Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father

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?”¹

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.² 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.”³

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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.

1. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 104. [↩]
2. I thank my anonymous reviewer for concentrating my attention on this point. [↩]
3. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 6. [↩]
4. See the conclusion of my Amalgamation Waltz. [↩]
5. I must again thank my anonymous reviewer for the term “heartbreaking.” [↩]