We had intended to hold an inauguration party, but then it turned out that it fell on the same evening as the last of a series of four Islamic Art lectures at SOAS, all of which I very diligently went to. In fact, the lecturer - a prominent American curator at the British Museum - had to rush off at the end of the questions to change and attend an inauguration ball at the Embassy! I got home some time after 9, and we settled down to watch all two hours of the 'live' BBC coverage ... though I had cheated slightly by watching it online on my computer at work! I'm sorry, but some things are just more important - especially at 5 o'clock in the afternoon!
I did, however, sport the Obama pin I had found in a hotel in Philadelphia, when I was there in October for the Historians of Islamic Art Association symposium. I wore this pin religiously in the period running up to the Presidential Election, and strangely found that I felt it emanated a kind of protective aura... This was in the uncertain days when it was by no means clear whether he would win, whether there would be more of what my friend Glaire described as "Republican shenanigans". But wearing this pin felt like an amulet, somehow. I can't really explain it - but then I came across a passage in Obama's amazing memoir, Dreams from my Father, which I recently finished reading (by the way, can you believe that has its own Wikipedia entry?!). He's still in his 20s, and it's just after he has moved to Chicago to take up a job as a community organiser, in the days after Harold Washington has just been elected the city's first black mayor. Obama wanders into Smitty's barbershop for a haircut and overhears the regulars discussing "Harold":
That's how black people talked about Chicago's mayor, with a familiarity and affection normally reserved for a relative. His picture was everywhere: on the walls of shoe repair shops and beauty parlors; still glued to lampposts from the last campaign; even in the windows of the Korean dry cleaners and Arab grocery stores, displayed prominently, like some protective totem. From the barbershop wall, that portrait looked down on me now: the handsome, grizzled face, the bushy eyebrows and mustache, the twinkle in the eyes ...
Smitty said, "The night Harold won, let me tell you, people just ran in the streets... People weren't just proud of Harold. They were proud of themselves. I stayed inside, but my wife and I, we couldn't get to bed until three, we were so excited. When I woke up the next morning, it seemed like the most beautiful day of my life..."
Could he ever have imagined that he could almost be writing about his own political victory, twenty years later?? Reading this, the parallel between the intensity of feeling among Chicago's black community in the 1980s and the response to Obama's election seemed almost miraculously close, like some kind of sealing of fate.
One of the great souvenirs I found in the souk in Damascus was a t-shirt with 'Obama' written on it in Arabic!
I bought a couple of these - unfortunately, for some reason the printer or shopowner had cut out all the size labels, so I had to go back a couple of times to get the sizes I wanted, and after all that, K's didn't fit him! But it sits in his wardrobe - like a protective totem (we might frame it!). Apparently 'u-ba-ma' in Farsi means 'he is with us'. Well, I guess they don't see it like that in Tehran, since they're already burning his effigy. I proudly showed this purchase to one of the Syrian security guards at the exhibition I was there to manage, and though he seemed amused by it, he did not seem to share my enthusiasm. He must have wondered what kind of strange English woman is this... I can understand that in Gaza at the moment they are thinking, this is just another new president who will not risk his re-election chances to help us. But then, there has to be a market for these t-shirts if one of the shops in the souq was selling them - and he had a fair few, in a whole range of colours!
I am hoping - that new emotion that America was waking up to this morning - that Obama abides by the principles he manifests, utterly honestly, in Dreams from my Father, where he genuinely believes that it is possible to make life better for a people who have suffered unjustly for too long, and tirelessly works towards trying to make this happen - I hope that he applies this generosity of spirit to the problems in the Middle East, unadulterated (or, at least, not much) by political compromises and vested interests. After all, as I read someone say in one of the newspapers in the last few days - "He's not Jesus". Cynics say he won't be able to do anything - his hands will be tied by Washington process - but I would just love to believe we can surf on this amazing wave of history for a bit longer, and see the United States of America as a genuine force for good in the world. I am trying not to think too hard about that gorgeous spring day in 1997 when it felt like we had woken up to a 'brave new world'. Then look what happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment