity, and desire. As a politician, Obama
learned to address the anxiety underlying this ambiguity with
self-deprecating humor. Such was the approach of the video biography
introducing Barack and Michelle Obama to the Democratic National
Convention in fall of 2008. They both mocked his "funny" name in the
context of recalling their first dates, implicitly allowing the nation
to relax and laugh about it too. The joke, we were led to believe, was
that even Obama finds his name funny. Mocking his name was
scripted into this spectacle of a normative, meteorically
upwardly-mobile couple, one in which Michelle Obama wryly presented
herself as the mock-xenophobic African American initially unprepared to
date someone with so strange-sounding a name. As many commentators have
gone on to confirm, despite laughable right-wing attempts to scandalize
her name, Michelle Obama's charisma has done much to confirm her
husband's bonafides in the black American community. Key also is the
manner in which her choice of and desire for her husband, and vice
versa, secures to them both the powerful narrative of racial
uplift.[15]
Like Wanda Sykes, Michelle Obama performs the public authority of black
women to name and confirm Barack as a brother.
How is this ability of the black woman to name related, if at all, to
the broken genealogy of Obama's Kenyan patronymic? The successful
normalization of the name Barack Obama might have left some to infer
that it lacks any specific ethno-cultural roots. On election night,
images of ululating Kenyans were crosscut with ecstatic dancers from the
Japanese city of Obama, relaying the acoustic image of the name across
and beyond any specific sign community. This global response to the name
finds a grounding and echo in the phenomena of the "African sounding
name" given by some African Americans to stand in for lost matrilineal
and patrilineal connections to Africa. This latter phenomena both cuts
and augments the name Obama as specifically Luo patronymic with what
performance theorist Fred Moten calls an "invagination", which he
describes as a "cut and augmented hermeneutic circle [that] is
structured by a double movement." As he goes on to explain:
The first element [of this double movement] is the
transference of a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists
certain formations of identity and interpretation by challenging the
reducibility of phonic matter to verbal meaning or conventional musical
form. The second is the assertion of what Nathaniel Mackey calls
"broken' claim(s) to connection" between Africa and African America that
seeks to suture corollary, asymptotically divergent ruptures—maternal
estrangement and the thwarted romance of the sexes—that he refers to as
"wounded kinship" and "the sexual cut."[16]
The first element of invagination, as Moten describes it here, helps
account for how the name as an ethnic identifier induces a transference
in the subject for whom it must remain a "radically exterior
aurality"—the sandy-haired child, Regina, even (the then) Michelle
Robinson on first being romantically approached by Barack Obama—which
disrupts and resists both identity and interpretation. Elsewhere I have
reflected upon Barack Obama's public persona and the psychoanalytic
concept of the transference.[17]
Here, I want to link this
transference to Moten's second element, wherein he suggests a double
fold of "asymptotically divergent ruptures"—the divergent ruptures of
the Middle Passage and African colonization—that manifest a wounded
kinship between Africa and African America. Moten productively refigures
the radical non-relation of the sexes, conveyed in the Lacanian maxim
"there is no sexual relationship," into a more capacious image of the
"thwarted romance of the sexes." I like this formulation because its
syntax captures a crucial element, so often missed, of the American
grammar book. In making "thwarted" the modifier and "romance" the noun,
rather than vice versa, it better reflects the "heartbreaking" stakes of
a black sentimentality.[18]
Simply put, Moten's formulation allows me to
augment my reading of the transference (the projection of
fantasized characteristics onto an other as love) with and
through a reading of racial kinship as sexual difference.
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