Known and Strange Things Read online

  Soon, cheers began to ring out intermittently in the lounge, as polls closed and states were called. Throaty boos greeted McCain’s predictable victories in southern states. The evening was long, like a cup final that lacked the fire and character of qualifying rounds. For the first few hours, there were no surprises. Blue stayed blue, and red remained red. Then, in the kind of flurry that seems disorienting at the time, and even more out of focus later on, Ohio and Pennsylvania were called. Big cheers. A gambler, by then, could have put everything on an Obama win. Still, it wasn’t sinking in. Everyone was expecting dirty tricks, something untoward and unexpected, a Bradley effect for the ages. No one relaxed. At ten minutes to 11:00, Virginia was called. That was the biggest cheer of the evening. I immediately thought of my friend Peter, who had put in long hours canvasing for Obama in that state. The minutes that followed found me trying and failing to stay focused on the numbers on the screen as well as on the mental calculations of where the math now stood. Just as I was reaching the conclusion that, with surefire blue California added to the present tally, Obama would have 5 votes over the necessary 270, I saw CNN flash the graphic announcing, “Barack Obama, Projected Winner, President.” That was it. It was all over.

  Screams tore through the air. What does catharsis sound like? The shouts rose like a wave from us, and slammed down back on us, rose again, slammed down again. Instantly, several people began to weep. A middle-aged woman grabbed me in a tight embrace and cried, “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus.” I forced my way outside. A pair of young women held each other’s hands and jumped up and down. Shouts, as though they were signals thrown across a valley, bounced from one end of the night air to another. I began to run across Lenox Avenue, toward Adam Clayton Powell, and was almost hit by a speeding cab. The driver screeched to a halt and rolled down his window. He grinned and extended his hand. “We did it!” he said, “I don’t know how, but we did it!”

  What was not known a few hours before was now irrevocably known. Those ten minutes, between 11:00 and 11:10, were of a surreal intensity I will never forget as long as I live. Thousands of people, as though out of thin air, suddenly converged at 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell. The TV screen that had been set up there earlier had been viewed by a sparse crowd. Now, the throng was tar-thick, and there was as exuberant and unscripted an outpouring of joy as I ever expect to see anywhere. Some people had brought out drums and were playing, and the crowd danced, and laughed, and jumped over and over. Over a PA, we heard “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” And then a brass band came through the densest part of the crowd, where there was hardly room to move, let alone dance, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

  —

  “The purification of the emotions by vicarious experience” is how the OED defines “catharsis.” The word has a strong purgative association. The need for this cleansing is unquestionable, given the sheer quantity of impacted bullshit in politics. But, on that congested street corner, amid the music and happiness, my mind was already beginning to roam. I was experiencing catharsis, and running a skeptical mental commentary on it. To my own disgust, I thought of the Nuremberg rallies: a thought too far.

  A makeshift stage had gone up below the giant screen, obscured from my view by the heroic statue of Adam Clayton Powell. Congressman Rangel was in attendance, as was Governor Patterson. While they spoke, laying claim in politicians’ words to the moment—not entirely unfairly, since it was indeed a political moment—other claims were laid in segments of the crowd. Some people near me began to sing “We Shall Overcome,” and it was taken up briefly by a larger group, but then abandoned. I had a sense that people were trying to find the right purchase on what was happening. Was it a civil rights moment? Was it a victory for partisan politics? Was it a racial affair?

  Race loomed large. People took the stage and references were made to four hundred years of slavery, to lynchings and Jim Crow, and to the marches of the 1960s. Someone next to me called out, “Free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.” For some, the moment was experienced with pure extroversion. For others, there was a kind of sweet wonderment and solitude inside the pressing crowd. These faces seemed to possess a quietness that was all the more stark in comparison to the emotionalism around them. I suddenly saw the beatific face of a friend: the great documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. I went to greet him, and promised to come visit him soon. Maysles had followed John F. Kennedy around with a video camera during the 1960 primaries. How wondrous that here he now was, in 2008, on his own two feet, watching the success of another callow genius. I watched him for a while: he radiated light.

  At length, the president-elect, the black president to be, came on the screen. Everyone screamed. He gave a workmanlike speech, “inspirational” by the numbers, full of the expected notes of unity, promises, and nationalistic nonsense. Black presidents were no novelty for me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this was America. Race mattered. Not the facts: that Obama was not actually descended from slaves, that he was raised in a white household. The facts could be elided easily enough. Race was what mattered, race and the uses for which it was available; societal convention gave priority to his black roots over his white ones. This, I thought, was what was being misunderstood about the prospect of an Obama presidency. The argument could be made that he wasn’t really “the first African American” to be voted into the office, because he was African American only in a special, and technical, sense, the same way I was African American: a black person who held American citizenship. But the history of most blacks in this country—the history of slavery, Reconstruction, systematic disenfranchisement, and the civil rights movement—was not my history. My history was one of emigration, adaptation, and a different flavor of exile. I was only a latter-day sharer in the sorrow and the glory of the African American experience.

  —

  The eagerness with which, minutes after he was declared winner of the elections, Obama was being narrated into the conventional African American story betrayed, I thought, an American longing for simplicity. The country had a love of clear narratives and optimistic story arcs, hence “We Shall Overcome” on the heels of a massively well-funded and astute display of machine politics.

  Obama, at the core of his experience, is hybrid. The significant achievement is not that, as a black man, he became president. It is that, as a certain kind of outsider American—of which the Kenyan father, Indonesian school, and biracial origin, not to mention the three non-Anglo names, are markers—he was able to work his way into the very center of American life. In other words, Obama is an avatar of a new American story, not one having to do with slave ships, or one relying on the Mayflower, or even the wave of poor Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants that the country welcomed (or at least tolerated) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Obama story is the story of immigration in the age of air travel, the kind of Americanism that issues from exchange students and H-1B visas and lapsed work permits. This is a form of being American that has been invisible in plain sight. His victory, I would think, should resonate even more strongly with these out-of-place characters who have been toiling in the shadows of the American story: the graduate students with funny accents, the pizza-delivery guys with no papers, Americans, regardless of color, who remember a time when they were not Americans.

  This was why my American friends who had Indian parents, or Nigerian parents, or who spoke foreign languages, or identified strongly, for whatever reasons, with more than one country, would feel this win on such an essential level. This was really their victory, that to be this new kind of American was no less valuable than to be one of the old canonized varieties. An inkling, on the part of the Republicans, about this argument about hybridity is what led to the kinds of attacks made during the campaign, all the nonsense about “pro-American” parts of the country, the talk about elitism, the insistence o
n mispronouncing the names of foreign countries, the pride in never having traveled. They knew, on a gut level, that it wasn’t the white and black dichotomy that was being challenged, but the idea that to be American is to be white or black. Who knew what could follow on from this murky Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Kansan mélange? They were right to be frantic. Obama had challenged the assumption that a person had to be from somewhere familiar, had to be from one place, and he had successfully smuggled that question into the center of American life. The hidden code in McCain and Palin’s “Country First” was really “No hybrids please, we’re American.” It was “Old Ideas of Country First.”

  The message in the stunning electoral victory, then, was not that anyone could grow up to be president. It was that any hardworking, devilishly handsome, and absurdly gifted child of recent immigrants, regardless of color, might more easily negotiate the minefield of American racial politics than might perhaps an African American of longer standing. This was what the pundits’ oft-repeated “he’s not an angry black man” was all about. He did not come from slaves, and did not therefore carry the threatening rage of those who had been maimed by slavery. It was no coincidence that Barack Obama and Colin Powell, the two most popular black men in American political life, were both children of people who were not born American. Classifying them as “African American” gave whites an opportunity for self-congratulation, and no real risk of racial backlash.

  I walked down Amsterdam Avenue toward Columbia University. “Change!” cried out Crazy Kev, still on the corner of 120th Street, where I first saw him eight years ago. I had no change, so I gave him five dollars. My ruminations did not displace my joy, even if the joy itself was a simple one: the joy of being with joyful humans. Walking down to Columbia’s campus at around 12:30 A.M., slowly, as the crowd loosened, I saw white college students immersing themselves in the moment as well. They trooped en masse toward Harlem, a short walk away, but an area of town most of them had, until this night, avoided. One group passing me was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A few blocks up, another, smaller, group sang “America the Beautiful.” Already on the first day in the life of the new thing, the narrative was bifurcating.

  The crowd had cheered with a single voice, but interpretations varied. For some whites, it was all about America and America’s greatness. For many blacks, it was a different story: a story about a racial triumph, one specifically tied to the enduring hurt of the slave trade. Yet, for all the assertion of a milestone reached, no one seemed worried that Obama’s accession to the White House left the U.S. Senate without a single black senator among its hundred members: one signal among many of how dire the racial divide remains in the country. But I reminded myself that pragmatism had entered my life. I duly jumped into the swarm of emails and phone calls and text messages. I understood the shaking, the weeping, the trembling; I had a share in it. I remembered Faiz’s words—“Let us go to the bazaar today in chains / let’s go with hands waving / intoxicated and dancing / let’s go with dust on our heads and blood on our sleeves”—and felt an immense gratitude that in some small symbolic way, I had participated in releasing the country from the rule of Bush and Cheney. These men had polluted the world, and Obama’s victory was a rebuke to them. It was a rebuke heard around the world, even if Obama’s own political ethos still remained beholden to aggressive consumerism and militarism. Things would begin to get better a little bit at a time. The healing of “the stripes and the scars” could commence. The world would surely change. The bells were already ringing.

  No, no, the world would do no such thing: power would eternally perpetuate itself. Greed would still ride roughshod over everything, and money and ego would still poison brother against brother. That was what reality actually looked like. The world would not revise itself: I would. I had. Reading Walcott against the basic sense of his poem, I told myself that November 4, 2008, had reprinted some part of me, and that was what mattered. What is written over is less pure, less pristine. What a wonderful sight, that the self as palimpsest, the unclear narrative, and the man from nowhere were now at the center of this lineage-crazed nation. I got on the train from 116th Street for the long journey back to Brooklyn, surrounded by curiously sedate passengers, as though for them the celebrations above ground were taking place on another planet. My wife, who was sleeping when I got home, whom I’d last seen before I knew what I now knew, was somehow able to murmur, when I slipped into bed, “Welcome home, Mr. President.” And that was true, too.

  A Reader’s War

  “THANKS TO LITERATURE, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires…civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables.” This defense, made by Mario Vargas Llosa when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature two years ago, could have come from any other writer. It is, in fact, allowing for some variety of expression, a cliché. But clichés, so the cliché goes, originate in truth. Vargas Llosa reiterated the point: “Without fictions, we would be less aware of the importance of freedom for life to be livable, the hell it turns into when it is trampled underfoot by a tyrant, an ideology, or a religion.”

  It would be hard to find writers who disagree with Vargas Llosa’s general sense of literature’s civilizing function. Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture, in 1993, said, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” This sense of literature’s fortifying and essential quality has been evoked by countless other writers and readers. When Marilynne Robinson described fiction as “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification,” she was stating something almost everyone would agree with. We praise literature in self-evident terms: it is better to read than not to read, for reading civilizes us, makes us less cruel, and brings the imaginations of others into ours and vice versa. We persist in this belief regardless of what we know to the contrary: that the Nazis’ affection for high culture did not prevent their crimes. It is simply not a true belief, but helplessly, at our most serious moments, we assert it again and again. But our attachment to this cliché is not harmless.

  There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush’s presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted “from the gut,” and was economical with the truth until it disappeared. Under his command, the United States launched a needless and unjust war in Iraq that resulted in terrible loss of life; at the same time, an unknown number of people were confined in secret prisons and tortured. That Bush was anti-intellectual, and often guilty of malapropisms and mispronunciations (“nucular”), formed part of the liberal aversion to him: he didn’t know much about the wider world, and did not much care to learn.

  His successor couldn’t have been more different. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history—as befits a former law professor—and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction. The books a president buys might be as influenced by political calculation as his “enjoyment” of lunch at a small-town diner or a round of skeet shooting. Nevertheless, a man who names among his favorite books Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Robinson’s Gilead, and Melville’s Moby-Dick is playing the game pretty seriously. His own feel for language in his two books, his praise for authors as various as Philip Roth and Ward Just, as well as the circumstantial evidence of the books he’s been seen holding (the Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, most strikingly), add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life. It thrilled me, when he was elected, to think of the president’s nightstand looking rather similar to mine (again, mindful of the cliché; again, unable to elude its grasp). We had, once again, a reader in chief, a man in the line of Jefferson and Lincoln.

  Any president’s gravest responsibilities are defending the Constitution and keeping the country
safe. President Obama recognized that the image of the United States had been marred by the policies of the Bush years. By drawing down the troops in Iraq, banning torture, and directly and respectfully addressing the countries of Europe and the Middle East, Obama signaled that those of us on the left had not hoped in vain for change. When, in 2009, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, we noted the absurdity of such premature plaudits but also saw the occasion as encouragement for the difficult work to come. From the optimistic perspective of those early days, Obama’s foreign policy has lurched from disappointing to disastrous. Iraq endures a shaky peace and Afghanistan remains a mire, but these situations might have been the same regardless of who was president. More troubling has been his conduct in the other arenas of the Global War on Terrorism. The United States is now at war in all but name in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. In pursuit of Al Qaeda, their allies, and a number of barely related militias, the president and his national security team now make extraordinarily frequent use of assassinations.

  The White House, the CIA, and the Joint Special Operations Command have so far killed large numbers of people. Because of the secret nature of the strikes, the precise number is unknown, but estimates range from several hundred to over three thousand. These killings have happened without any attempt to arrest or detain their targets, and beyond the reach of any legal oversight. Many of the dead are women and children. Among the men, it is impossible to say how many are terrorists, how many are militants, and how many are simply, to use the administration’s obscene designation, “young men of military age.” The dependence on unmanned aerial vehicles for these killings, which began in 2002 and have increased under the Obama administration, is finally coming to wider attention.

  We now have firsthand testimony from the pilots who remotely operate the drones, many of whom have suffered post-traumatic stress reactions to the work. There is also the testimony of the survivors of drone attacks: heartbreaking stories of mistaken identity, grisly tales of sudden death from a machine in the sky. In one such story reported by The New York Times, the relatives of a pair of dead cousins said, “We found eyes, but there were no faces left.” The recently leaked Department of Justice white paper indicating guidelines for the president’s assassination of his fellow Americans has shone a spotlight on these “dirty wars” (as the journalist Jeremy Scahill rightly calls them in his documentary film and book of the same title). The plain fact is that our leaders have been killing at will.