Everything You Wanted to Know About Barack Obama

14 04 2010

“Everything You Wanted to Know About Barack Obama,” The Root, 8 April 2010.

David Remnick’s exhaustive–and exhausting– biography of Obama is a textbook for the ages.

On the day he had officially proclaimed United States Census Day 2010, President Barack Obama ticked off a box marked “Black, African American or Negro.” Though the form provided space for him to write in the story we know so well by now–Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Hyde Park–he chose the simpler, less divisive route.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker since 1998, has thoughtfully animated Obama’s journey toward that single checkmark in The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, a sprawling and densely reported new biography of the man who has faced such choices at every turn of his brief life.

That The Bridge is compulsively about race is not surprising; the first public iteration of this book came in the days after Obama fulfilled the racial dreams of generations of Americans, black, white, and other. “From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii–and even Alaska–from ‘the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,’ as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made,” wrote Henry Louis Gates Jr., in an essay for The Root on Obama’s election. Remnick, a Washington Post alumnus who has written books on Russia and Muhammad Ali, had been studiously silent throughout the campaign season. Suddenly, two weeks after Obama’s win, a 7,000 word treatise on “The Joshua Generation: Race and the Campaign of Barack Obama” sprang, as from the head of Zeus, into an issue whose cover featured a brightly burning Lincoln Memorial.

In the essay, Remnick narrates how Obama “explicitly inserted himself in the time line of American racial politics.” He focuses less on the raw political science of electing a black president, and more on  ”the nature of his quest for identity.” According to Remnick, “to be black was, for him, as much a matter of aspiration as of inheritance. It was an identity he had to seek out and master. When Obama shared his adolescent reading with some African-American friends, one told him, “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black.’”

The Bridge picks up the thread begun in that essay, chronicling Obama’s life in the post-civil rights “Joshua Generation,” explaining what Obama discovered that he could not find in books: How one “becomes” black in America. The title of the book is crucial–and essentially about race. In a literal sense it refers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama, where in 1965, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr. and dozens more black activists furthered the cause of voting rights with their blood, and where, in 2007, Obama walked, having made his first use of the biblical formulation that yoked him to the old guard of abolitionists and civil rights pioneers, and to the Old Testament story of liberation embraced by his former pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright. But the bridge is also a symbol of translation, the subtle arithmetic that Obama has consistently performed, adding white liberals, bombastic preachers, black nationalists, lunchbucket Democrats, conspiracy theorists, skeptical conservatives and smitten youth into his “yes we can” coalition.

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Categories : America, Books, Chicago, Culture, History, Politics, Race

Who Will Teach the Children?

23 10 2009

“Who Will Teach The Children?” The Root, 21 October 2009.
Obama’s education policy seeks the right mix of change and stability in the heated debate over the importance of teachers.

obamaschoolmd
President Barack Obama had more homework than usual this week. In the wee hours of Monday morning, Obama surprised administrators at Washington’s Sidwell Friends Academy, where his two daughters attend school. He and his wife showed up for the quarterly ritual known as the parent-teacher conference. After hearing about Malia and Sasha from their teachers, Obama stopped by Viers Mill Elementary School in Maryland, where he led a group of local students in chants of “read, read, read, read!”

The whole first family has been focused on education. The first lady penned an op-ed in U.S. News and World Report in which she sang the praises of the men and women who are training the next generation of America’s leaders: “We all remember the impact a special teacher had on us—a teacher who refused to let us fall through the cracks; who pushed us and believed in us when we doubted ourselves; who sparked in us a lifelong curiosity and passion for learning,” she wrote, citing data that shows “the single most important factor affecting students’ achievement is the caliber of their teachers.”

Michelle is right: A 2006 Brookings Institution report notes that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.” In the face of distressing recent reports that the racial achievement gap is as wide as it has ever been, that is an important statistic.

But is any teacher a good teacher? Is a smaller class a better class? That’s been the subject of a fierce debate in education-policy circles for years.

Lawyer and media mogul Steven Brill jumped into the fray with a lengthy screed about bad teachers last month in New Yorker magazine. He argues that teachers’ unions are too powerful; that the political cost of firing bad teachers is so great that the city of New York tolerates enormous monetary costs just to avoid doing it. One such teacher, “Patricia Adams,” was found passed out in her classroom: ‘There were 34 students present in [Adams’s] classroom,’” Brill reports. “When the principal ‘attempted to awaken [Adams], he was unable to.’ When a teacher ‘stood next to [Adams], he detected a smell of alcohol emanating from her.’ ”

Needless to say, this doesn’t describe the teachers at posh Sidwell Friends. And the Adams case is an extreme example of incompetence. But what is to be done about the bad apples teaching the 50 million school-aged children, including the majority of black children, in the nation’s public school system?

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“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

1 07 2009

“Old Wasp Money Meets Angry Black Poetry,” Double X, 1 July 2009

A Q & A with Danzy Senna, author of Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

DanzySennaIn 1968, Carl Senna married Fanny Howe. He was a black American poet and writer from the Deep South; she was the daughter of an old money, white American family with members who had founded the Atlantic Monthly and owned slaves. The marriage was doomed, but it produced author Danzy Senna, who came of age after the break-up. She soon realized that her parents’ story was both an emblem of a new, hybrid national history and a cautionary tale about the limits of love and the importance of origins.

Senna gamely excavates her own quintessentially American ancestry in her new memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? Her previous books, Caucasia and Symptomatic, are fictionalized treatments of race and identity in America, where self-consciousness, bloodlines, and cultural disjuncture reign. Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is Senna’s true story—at once a portrait of her family and a detective story. Senna travels from the American South to 1960s Boston in order to discover the forgotten history of her black relatives.

Senna spoke to Double X from her home in Los Angeles about the difference between fact and fiction and “optical ineptitude” when it comes to race.

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What prompted you to write a memoir?

In the differences between my family histories, there’s an implicit question about race and the way narratives are told or buried. I thought about how much documentation there was of my mother’s family history, and then the void on my father’s side. But it started from a more personal curiosity about my father and my grandmother and where they had come from.

I thought the book was going to be more of a genealogical mystery and excavation when I began it. And then my father took me down south and I realized then that I was going to have to put in this more personal narrative as well—because that was driving my interest in the story. And I didn’t really want to write a memoir, but it kind of snuck up on me.

Obviously there’s an outline that is “true” here—but often you only have a few documents and some photographs, so you fill in the blanks. How did you put together the stories of your grandmother, Anna, your shadowy grandfather, and others in your father’s past?

To fill in the blanks with my imagination felt like such a different beast to me than writing fiction. And yet at the same time I guess I drew on my fictional sensibilities in trying to create a sense of suspense and the pacing of a detective novel. Because I wanted it to have that feeling of what I had experienced while I was trying to find this story.

A memoir is so much about what you leave out of the story. I had hundreds and hundreds of pages that I never used in this book. I realized that part of what makes a memoir work is choosing to create a lot of white space around things and letting those things breathe.

In the book, you struggle with the question of who is biologically related to you, and to one another. You’re frequently looking for some tether, the “one drop” of shared blood that proves a common history. How did this complicate for you the very idea of family?

Part of the subtext of the book is that I was having babies while I wrote it. So I created my own family as I excavated and explored the past, and I was creating my own family in the future.

In terms of the one drop thing: I knew growing up, or suspected, that I was part Mexican because of the clues that my grandmother had dropped, and my father’s mixed appearance. And I knew that my father was mixed and was very bound up in that, as I describe. I understood myself to be black. But then I started to believe that race was a construct. History and knowledge about blackness is very much a plague amongst black people in this country who are not pure African. I remember in college looking at pictures of Malcolm X and his mother and reading about the Harlem Renaissance and realizing that all the icons of negritude and blackness were also very mixed, and feeling like I was part of a long tradition. And that one drop is such a part of it.

Have you read Dreams from My Father, the president’s memoir? How do you place your book within the ever-growing literature of lost families and interracial love in America?

I didn’t read Dreams From My Father. And it’s ridiculous that I haven’t read it, but I have not. In terms of my family, my parents were doomed for a lot of reasons, some of which had to do with their class and race differences and a lot of which had to do with my father’s personal demons. My mother once said “it’s not love, it’s something else.” And I met people later who talked about meeting them and how in love they were and I found journal entries from my mother that revealed that there was really a lot of love and passion between them, so I think a lot of that was revisionist history on her part. Her being so bitter about my father in the present that she was unable to remember what drew them together.

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“Crisis on the Color Line”

12 02 2009

“Crisis on the Color Line,” The Root, 12 February 2009

After 100 years of ‘pleading our own cause,’ has the NAACP still got it?

crisis003_0Just before Christmas 1776, colonist Thomas Paine published the first of a series of essays on early American values that would come to be known as “The American Crisis.” In it, Paine, a strong voice for the American colonies’ independence from Britain, wrote of setbacks on the path to liberty as “the times that try men’s souls.”

The spirit of these op-eds is a fitting match for the events surrounding the bloody founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded 100 years ago on February 12th. Through the NAACP, The Crisis was reborn, as a freedom pamphlet for a new group of revolutionaries.

Like the United States, the NAACP owes its birth to violence—the 1908 race war in Springfield, Ill., sparked by false rape accusations, which nearly leveled the town that bred Abraham Lincoln, born a century, to the day, before the organization’s founding. In Springfield, an angry majority “went on a killing spree, a burning-down spree and a chasing-the-blacks-out-of-town-spree,” says Roger Wilkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and prominent alumnus of the civil rights movement. When the fires went out, W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, along with a group of former abolitionists, decided that their nascent plans to organize against endemic racial inequality could not wait. “Their minds were blown by the savagery of Springfield,” says Wilkins, nephew of onetime NAACP head Roy Wilkins; and so the interracial, interfaith coalition—that promised advancement where there had been only oppression—began.

Today, the upstart project started by Wells and Du Bois has matured into the oldest civil rights organization in North America. The Crisis, a magazine published continuously since the first year of the NAACP’s existence, is—like Paine’s original—living proof that, “words matter.”

As the NAACP struggles to remain relevant in a time of shifting attitudes about race, politics and how to best achieve equality, a look back at the rise of The Crisis, and its period of dominance, offers insight into some potential strategies for the future of an organization that many believe is past its prime.

Over the past century, The Crisis has been “the tribune, the call to action, the disseminator of news and information” among blacks, says Julian Bond, civil rights activist and board chairman of the NAACP since 1998. “It’s just been indispensable.” It went from an initial circulation of 500 subscribers to 27,000 in just a few years—swelling to 100,000 readers by 1920. Its popularity, says Patricia Sullivan, author of Lift Every Voice, a history of the NAACP, ensured that the fledgling civil rights group survived. “In the early days, it was a very improvisational, flexible, lean organization,” she notes. “The Crisis lay the groundwork for the NAACP to grow.”

For decades before 1909—by dint of law or custom—blacks could not congregate freely in the U.S. So, just as the black church became a place of civic organizing, the black press also offered a chance for call and response, for shared experience and robust debate. (In the first part of the 20th century, the Baltimore Afro-American had greater circulation than the New York Times.) In the days when white media would rarely venture into communities of color, this was a necessity: “The black press,” says Bond, “always felt the need to be explainers of black life to black people. In its heyday and even in the recent past, you were dependent on an organ like The Crisis to tell you what was going on.”

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“Still ‘On Fire’”

19 01 2009

“Still ‘On Fire,’” The Root, 19 January 2009

Have the flames of Dr. King’s legacy been put out?

garbage-workers-strike-memphis

On Election Night 2008, a jangling, inter-ethnic mob in Washington, D.C. toasted Barack Obama’s presidential victory, stopping traffic at 14th and U streets—the same crossroads where, 40 years earlier, in April, Bobby Kennedy had signed autographs at a campaign rally, and where Stokely Carmichael and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had crouched, listening to the news spool over the radio: King is dead.

The week that followed brought some of the worst rioting that American cities had ever seen. Washington—where on April 5, 1968, some 200 fires raged—led the way; in Chicago, in Baltimore, in Raleigh, N.C., in Pittsburgh, in Hartford, Conn., the acts of thousands of anonymous mourners, thugs and opportunists eclipsed the spectacle of the 1965 Watts riots and sent white Americans scurrying for the hills—like the Israelites, not to return for 40 years. Barack Hussein Obama has taken Martin Luther King Jr.’s 45-year-old “arc of history” and bent it sharply toward justice. It seems an apt time for a fresh look backward.

In a new book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, Clay Risen examines the days between April 4 and 11, 1968—an often ignored history—ruled by grief and by grim violence. Using newly declassified reports and with a journalist’s eye for historical detail, Risen recounts a moment of great schism in American life—between black and white, urban and suburban, before and after. As Washington sent up smoke signals to the suburbs and King’s body was flown from Memphis, Tenn., to Atlanta, Risen asks: “As surely as this was the end of something, it was the start of something, too. But what?”

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In one sense, it was the beginning of a civil war, a shot to the stomach that has yet to bleed out, pitting American majority culture against a devolving inner city. Risen’s work suggests this was as much a matter of explicit government policy as the seismic cultural change that nostalgia names “the sixties.”

That week, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? played at a movie house on U Street; civil rights leaders met President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House; thousands of troops were deployed to major cities; Palm Sunday came; a television audience of 120 million watched King’s funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. At the same time, Risen reports, people of color battled “poverty, jobs discrimination, poor schools—all this in cities where blacks were supposedly free, where city leaders flatly denied the existence of squalid conditions or de facto segregation.” The need for social programs for vulnerable members of inner cities ground against job insecurity, anticommunism and intense fear of disorder—cleaving the nation as handily as did the Vietnam War (recall that King was killed in the midst of his unpopular “Poor People’s Campaign”).

The whole affair proved, in another sense, the end of innocence for the many Americans who had wholeheartedly supported the cause of civil rights up to and through King’s assassination. As Rick Perlstein also documents in his excellent Nixonland, 1968 was a turning of the cultural tides, during which the shiny luster of Johnson’s Great Society began to fade, and a politics of grievance took root in America. Though there were signs of mediation—the Chicago gang members who preached nonviolence in the days after the slaying, the 1968 Kerner Commission report that called out “white racism” as a cause of inner-city strife—Risen argues that the riots signified the public fall of the noble Negro cause, a reason for even liberals to question that equal rights and social justice were possible or necessary.

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“The Inaugural Poet”

19 01 2009

“The Inaugural Poet,” The Root, 18 January 2009

Barack Obama’s chosen muse dishes on politics, poetry, and why she didn’t blink.

15-alexanderThe selection of Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander to write and deliver a poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama marks not only the return of poetry to a place of prominence in presidential history (she is only the fourth to read at a presidential swearing-in), but represents a true mind-meld between the president-elect and his chosen bard. Professor Alexander is a virtuosic writer and a shrewd analyst of American letters, a polyglot who moves fluently from essay to sonnet, from free verse to drama—and in her teaching, traces equally diverse themes. As the big day approaches, it’s hard to tell who will serve as muse to whom—Alexander and Obama share ties to Chicago and to the classroom, and a demonstrated commitment to the power of words and of community institutions.

I recently caught up with my former teacher to discuss her work and the now-finished poem she will deliver at Tuesday’s ceremony.

The Root: Congratulations! How were you chosen for this honor? Who called who?

Elizabeth Alexander: I actually don’t know! You’d have to ask the inaugural committee what happened. I just got a phone call saying that they were asking me to write a poem and deliver it. It was a tremendous thrill. Kind of like Sarah Palin, I didn’t even think about saying no.

I think one of the really exciting things about the Obama campaign and his election is that so many more people than in the past have felt called to serve, have felt that they needed to step up their game, do what they could. You know, not much has been asked of us in the last eight years—now is the time. So I thought that this question was a continuation of the same mission we heard expressed on the campaign trail.

TR: Have you read the president-elect’s college-era poetry? It’s pretty bad. How can you trust his judgment on you? What kind of poetry does he enjoy? (I think that he must have loved your “Stravinsky in L.A.”)

EA: Well, most 19-year old poetry is pretty bad! As to what poetry he favors now, that’s a question better left for him. I do know that when he was photographed a few days after the election, he was holding a copy of Derek Walcott’s collected poems. And let me tell you, an audible collective whoop rose up from the poetry world. It was so wonderful to see that three days after he was elected leader of the free world that he would literally model for us a book of poetry, show the value of taking a moment to see what wisdom could be found in a poem. And with a great poet like Walcott, who, of course, doesn’t shy away from politics and serious sociological thinking.

TR: Who have you been reading for inspiration, and how is that different from what you teach at Yale?

EA: I did a lot of rereading—and then I stopped. Because it was important that I remind myself what it was possible to do in poetry, but at the same time to create a space to listen to what I had to say. I have learned that the greats inspire, but they can also daunt. So to know when to put them aside is a key calibration. I certainly returned to Walt Whitman, thinking of his lines about “I hear America singing; the varied carols I hear,” and that vision of a multivocal, loud America, speaking in many different voices and different registers. Conveying a sense of expansiveness in America was important to me.

And Gwendolyn Brooks, as usual, provides me with her intensity, her fierce intensity of language, the way that she begins simply with the lives she might see outside her window on the South Side of Chicago. I thought particularly about Brooks because, were she living she would absolutely be the one giving the inaugural poem. She’s the bard of the South Side and one of the unheralded geniuses of the last century. And I’ve been thinking, of course, about her connection to Obama’s stomping grounds and what it means to be from Chicago, but also her sense of occasion—her sense of what it means to be a community and to hear it all in the tiniest things.

Also, I thought a lot about the poet Robert Hayden, and poems of his such as “American Journal,” where he meditates on “this variegated people” and a poem like “Frederick Douglass,” when he tries to define freedom, to define this concept that we all know, we say we want it—but what is it? And Frederick Douglass is in the poem and tries to make sense of freedom. Those are actually all poets that I teach—at one point or another I try to make it a point to teach what I love.

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“Her Supreme Sassiness”

1 10 2008

“Her Supreme Sassiness,” The New York Observer, 30 September 2008.

Inspired by Harriet Miers, upstaged by Sarah Palin; Buckley’s hot chick falls flat.

Supreme Courtship
By Christopher Buckley
Twelve, 285 pages, $24.99

In Supreme Courtship, Christopher Buckley’s most recent portrait of Washington through the looking glass, a massively unpopular president, clicking through the cable channels late at night at Camp David, comes across a rerun of a prime-time reality television show called Courtroom Six. By morning he’s made up his mind: He’s going to nominate “judge” Pepper Cartwright to the Supreme Court.

Charming, brash, Texan, Pepper Cartwright is not observably intelligent, yet prone to dishing out zingers in response to male plaintiffs on Courtroom Six. She packs a pistol, and “shimmies” into her jeans—and we know what it means for a woman to shimmy. As a nominee, she’s the embodiment of what Roger Ebert has called “the American Idol candidate,” a figure “so talented, why, they’re darned near the real thing.” At her Senate confirmation hearing, she drawls, “Why don’t we just get to the grilling. I see you’re all wearing your best barbecue mitts.” Barbecue mitts! The crowd goes wild. She becomes the Supreme Court’s newest junior justice.

Mr. Ebert, of course, was referring to the real-time media phenomenon known as Sarah Palin. And if the notion of a film critic weighing in on the subject of a vice presidential selection sounds absurd, excuse it. The trappings of celebrity in this election season—from throngs of Berliners hoisting the American flag, to ad cameos from lissome pop stars, and countless closed-door fund-raisers with the well-heeled—suggest our politics have invited this incursion. (As if on cue, the Lifetime television network is commissioning polls to determine female voter preference, and The View earns kudos for skewering John McCain as a liar.)

It’s not obvious that Sarah Palin will enjoy the same success as Pepper Cartwright. Her convention speech in St. Paul won her instant fame, but since then she’s been barricaded from public view, a Suri Cruise manqué. When she emerged for her interview with Katie Couric, she oozed mediocrity and contradiction, and, worse for her patrons, depleted her pinup power before millions.

WILL MRS. PALIN’S TUMBLING popularity (17 points in three weeks, according to one poll) spoil our pleasure in Christopher Buckley’s novel? Pepper—the “chick lawyer from Texas” who fights the odds to “make the whistle” (that’s rodeo-speak for survival), and unlike Harriet Miers, Buckley’s sure inspiration, provokes clumsy blushes among powerful men—was believable while Mrs. Palin was riding high. Now all three women look like fairy tales.

Mr. Buckley casts Pepper as a quick study, endearing in her pragmatism, and destined for photo spreads screaming “Justices: They’re Just Like Us!” She drives a red pickup to her meetings on the Hill. She has enjoyed her own thrashing moment of baptism amongst a born-again Christian sect in the South. She places incredibly authentic drink orders: “Tequila, straight up. Beer back. Bottle, lime.”

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“Lost Ones”

11 02 2008

“Lost Ones,” The Yale Review of Books, Spring 2007

Life Cover, July 1968

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Adichie
Knopf, 440 pp. $24.95
What is the What, Dave Eggers
McSweeney’s Books, 475 pp. $26.

The heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis.

–Joan Didion, Democracy

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, foregrounds its family drama, offering only gentle intimations of a 90s-era Nigerian police state. In Adichie’s newest work, Half of a Yellow Sun, the folding screen is whisked away, laying bare the history and tragedies of the three-year intra-Nigerian conflict, reduced in today’s parlance to a single bullet point: Biafra. Adichie’s approach to writing about the story of Biafran War is not uncommon—she follows a 1966 military coup, as ethnic tensions erupted into mob violence targeting members of the Igbo ethnic group in northern Nigeria, and forcing thousands into a hasty, fearful retreat to the east. Igbo political players and military authorities responded with outrage to the mass killings, declaring in 1967 that the southeastern part of Nigeria below the Niger River would be henceforth Biafra—a new and sovereign state.

In the novel, the massacres arrive begin as Ugwu, a houseboy and one of the novel’s three narrators, is listening to the radio:

Ugwu no longer listened. It started in Kano rang in his head. He did not want to tidy the guest room and find bedsheets and warm the soup and make fresh garri for them… He wanted the radio announcers to be silent, too, but they were not. They repeated the news of the killings in Maiduguru until Ugwu wanted to throw the radio out of the window, and the next afternoon, after the men left, a solemn voice on ENBC radio Enugu recounted eyewitness accounts from the North; teachers hacked down in Zaria, a full Catholic church in Sokoto set on fire, a pregnant woman split open in Kano…

Once flowing, the horrors of this war will not be staunched. For nearly a decade, the novel follows Ugwu, his employers Olanna and Odenigbo, and their associates through a romantic, turbulent arc of the secession and war, as rations thin, soldiers kill loved ones, and bombs and suspicion penetrate their lives.

These characters, a few among some of the many thousands of Nigerians turned suddenly Biafran, are the raw materials of a tremendous work of historical fiction. Their experiences allow Adichie to reanimate this painful history—discussion of which, Adichie writes, she has said is largely verboten among Nigerians today. Ugwu’s urge to shut off the radio has an eerie prescience—there are many still who still would rather not hear or remember the shocks of ethnic violence. But silence among those older generations leaves nothing of history for those who did not live through the conflict, to those silent because they have not known the caustic aftertaste of war.

Narrative theorist Mieke Bal, in her discussion of rhythm in narrative fiction, writes of the ellipsis, the quick or unwritten event that is seen only through referent. An ellipsis may take the form of silent knowing looks, an oblique conversation between characters, or many years taken at a stride. But “the event about which nothing is said may have been so painful that it is being elided for precisely that reason. Or the event is so difficult to put into words that it is preferable to maintain complete silence about it…. the ellipsis is used for magical purposes, as an exorcism.”

Chimamanda Adichie Adichie has set her mind to exorcizing that ellipsis in contemporary Nigerian culture. History books have been written about Biafra, with statistics, figures and at times vivid and compelling analyses of the conflict—but Yellow Sun, as a novel, is particularly well-suited to the task of shading depicting in the events of the unsavory past. Edward Said has said that novels fill gaps in an incomplete archive. Grounded in tender description across class, culture and political leanings, Adichie’s Nigeria is a generous sealant.

Also pulsing through the imagined Biafra is a critique of history itself, of the role that conventional narratives play in cultural memory. Adichie refuses to treat the past as a sedentary object; news like that screaming out of Ugwu’s radio is history made fresh and urgent in the retelling. As if to highlight the ambiguous space that the historian/novelist occupies, Adichie intersperses a nonfiction account of the same war. Styled as excerpts from a book, “The World Was Silent When We Died”, this drier, anthropological language is meant to educate the reader about the war’s so-called objective history.

He writes about starvation. Starvation was a Nigerian weapon of war. Starvation broke Biafra and brought Biafra fame and made Biafra last as long as it did.

The reader later discovers that a central character has written this treatise—a masterful play on time and the subjective nature of “history”—but as the “nonfiction” glosses Adichie’s own fictional telling, and vice versa, the relevant distinctions between fact and fiction seem to evaporate.

This must be the point. This novelistic demonstration recreation of history, via via characters who negotiateting a beautifully crafted vision of time and place, rehabilitates Biafra as an idea and places it securely inrestores examination to the archive. It is pleasing to see that the book was released in Nigeria this October, published and distributed by Farafina Books, a young local imprint. As the novel comes into the world, is read and circulated, Adichie’s skillful redeployment of a seminal Nigerian social moment will serve as an example of how historical literature can repair certain ruptures of social dialogue.

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NYT Book Review graphic

Likewise, Dave Eggers’ new book deals in exorcism. This fictionalized memoir of one Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee, narrates a journey out of war, but also out of the quiet of marginalization and into mainstream notice.

Achak lives in America now, which is nothing short of a miracle. To arrive in the land of the free, in which the freezer is a mysterious, untrustworthy object, Achak has accomplished the unthinkable—walking from tiny Marial Bai in southwestern Sudan across a desert and into Ethiopia, and then Kenya—all the while experiencing a embarrassment of traumas, from abandonment and starvation to watching those closest to him die deaths both bloody and resigned. These wrongs are deep, and perhaps outside of the possibilities of linguistic articulation, but Eggers and Achak give it a heroic shot; at every turn their collaborative journey suggests that words offer recourse to injury.

The memoir is rendered in tight focus—somehow, much of the drama unfolds in a single room—yet Achak’s singularity collides with collective history to stunning affect. His experience as one of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan must speak for many. So he is a conscientious narrator, whose offbeat innocence challenges a presumption of faceless victimhood in vague, ‘African’ contexts. At times the novel even plays with this trope of African ‘otherness.’ When an American antagonist drops a phone book on his head, as if foreignness were akin to being an insect, Achak deadpans: “the pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.” This wry interiority is a fine way to reveal the impact of violent conflict and its aftermath. As we love Achak in his wittiness, literalisms and idiosyncrasies, displayed with fondness and assurance by Eggers, we hate those forces, human and fatal, that cause him pain.

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“B(l)ack to the Future?”

11 02 2008

“B(l)ack to the future?” Sphere Magazine, December 2006

Leopold Senghor Billet Fifty years ago Léopold Sédar Senghor, esteemed patriarch of African letters in French, took a ride on the train from Tours to Paris, a trip which, in 1956, was only 10 French francs. With Senghor, dozens of other black artists, from Africa, the Caribbean and North America, made their own journeys to Paris for the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, sponsored by Présence Africaine in September of that year and commemorated this fall by UNESCO and Harvard’s Du Bois Institute. The ticket is pricier now, but the 2006 gathering—held on the same dates in the same place in the same storied city—offered still-living original participants and leaders of the contemporary black intellectual and artistic world the chance to make a pilgrimage to the site that, in 1956, served as midwife to a new black cultural destiny.

Présence Africaine founder Alioune Diop had, since 1947, been encouraging the process of free creative expression for blacks in his native Senegal and around the francophone world. His title, as the first internationally circulated magazine of African letters, was the ideal vehicle for a real-life intellectual and literary exchange. The Paris Congress was the culmination of the publication’s efforts to date, attended by pillars of black aesthetic and political history such as Richard Wright, Aimé Césaire, René Depestre, David Diop, Frantz Fanon and the venerable Senghor himself. For a memorable three days, the very center of Paris became a melting pot for cultural dialogue, fraternity and debate.

The participants, met at the Sorbonne, were as diverse as the term “Noir” could then suggest. Also in attendance were a squadron of politically committed Haitian writers, an editor of NAACP magazine The Crisis, poets from Dahomey (now Benin) and Madagascar, sculptors and painters from Nigeria and the editor of a magazine representing the Belgian Congo.

Paris Conference Organizers

These men and more enacted an early notion of black solidarity in diaspora. Diop’s opening address notes: “We have then, we others of the non-European world, to provoke, all of us, new values, to explore together the new universes born out of the meeting of peoples.”

A litany of written RSVPs to the Congress invite, published in a period Présence Africaine, express similar passion for the global project, as well as a belief in the intrinsic value of such focused and thoughtful interaction. Figures like Claude Lévi-Strauss, W. E. B. Du Bois and Picasso—who created a pen and ink poster specifically for the 1956 Congress—were among the dozens of well-wishers. A telegram from one Julien Blérald, 7000 km away in Fort-de-France, Martinique, bears out the breathless energy of the moment:

 

Enthusiastic Hello first cultural Congress black men stop Present Heart spirit stop We follow passionately grand unfolding event stop Congratulations Présence Africaine stop Convinced brilliant new success for Paris stop.

This idea of pan-African and pan-Atlantic black solidarity may, through a 2006 lens, seem routine, but stated in 1956 the aims of the conference were revolutionary enough to merit such excitement. The fifty intervening years between the original congress and its 2006 incarnation has found black creativity in the west and all across the diaspora flourishing, circulating images and ideas to the enrichment of both artist and audience.

Perhaps the most delightful fact about the first Congress is that the entire history of the black Atlantic world after 1956—the wave of independence that would begin its sweep through Africa in only a year, the Civil Rights movement in America, the Cold War, then in infancy, the end of apartheid—all these had not yet occurred. That over 40 promising and enterprising black artists and writers converged at the Sorbonne, that palace of wisdom, in a room consecrated to the philosopher Descartes, speaks to a remarkably early “globalized” consciousness.

Also telling: for most of the luminaries that made their way to the Amphithéâtre Descartes, 1956 was an early point along a trajectory of cultural influence and impact that none could then have predicted. Besides Senghor and poet Aimé Césaire, his partner in the negritude movement, American Richard Wright may be the only delegate to the Congress to have been well- and widely- known, for works like Black Boy and Native Son. The others were members of a young academic avant-garde, green but committed, earnestly engaged with their pan-ethnic project and training themselves, it seems, for the tasks the latter half of the 20th century would bring.

Given until 2006 the roster would include two presidents of Senegal and the namesake of its national university, an ambassador to Great Britain, the first black tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and many true legends of the black intelligentsia. But the Présence Africaine Congress catalogue contains “notices bibliographiques” on 1956 delegates that are in many cases, terribly premature.

Delegate Frantz Fanon was listed as a “doctor in psychiatric hospitals”, with only the first of his many landmark studies, “Black Skin, White Masks,” published to date. Abdoulaye Wade, current president of Senegal (elected in 2000) was listed in the briefest of entries, as a “legal trainee”. Barbadian novelist and critic George Lamming had then only published his first, well-loved novel In the Castle of My Skin, though over a dozen other novels and collections of essays were to follow.

@ Place Sorbonne, 1956

So the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists brought together the makers of the modern black intellectual agenda—no small feat—and did it at a pivotal moment for both the individual and the century. The legacies of the Congress are many; the gathering gave birth to pioneering notions of cultural diversity and plural identities; Présence Africaine, impressive in scope and in durability, continues to champion black creative efforts through its Paris-based publishing house; and I, working as an archivist this summer for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., UNESCO and the Du Bois Institute organizational team, caught a glimpse at the architects of the black intellectual century at an age not much older that my own—an encouraging prospect in any time.

Partners like UNESCO, Gates, Nigerian Nobel winner Wole Soyinka and other heavyweights have made their own journey to Paris this year. The airfare is worth it—they are champions of an homage to the old order, which insists that, as Aimé Césaire said in the leadup to the Congress: “The shortest path to the future is always the one that involves looking deeper into the past.”

Sur Ferry, 1956

Dayo Olopade

(photographs courtesy Du Bois Institute/Présence Africaine)


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Categories : Africa, Books, Culture, Europe, History, Race

“On Dreaming”

11 02 2008

“On Dreaming,” Yale Review of Books, Spring 2006

The Facts of Winter, Paul Poissel, translated by Paul LaFarge.
McSweeney’s Books. 149 pp. $18.
The Dreams, Naguib Mahfouz, translated by Raymond Stock.
American University in Cairo Press. 125 pp. $19.95

The Facts of Winter are not in fact facts. The truth of it is, the title is a joke, a misdirection whose sense is arguably lost in translation. In the French, in which this charming book was originally written, the title is Les Faits d’Hiver—literally, The Facts of Winter. But the slippery rules of homophony also make the title Les Faits Divers (The Diverse Facts). The latter name was the tag given to a series of sensationalized accounts of murders, suicides and mysterious happenings printed in pamphlets and newspapers in 19th century France. Immensely popular with the public, some stories were sworn reports of real people, while others were fabricated by editors. As the title suggests, Paul Poissel’s 1904 Les Faits D’Hiver supposes to be a series of such incidents, occurring in Paris during the winter of 1881, and inspired by a later-released anthology of faits divers.

Despite its complex evolution, this new version, gamely translated by Paul LaFarge, is simply and generously written. Arranged chronologically from January 1st to the Ides of March, the winter is sketched in soft focus, leaving thoughts unfinished and engaging a voyeur’s longing looks at the shifting lives of a city.

YRB imagePoissel’s stories marry the melodramatic to the banal. In “Madman Ties Self Up,” he likens a man hanging from a lamppost to a teabag from a deluxe boutique, while in “A Patricide,” a widow tells her son to go out and fetch her a husband, only to marry the chair her son returns with. In “The Burning of Spring,” Baron Haussmann, former prefect of Paris, contemplates what action to take following a fire at the warehouse where the seasons are kept. Should he release summer early or “draw the winter out?”

In Poissel’s Paris nothing seems quite real. There is cause for this. These brief reports, recounting episodes of flying, drowning and sorrow with sly jokery, are narrated as dreams, dreamed by the people of Paris, 1881. Poissel’s relocation of journalistic scenarios out of waking life and into the world of dreams is a brilliant and productive variation on the genre of the fait divers.

On February 9, “Madame F—— dreams that she’s on the 367 Bus from the Louvre to Belleville. A well-dressed gentleman gets up and offers her his fortune, which adds up to two million francs, he says.” She is flattered, but on waking recalls that “the 367 bus doesn’t even go to Belleville.” It is this disconnect between sleep and the real that the collection seeks to inhabit. The texts offer breaths of insight into a dream-state that is a brittle simulacrum of the original faits divers that “happened” in and around Paris at the time. Reflecting this tenuous balance, the pieces are full of subtle wordplay in both French and English. The previously mentioned “Burning of Spring” is actually Poissel’s revision of a report about a fire in the Parisian department store Printemps—the French for “spring.” In “Je vous mens. Chant.” (“I Lie to You. A Song.”), he has simply rearranged the phrasing of the original published entry: “Changement de Vue” (Change of View).

It is a good joke then, that these “diverse facts” have such ambiguous ties to reality. The historical facts are fictionalized and reenacted, “a whole waking world rearranged,” says LaFarge. And where else can one find such irrational, jumbled branchings and wild association?

(Note that Les Faits D’Hiver owns yet another homonym: l’effet d’hiver; the effect of winter. The dreams then, tell the story of a long winter, the personalities that weather it, and the thoughts that fork through it.)

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