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.

1. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink, Héloïse Fink, and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2005), 681. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
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. [↩]
5. Kenya became a republic December 12th, 1964. Barack Obama was born August 4th, 1961. [↩]
6. Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963). [↩]
7. William Wallis, “Dodging the Ballot: How Stolen Votes Are Testing Africa’s Faith in Democracy,” Financial Times, 15 January 2008. [↩]
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. [↩]