Barack Hussein Obama, or, The Name of the Father

Katherine Bassard has employed Spillers’ formulation of an “inexorable difference” in American women’s community to offer a suggestive reading of one founding text of black feminist literature, Harriet Wilson’s 1859 novel, Our Nig. To be sure, Wilson’s autobiographical protagonist Frado and Barack Obama are not at all similar characters. But as the children of white mothers metonymically “blackened” by their relation to black husbands and children, their shared location within the American racial symbolic order offers the former as a suggestive inter-text to the latter. Bassard reads Frado’s origin story—born to a black father who dies of consumption, leaving her overburdened white mother to soon give her up to service in an unkind Massachusetts family home (a “Two-Story White House”)—allegorically as well as autobiographically. For Bassard, Wilson’s narrative of Frado’s birth and childhood sets up an alternative black feminist origin myth that re-routes the imputed guilt of partus sequitur ventrem. If the slave law that makes the child follow the condition of the mother preserves “the vilification of black women as the originators of both ‘blackness’ and chattel status,” then Frado’s birth to a white mother dissolves this vilification, “denaturalizing the legal and discursive presumption of blackness with servitude and ‘rescuing,’ if you will, the black mother from originary blame.”¹

One possible implication of Bassard’s reading, admittedly, is that the black mother needs to be rescued from the blameworthiness of her blackness by the intercession of white womanhood. While admitting this possibility, I am interested in pursuing the alternative implication that Frado’s mother Mag is presented as desiring blackness—not simply accepting the stigma of racialization, but experiencing the transference of blackness as “a radically exterior aurality that disrupts and resists certain formations of (white) identity and interpretation.” Since Frado is set up as the privileged interpreter of this desire of the mother, I want to use this alternative implication to read a highly suggestive moment in Obama’s memoir, where he sets himself up in a similar position.

While Stanley Ann Dunham cannot in any way stand in for the black female experience, her Americanness is nonetheless marked by its non-relation to Afro-Americanness, as the scene I will read in closing powerfully suggests. The outer-national, antenatal, improper blackness she experiences in the following scene evades any blameworthiness passed via proper lines of descent. That she encounters this foreign blackness through a line of identification ultimately linked back to her own homeland, even to her own heartland, only reinforces the uncanny presence of the black female subject with the potential to name, a voice first heard in a space where shadows possess a particularly powerful mystique, the cinema.

Again from Dreams from My Father:

One evening, while thumbing through The Village Voice, my mother’s eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie, Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted that we go see it that night; she said that it was the first foreign film she had ever seen. [. . .]

We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I decided that I’d seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depictions of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen [. . .] was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.

I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me.²

In this passage, Obama focuses on the images of “carefree birds in colorful plumage,” his simile for a degrading, almost minstrel performance. And indeed, Black Orpheus (dir. Marcel Camus, 1959) contains plenty to embarrass and irritate the contemporary viewer, including a scene centering on the black man’s bottomless appetite for sex and (what else?) watermelon.

But in reading this passage, I want also to recall the musicality and rhythm of Black Orpheus and reconsider the “sonorous envelope” it produces in the theater.³ We are familiar with the sense of aquatic immersion that all surrounding, rhythmic music can produce, a synesthesia that psychoanalytic theory has related to “oceanic” fantasies of womb-like security. Black Orpheus, in which the sounds of carnival drumming are almost continuously audible throughout the narrative, and which affords the monolingual viewer the distinctive pleasures of immersing oneself uncomprehendingly in the exteriority of a foreign tongue, is a powerfully seductive sonorous envelope. We see, in the above passage, the difficulty Obama encounters when he must address a dream from his mother, one in which he must reckon with the originary force of her antenatal desire.

1. 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. [↩]
2. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 123-24. [↩]
3. 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). [↩]