Native Son

Like zillions of other Americans, I'm now reading Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father, the memoir he wrote in his mid-30s. Much of it concerns his coming to grips with the duality of his racial makeup, and his insights and candor regarding his youthful anger about the subject make it fascinating. One aspect that especially intrigued me, naturally, is that a turning point in his understanding of his mother's perception of blacks comes while watching a movie. (David Remnick has a sentence about this in his outstanding article about race in Obama's campaign.)

During Obama's first summer in New York in the early '80s, when he was maybe 20 and about to begin his junior year at Columbia, his mother and half-sister come to visit.

One evening, while thumbing through The Village Voice, my mother's eyes lit on an advertisement for a movie, Black Orpheus, that was showing downtown. My mother insisted that we go see it that night; she said that it was the first foreign film she had ever seen. … We took a cab to the revival theater where the movie was playing. The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast, had been made in the fifties. The story line was simple: the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage. About halfway through the movie, I decided that I'd seen enough, and turned to my mother to see if she might be ready to go. But her face, lit by the blue glow of the screen, was set in a wistful gaze. At that moment, I felt as if I were being given a window into her heart, the unreflective heart of her youth. I suddenly realized that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad's dark savages, was what my mother carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different. … I turned away, embarrassed for her, irritated with the people around me.

On one level, I'm just delighted to have a president-elect who's been to revival houses in downtown Manhattan, and who loves The Wire and Casablanca. (Remember 16 years ago, when Bill Clinton's declaring his favorite novel to be One Hundred Years of Solitude seemed like a revelation?) On another, it's a wonder to have a president-elect for whom introspection has been a lifelong pursuit. Yet his internal struggle is gripping. His shame and resentment in that movie theater come through with painful clarity—he's a self-righteous college student, steeped in Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, groping for his place in the world—but before long, he finds himself forgiving his mother. A few pages later, he writes:

In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up—their parents' lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives.

Comments

[Brendan]

Great post, LL. Those of us who pride ourselves in watching film at a critical remove sometimes forget it has the power to deliver this kind of moment of revelation: exposing Obama's mother's racial naiveté and the President-Elect's cringing recognition of it.

[gmoke]

It is disappointing to me that Obama did not recognize the greatness of the score of that movie. "Manha da Carnival," "Triste," "Samba da Orfeo"... This was the explosion of Bossa Nova with tunes by Jobim and Bonfa and lyrics by de Moraes.

And the beautiful Marpessa Dawn.

The movie has been remade by Brazilians, reset as a drug war in the favelas, with a new score by Caetano Veloso.