Dinaw Mengestu

The Past Remains With Us

There’s a line near the beginning of James Baldwin’s essay, ‘Harlem Ghetto’, concerning the peculiar problem African Americans are confronted with during a presidential election. ‘In a land where, it is said, any citizen can grow up and become president,’ Baldwin writes, ‘Negroes can be pardoned for desiring to enter congress.’ It’s Baldwin’s use of the word ‘pardoned’ that is most striking, with its obvious implication of white presidential power conferring forgiveness on a humbled Negro population that knows better than to reach too high.

I first read Baldwin’s essay sometime when I was in high school and briefly filled with the race-baiting rage that he often used as the source for some of his most eloquent essays. In those days, in a small but relatively affluent Chicago suburb, indiscriminate racial epithets were common. ‘Nigger’ was the preferred word of choice, used more often than not to describe someone famous, and I would hear it often as I walked down the hallway. Michael Jordan was an amazing nigger, as were the other stars of the various Chicago sports teams. On occasion we read a nigger in a class (see Baldwin above). I was the only nigger in many of my classes. For a year or two, fights were common. A group of black students brawled with a group of white ones on the balcony overlooking the gymnasium. I had one or two fights of my own, simply, I think now, because I knew of no other way and had no other outlet through which to diffuse the twin emotions of anger and impotence that any racial slight inflicted.

It’s one of the curious facts about our racial wounds that salves are difficult to find. When I first heard of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, I, like many other blacks in America, balked at the idea, unwilling given our experiences (just as Baldwin was) to believe that such a thing was possible. Now, of course, on the eve of an election in which the impossible seems almost certain, I find myself more than slightly shocked and confused. I find myself engaging in a form of hypothetical, wishful thinking, in which the past is reordered to allow for a different set of events. What would it have been like to have had a president like Barack Obama growing up? Selfishly, I can’t help but think that I could have really used this election eighteen years ago, when I was twelve and first coming into that full consciousness of black male identity. It seems safe to say that things would have gone differently. Several fights would have probably been avoided. Years of discomfort and insecurity would have been considerably tempered by the knowledge that there was an amazing nigger in the White House, and that there was nothing that I needed to be pardoned or forgiven for.

It’s impossible to know what Obama will be able to do in terms of America’s politics. Those questions and challenges will be resolved later. Certain things, however, I know for certain right know, such as the simple and obvious one that the past remains with us, regardless of what we think or do. It just so happens, I think, that an Obama victory may mean that parts of it need not sting so much.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. He emigrated to the United States in 1980. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, his novel Children of the Revolution won the Guardian First Book Award in 2007.