Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama

3. The Unspeakable Language of Race and Fantasy in the Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri

100 3 The Unspeakable Language of Race and Fantasy in the Stories of Jhumpa Lahiri Part I of Obama’s Dreams from My Father is largely dedicated to chronicling the difficulties of growing up black in Hawaii. With his mother in Indonesia conducting fieldwork for her dissertation, the adolescent Obama lived with his maternal grandparents. Though his grandfather introduced him to a number of older black men, including an insightful poet named Frank, our future president found himself alone in navigating the tensions and ambiguities of his racial identity.1 Joining the long legacy of African Americans who, as Karla Holloway observes, “make their marks with a list of the books they have read” (BookMarks, 6), Obama turned to literature for guidance and wisdom: I gathered up books from the library—Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Wright, DuBois. At night I would close the door to my room, telling my grandparents I had homework to do, and there I would wrestle with words, locked in suddenly desperate argument, trying to reconcile the world as I’d found it with the terms of my birth. But there was no escape to be had. In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper THE UNSPEAKABLE LANGUAGE OF RACE AND FANTASY 101 into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels. (85–86) Obama seeks a reflection of his story and vision in works by some of the most important African American writers of the twentieth century. However, where Du Bois, Baldwin, and Hughes retreat into pessimism, fleeing from an ever-broken America, Obama longs for something more. Only the autobiography of Malcolm X offers some hope, for as Obama notes of the remarkably self-disciplined and charismatic Black Muslim, “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me.” Although the future president admires Malcolm X’s bold program for self-reform and social change, he remains troubled: Even as I imagined myself following Malcolm’s call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he’d once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that, for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border. (86) Malcolm X’s wish to expunge his white blood is inconceivable for Obama who finds his greatest source of support in his mother and maternal grandparents. Their love for him as well as the limits of that love, most evident in their awkward but well-intentioned approach to racial issues, has no corollary in the books that he carefully studied.2 Baldwin, Ellison, and Wright, like so many other pillars of the African American literary canon, delve deep into the nuances of black subjectivity but not into the complexities of biracial identity or the love of a black son for his white mother. Just as Obama does not relate to the pessimism of Hughes and Du Bois, he also does not find his particular struggles reflected in the writings of these masters. Biraciality figures in African American letters largely through variations on the theme of the tragic mulatta, the beautiful but forever-doomed archetype, or through “passing” narratives that implicitly deny the celebration of interracial intimacies. Although the United States has long been figured as a “melting pot” of racial identities and various cultures, American literature has largely ignored the complexities of sexual and familial relationships that exist across racial lines. Depictions of interracial sex are certainly not absent from American texts, but few novels or even short stories explore the challenges of maintaining such committed intimate relationships. Fears of miscegenation haunt much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century...