After Canaan

Essays on Race, Writing, and Region

Wayde Compton

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781551523873
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia

After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed African Canadian poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuous twentieth century. Written from the perspective of someone who was born and lives outside of African American culture, it riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped in a kind of history rarely written about, explore the language of racial misrecognition (also known as "passing"), the failure of urban renewal, humor as a counterweight to "official" multiculturalism, the poetics of hip hop turntablism, and the impact of the Obama phenomenon on the way we speak about race itself. Compton marks the passing of old modes of antiracism and multiculturalism, and points toward what may or may not be a "post-racial" future, but will without doubt be a brave new world of cultural perception.

After Canaan is a brilliant and thoughtful consideration of African (North) American culture as it attempts to redefine itself in the Obama era.

Obama and Language

“Post-Race”

Three recent book titles feature this neologism:

Mixed-Race, Post-Race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices (2005) by Suki Ali

The Construction and Rearticulation of Race in a ‘Post-Racial America’ (2008) by Christopher J. Metzler

Racism in Post-Race America: New Theories, New Directions (2008) by Charles A. Gallagher

The term “post-race” is clearly in use, and yet it remains under-defined. It elicits a knee-jerk disavowal. Race has vanished. But has racism vanished? Or is the connotation more subtle; our responses to racism have become hackneyed, but nuance may yet overtake the blunt instrument of identity politics. Use of the term expanded with Barack Obama’s election campaign and presidency. But he is just a part of its constellation. Here is a walk through a few of my attempts to give “post-race” a definite sense.

In the popular press—at least in Newsweek—the term appears to mean that “race isn’t supposed to matter anymore.” It implies an era in which “everyone has ‘gotten over’ race” (Romano and Ammah-Tagoe 2009). On right-wing American talk-radio, “post-race” means the disappearance of racism. An academic—Alana Lentin—uses the term negatively: “post-race” is a fallacy of triumphalist neoliberalism and white hegemony (2008, 90–93). Another—Brett St Louis—sees in the term a question of anti-racist tactics and asks, “How might a critical post-racial imagination that trades on the theoretical and conceptual bankruptcy of race and is committed to its erasure retain efficacy in a civil society and political culture largely arranged around its immense practical currency?” (2002, 661). It is the central contradiction of a transitional era. For yet others—Jo-Anne Lee and John Lutz—the word names a teleological dilemma—“Instead of seeing racism as ‘the thing’ to oppose, we need a clearly articulated vision of a post-racial world” (2005, 4). For them, “post-race” describes the revolutionary goal, which revolutionaries usually fail to depict while within the depths of struggle. Sociologist Suki Ali is loathe to reify the term and offsets it as “‘post-race’ thinking” or “‘post-race’ analysis” (2003, 8–9), lengthening the noun, as if this will keep the implications at bay. For Ali, it is best defined by Paul Gilroy—in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2000)—where the term is not used at all. Gilroy says that strategic essentialism has run its course, that the argument against racism now needs to include an argument against the notion of race itself.

Are these the premises? The Obama phenomenon signals a need for ideological reconstruction; liberation strategies built upon race-as-real tilt toward authoritarianism, mysticism, collective self-flattery; the older models—Black Power, Afrocentrism, the late twentieth-century identity politics movements—are exhausted.

Obama has mainstreamed the criticism of strategic essentialism, but he is the evidence of change more than the change-maker. During the 2008 Democratic Party primary race, at least, his discourse seemed to signal a nuanced disengagement from race—one more subtle and textured than it has ever been at a mass media level.

The Jeremiah Wright controversy (“God damn America”—old model? exhausted?) was all black commonplaces: the undemocratic, aggressive, racist record of the United States. [1] Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech distanced him from Wright, from these basics—disingenuously, surely, pragmatically, tactically—but more startlingly, it was Obama as a mixed-race subject that put him over, suggested a path of compromise for their nation. [2] The rhetorical turning point, the coalescence of a viable candidate, was co-created out of a refreshed sense of mixed race (after race?).

This Canadian/mixed/black/white witness views the spectacle and sees in Obama a US version of Pierre Elliott Trudeau—the youth cult, the charisma, the aura of a personality containing his nation’s contradictions. In Trudeau’s time—national unity; in the Obama phenomenon—the embodiment of a possible American answer to division. In this comparison, Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech was Trudeau’s 1968 St Jean-Baptiste Day parade, the one where separatists threw bottles and rocks at him and his entourage, and he refused to move, somehow never getting hit by the volleys, forming an instant media myth of a leader who might similarly will the nation through the social crisis. [3] It is sympathetic magic—electing leaders who seem to personify compromise, regardless of their actual policies and the material roots of the conflict—but there is the shape of truth within the illusionists’ tricks. Both moments, Obama’s speech and Trudeau’s parade, were spectacular disavowals of their identification with perceived radicals of their own minority ethnic backgrounds. Obama’s speech, and its remarkable polyvalence, suddenly made both American cable news and hip hop seem even clumsier in their handling of race than we already knew they were. An era of dispassionate consideration regarding identity seemed surprisingly at hand. Then he won. Then he ceased to speak about race. Then the backlash whipped the discourse back to 1961 standards—or thereabouts. [4]

“Double Consciousness”

W.E.B. DuBois laid it down—“double consciousness”—in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Blacks in a white-supremacist society see themselves twice—once according to their own cultural values, and once according to the white eye. A cornerstone, a binary, oft revised and expanded. Tripled. Quadrupled. And more. [5] Along this critical line, one might call the audio recording of Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) an example of “quadraphonic consciousness,” if the oration—the physical voice—of its author can be used as a gauge of cultural perception. For while Obama has been pitched as a bridging figure, a symmetrical subject who brings together black and white, his performative narration shows a consciousness that is obliged to inhabit multiple identity positions as a matter of course in his personal milieu: multiple black and multiple white focalizations, and even a hint of an internalized Asian consciousness.

Back to the right-wing reaction. After Obama gave a speech at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) event, Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program that he “put on a fake accent” when talking to black audiences, and that this was a kind of reverse-racism (“Obama Disowns His Whiteness”). Attacks on Obama’s “authenticity” are, predictably, confused, ludicrous; there is anxiety if he speaks black vernacular, there is anxiety if he does not. Limbaugh’s presupposition is a monoracial norm. But can we not recuperate and claim linguistic drift as the “authentic” experience of one who moves in and out of cultural settings—one whose own family is a Venn diagram of ethnicities?

The drift is Obama’s norm. Mine too. My poetics, too. My own acquired and strategic use of the black dialect is both contrived and natural—if natural means that it comes from a life that moves, changes, and passes in and out of blackness/whiteness. To make it yet more plain: black dialect is always created, is not static, is not perennially folksy. It moves and is moved by speaking agents.

As a text or time-based narration, Obama makes four voices out of his one within the first few moments of his memoir, enacting them in the narrative—

—his standard speech;

—the Kenyan English of his Aunt Jane, telephoning from Nairobi;

—the mid-western American twang of his maternal grandfather;

—and his Kenyan father’s speech, a “deep baritone” with a “British accent” (1995, 3–7).

Not just the voices of these characters, but the auditory memories, the imprint upon the author’s voice, the author’s persona. (Obama’s standard speech, the bulk of his talking, sounds to my ears most like his grandfather’s, with something else—a regional Hawaiian tone?—lacing it.)

And more: when the author/speaker is four years old and his mother marries Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student, Obama narrates long passages of dialogue in which his stepfather teaches him lessons about power. The performance of Soetoro’s English by Obama is that of a stern, staccato, masculine rap. Soetoro tells the author, a boy at the time, that a man he saw killed once was “weak” and that, “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself. Always” (40–41). One hears Obama thinking through the implications as he speaks Soetero’s stoicism. Inflection is part of his process of internalizing and evaluating this bleak ethic.

And still more: when the adolescent Obama, back in Hawaii, meets the character Ray, we hear black American English as Obama first heard it—and tentatively employed it—during discussions that were themselves about “authenticity.” He says to Ray, “Maybe we could afford to give the bad-assed nigger pose a rest,” taking “the dozens” a little too far. Ray answers, “A pose, huh? Speak for your own self” (82). And thereafter, during the author’s sojourns through ideological Black Power and community organizing, his acquired black vernacular seems just a part of a personal pidgin—a bend of a vowel here, the use of a term there, a way of thinking the words into selfhood. By the time Limbaugh heard him talking before the NAACP in 2008, the weight of a long, lived journey was behind Obama’s hybrid voice.

In the same screed, Limbaugh sees reverse-racism in every reference to black dissatisfaction that Obama names. Limbaugh believes that simply speaking about anti-black racism opens “race wounds” and “take[s] us back 30, 40 years, making it look like no progress has been made.” He positively cites a previous time, when “Barack Obama had succeeded in transcending race […] He was smart, well-spoken. He was competent. He was able to excite crowds. He looked young and fresh and new. Furthermore, he was black, but ...