The Bottom of Heaven Blogging Postmodern Blackness

I am genuinely puzzled by David Samuels’ recent in-depth article in The New Republic that compares Barack Obama to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic, Invisible Man. Like many who are familiar with Ellison’s work, I also sensed a cultural and literary kinship between the book’s unnamed black protagonist and the bi-racial U.S. Senator from Illinois. (See my previous post on Obama’s bookshelf here.)

Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance articulates a quest for identity that aspires to the same eloquence and profound complexity of Ellison’s novel. Both texts acknowledge the ways in which arbitrary social constructs (such as race) over-determine our perceptions of one another in this country, and both offer a shrewd participant-observer stance from which to evaluate the absurdity of bigotry and class discrimination. Samuels concurs on these points and I like the way he reflects upon the possibilities of a gifted writer like Obama as our next president.

But as the article continues, Samuels seems to suggest that, during the course of his campaign, Obama has repressed the virtues and visibility of his soul-searching autobiography in favor of a generic narrative that willfully renders him invisible.

Samuels writes:

The identity that Obama so painstakingly created for himself is not one that he can share with the electorate, and so the price of his political success is that he is forced to sublimate the material he had so painfully excavated and again become invisible. His image-makers create new stories about the candidate, which ring false and drain his marvelous abilities as a writer, a speaker, and a leader.

Samuels’ observation is a prelude to his deflated account of Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. He speaks of the biographical video with disgust (“This is utter bullshit”) and laments the lack of confidence he perceives in Obama’s VP selection ( “Joe Biden is one more symptom of the candidate’s invisibility, which reads like insecurity.)

I don’t buy this argument, and I’m not sure that it reflects a careful interpretation of Ellison’s message in Invisible Man either. Trying to gauge the level of racial visibility in Obama’s public persona, particular given the media filter through which we “know” the candidate, seems to court the same kinds of assumptions that Ellison set out to dispel. What mattered most to Ellison is self-definition; once the Invisible Man has acknowledged the blindness of others – black (Dr. Bledsoe) and white (Mr. Norton) – his quest moves inward. He hibernates, he tells his story, he contemplates new ways of living and being in the world outside.

Now that Obama has stepped into the spotlight, he understandably earns heaps of praise and criticism for the aspects of his identity that he chooses to reveal. But the larger decisions that guide his campaign are his and they reflect a sure understanding of his own truth and the dreams that are not his father’s, not Jeremiah Wright’s, or Joe Biden’s, but his own.

I think I can identify in some respects with the source of Samuels’ disappointment. I also thought the biographical video at the convention oversimplified the narrative of Obama’s life into something that could easily inspire. But Samuels writes as if Dreams of My Father is an out-of-print secret, instead of a book that millions have already read and are continuing to read. And I wonder, too, if Samuels is not selling short Ellison’s Invisible Man, who like Obama, speaks with a kind of self-sustaining awareness that few can match:

In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge… I’m shaking off the old skin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it’s damn well time. (580)

Update:

As an epilogue of sorts, take a look at journalist Al Giordano’s post, “Full Circle” at his blog, The Field. He’s been on the road with the candidates and has followed Obama closely during this election. Giordano observes:

In chemistry, the catalyst is the element that changes everything around it while remaining unchanged. Obama – the human catalyst – is closing this campaign exactly as he introduced himself, four years ago, to the nation. He’s gone through this grueling process without being changed by it. He’ll land in his boyhood home of Hawaii today and be able to look himself in the mirror of his grandmother’s eyes and know that to his own self he’s been true.

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