Tavia Nyong'o, "Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father"
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This unexpected and embarrassing encounter with the cinema as a primal screen produces a repudiation in the young Obama, as he attempts to reduce its meanings to "the simple fantasies" of "the unreflective heart of her youth." Black Orpheus, it would seem, must be repudiated because it "invaginates" the paternal line of succession, around which the memoir is organized, with a blackness that evades the natal occasion with a peculiarly insistent previousness,[28] a blackness that the "mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before" (my emphasis). Pregnant with great expectations born of the womb of carnival, Stanley Ann Dunham had "named" Obama even before she knew his name. She had dreamed of blackness (just as early modern European medical science feared she might), thus giving birth to blackness.[29]

So, what kind of African and African-American blackness irritated and embarrassed our future president in that revival theater that night? Shall we accept his Dorothy-in-the-Wizard-of-Oz explanation of a repressed Kansas girl with Technicolor dreams of the "warm, sensual, exotic, different"? Or, do we also hear in this irritation and embarrassment the undoing of the patronymic name? Do we hear echoes of Derrida's "loss of the proper [. . .] in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of"?[30] Perhaps. If we do, we might also recognize a detail omitted from Obama's summary of Black Orpheus that must surely have struck him at the time. Or at least, it strikes me in watching Black Orpheus today. Obama's generalized reference to "depictions of childlike blacks" omits the highly plausible identification his mother may have had with the lead female role Eurydice, the simple country girl who is shown, in the film's marvelous opening scene, arriving into Rio by boat. Obama never mentions that we enter into the world of Afro-Brazilian carnival through the eyes and heart of a young black woman. Neither does he name the ebullient, melancholic actress who portrayed Eurydice, born eight years prior to his mother, not in Brazil, but in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. If Marpessa Dawn could show Ann Dunham how to dance the samba, what other "broken' [hearted] claim(s) to connection" might there be?

Endnotes

1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2005), 681. [Return to text]

2. To be sure, Lacan did not believe that a non-psychotic subject could do without anchoring points, so simply to locate one is not in itself to launch a critique of it. [Return to text]

3. The contours of this national desire are drawn with remarkable economy in the title of one post-election article in a U.S. marketing publication: Max Lakin, "The Question: Do You Think 'Brand America' Will Bounce Back with the Obama Administration?; 78% Said Barack Obama Can Bring Back Brand America," Advertising Age, 17 November 2008. [Return to text]

4. Why, if true, this would preclude him from being considered a "natural born" citizen was unclear, since he would have held a claim to U.S. citizenship through his mother, regardless of his place of birth. For instance, his rival for the presidency in 2008, John McCain, was actually born of U.S. parents overseas: on a military base in Panama. "Challenge to Obama Is Dismissed," New York Times, 6 March 2009. [Return to text]

5. Kenya became a republic December 12th, 1964. Barack Obama was born August 4th, 1961. [Return to text]

6. Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). [Return to text]

7. William Wallis, "Dodging the Ballot: How Stolen Votes Are Testing Africa's Faith in Democracy," Financial Times, 15 January 2008. [Return to text]

8. I am referring here to Hartman's powerful critique of how the "Door of No Return rituals, reenactments of captivity, certificates of pilgrimage, and African naming ceremonies" that form the content of a growing heritage tourism in West Africa frame slavery and dispossession "primarily as an American issue and as one of Africa's relation to her 'lost children.'" Hartman's rigorous refusal identifies this rhetoric of lost-found nativity as an emotive ruse that forestalls a harder engagement with the legacies of slavery in both African and diasporic societies. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 163. [Return to text]

9. But this without the psychosis Lacan believed would be consequent upon such a foreclosure: "For psychosis to be triggered, the Name-of-the-Father—verworfen, foreclosed, that is, never having come to the place of the Other—must be summoned to that place in the symbolic opposition to the subject." Lacan, Écrits, 481. [Return to text]

10. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience : Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). [Return to text]

11. Because Obama, senior, cannot symbolize the American racial order within which he nevertheless positions his son, he also takes on a specific relation to the third, enigmatic role Lacan speaks of: the real father. This is not the "biological father," or the father in reality, but the pressure of paternity asserted as a trauma upon the child in the form of rumor and reported speech—the man "said to be" the father. When Obama returns to Africa towards the close of his memoir, in search of the real father by way of the fatherly imago in other's memories of him, he is brought face to face with this trauma of the real father through the inconsistent reports of this person "said to be" the father, and must thus confront the possibility of his own non-relation, precisely through his filial connection, to this father in the real. [Return to text]

12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Corrected ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 112. [Return to text]

13. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, First Paperback ed. (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), 60. [Return to text]

14. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 104. [Return to text]

15. I thank my anonymous reviewer for concentrating my attention on this point. [Return to text]

16. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. [Return to text]

17. See the conclusion of my Amalgamation Waltz. [Return to text]

18. I must again thank my anonymous reviewer for the term "heartbreaking." [Return to text]

19. The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Office of Policy Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, March 1965. www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm. [Return to text]

20. Ibid. [Return to text]

21. Cheryl L. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993). [Return to text]

22. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 209. [Return to text]

23. Ibid., 228. [Return to text]

24. Ibid., 228-29. [Return to text]

25. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, eds., Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 197-98. [Return to text]

26. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 123-24. [Return to text]

27. On music as sonorous envelope and its relationship to oceanic fantasy, see the first chapter of David Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). [Return to text]

28. My formulation here is indebted to Fred Moten's In The Break. [Return to text]

29. Mary Fissell, "Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece." William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 1 (2003). [Return to text]

30. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 112. [Return to text]

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