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Oedipus and Ordinariness
A Meditation on
Barack Obama
By Rudolph Lewis
| Negroes are suddenly shocked to discover
that Obama is nothing more than a mulatto
version of Ronald Reagan. Tea baggers are
too stupid to see that Obama is only a
colored version of the Reagan philosophy
that they claim to admire.—Anonymous |
I suppose we, the nation, will get a
clearer sense of Mr. Obama between now and November
2012. Much more so than what we thought we knew and
understood before November 2008. Or at least what we
refused to acknowledge, that is, excessive racial pride
can blind one to the truth of things. The Greeks warned
us so long ago that hubris was a fault. They passed down
to us kindly through the ages the character Oedipus as a
poetic reminder. Here I do not propose to be Mr. Obama's
analyst. I possess no talent and training for what is
Oedipal and what is not Oedipal.
This I can say. Many of us expected
wrongly that Mr. Obama would change the context in which
we in our efforts strive to make a more perfect union.
That was hope beyond reason, possibly. But maybe
that was Oedipus’ failing also. That is, to hope beyond
reason. To state the matter in the context of folk
knowledge, to hope beyond one's own fate is folly, and
depending on one’s place in society, can bring blight
and poverty upon a nation. Some small-minded Freudians
think that the Oedipus fault was sleeping with his
mother and killing out of anger his father. Maybe those
thinking parameters are there in Obama's psyche. But his
situation is much more normal, I believe, than those
fanciful acts of matriarchal desire and patriarchal
revenge.
If truth be told, what Obama tried to
escape was not the murder of his father and incest with
his mother. The urge of the young Mr. Obama who
finally ended up in law school was his middle-class
attempt to escape ordinariness. He wanted to become
special when his fate was to be an imitator of flawed
but successful ordinary men accidentally raised to high
places. Many of us mistakenly thought him a genius, a
godlike creature, a view which he encouraged by making
himself over in the religious consciousness of Negroes,
namely, to proclaim himself a Joshua, to the well-agreed
upon characterization of Martin King as Moses, the
Deliverer. But in African-American history the folks
allow the existence of the arrival into the world
countless approximations of the biblical prophet Moses.
Those kinds of individuals appear as
well in African history. For instance, there was the
successor to the Albanian Muhammad Ali, namely, Muhammad
Ahmad, a Sudanese who was to fulfill his fate by way of
a religious teacher, maybe in ways not too unlike a
Jeremiah Wright. And Ahmad, though a rather ordinary
fellow himself, remade himself imaginatively into the
Mahdi and by historical
chance became the father of modern Sudan, or Sudanese
nationalism, by laying the foundation by which the
colonized tribes finally expelled their Anglo-Egyptian
oppressors.
Ahmad lived a rather short life and
probably hoped like all such leaders in a monarchial
climate that he would be able to establish a family
dynasty. Of course, religion is never really established
on or in or as a rock and after his death from some
disease or poison all that he left by inspiration was
remade into something else that did little to advance
Sudan toward righteousness or a more perfect nation.
Arabism has never really solidified or fully
substantiated its love for its black acolytes. That has
been the case also with the supercilious Puritans and
their successors, the blackness of African skin always
reminded them of the blackness of their hearts.
Maybe a similar messenger can be
found in African American history, namely in the mulatto
Nathaniel Turner, the prophet of Southampton. Turner was
one of those ordinary persons who was saved from the
fate of ordinariness by self-criticism, sexual piety,
and self-sacrifice. Mr. Obama, I suspect now, never
possessed Turner’s correcting traits. “Ole Nat Turner,”
born old like Obama, was probably, though a murderer
from necessity because of his religious beliefs (a
modern-day Jesus), was much closer to being a disciple
and saint than our present-day Joshua could ever
approach. Why? Turner grew gradually and with much
introspection to the view that he could only become
truly a man by changing the context in which he lived.
But to change the context in which
one lives, rather than changing one's self, is to be a
revolutionary. That aspect of American character never
really dawned on Mr. Obama to the point he found it an
attractive career to pursue. Mr. Obama was born to be
ordinary, not to change the context of his life, but to
learn how to live within the context in which he was
born, the context he deemed truly American. That is, Mr.
Obama discovered that to be exceptional within limits,
within the context of the given, is no small matter to
be snubbed.
The Tea Party and their sympathizers,
once called the white moral majority or Dixiecrats, are
hounds barking at a knot on a tree limb thinking they
have treed a coon. Rather than his parents, more likely,
Mr. Obama was made the ordinary American by the
influence of his white American grandparents. He thus
chose the most typical and ordinary of American careers,
namely the salesman, with an exceptional talent at
orating, one who could make the ordinary glow as if it
were a vision, not quite with the flamboyance of Burt
Lancaster’s Elmer Gantry.
Yet Mr. Obama concluded after
organizing within Chicago’s black Protestant communities
that fanciful acts of orating could, if dressed in
clothes and terms of middle-class respectability, as it
had for others, bring wealth, power and even more
powerful allies. In these career choice meanderings, Mr.
Obama has accomplished his goals and accomplished them
exceedingly, and probably fortunately for family,
friends and associates in the Democratic Party and
Corporate America far, very far beyond his youthful
fertile imagination. Now what? Well, we really don't
know. Surely, I don't have Jim Jordan’s visionary ball
into which I can peer and see both hidden past and
harrowing future. But
I know for certain that the next eighteen months will
make him or break him.
With his new adventures (acts of
political gamesmanship) in promoting war against
Gaddafi’s revolutionary Libya and the building of two
new nuclear reactors in the South, Mr. Obama is walking
on hot coals. Maybe he has the political soles for it
when he has a Republican opposition in disarray. Ronald
Reagan in his white substantiation is dead. In new
clothes, however, Mr. Obama is indeed, probably, a
worthy successor to Mr. Communicator, with his lawyerly
combative intellectual attributes. But he may take it to
heart, at some point, like Elmer Gantry the false
prophet, and discover his ordinariness causes misery.
posted 29 March 2011
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Africans
Beware the Saviors of Libya /
US Senate discusses sending troops to Libya
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Crossroads in the Black Aegean
Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African
Diaspora
By
Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson
Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a
compendious, timely, and fascinating study
of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It
consists of detailed readings of six dramas
and one epic poem, from different locations
across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff
and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of
Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so
prominently among the tragedies adapted by
dramatists of African descent, and how plays
that dilate on the power of the past, in the
inexorable curse of Oedipus and the
regressive obsession of Antigone, can
articulate the postcolonial moment.
Capitalizing on classical reception studies,
postcolonial studies, and comparative
literature,
Crossroads in the Black Aegean co-ordinates
theory and theatre. It crucially
investigates how the plays engage with the
'Western canon', and shows how they use
their self-consciously literary status to
assert, ironize, and challenge their own
place, in relation both to that tradition
and to alternative African models of
cultural transmission. |
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Elmer Gantry
By
Sinclair Lewis
Novel
by Sinclair Lewis, a satiric indictment of
fundamentalist religion that caused an
uproar upon its publication in 1927. The
title character of Elmer Gantry starts out
as a greedy, shallow, philandering Baptist
minister, turns to evangelism, and
eventually becomes the leader of a large
Methodist congregation. Throughout the novel
Gantry encounters fellow religious
hypocrites, including Mrs. Evans Riddle,
Judson Roberts, and Sharon Falconer, with
whom he becomes romantically involved.
Although he is often exposed as a fraud,
Gantry is never fully discredited.—The
Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature |
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Faces At The Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
By Derrick Bell
In nine grim metaphorical sketches, Bell, the black former Harvard law professor who made headlines recently for his one-man protest against the school's hiring policies, hammers home his controversial theme that white racism is a permanent, indestructible component of our society. Bell's fantasies are often dire and apocalyptic: a new Atlantis rises from the ocean depths, sparking a mass emigration of blacks; white resistance to affirmative action softens following an explosion that kills Harvard's president and all of the school's black professors; intergalactic space invaders promise the U.S. President that they will clean up the environment and deliver tons of gold, but in exchange, the bartering aliens take all African Americans back to their planet. Other pieces deal with black-white romance, a taxi ride through Harlem and job discrimination. Civil rights lawyer Geneva Crenshaw, the heroine of Bell's And We Are Not Saved (1987), is back in some of these ominous allegories, which speak from the depths of anger and despair. Bell now teaches at New York University Law School.—Publishers Weekly /
Derrick Bell Dies at 80 |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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