Saturday, November 08, 2008

40 Acres

Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field's receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower

From The New York Times Online
November 5, 2008
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Not to be a wet blanket, but does anyone notice the irony in the fact that Obama is not a descendent of the people Walcott is talking about in this poem? Also, the poem itself seems a bit rushed. Not the best poem of Walcott's -- one would expect better from a Nobel Prize winner. There are some lovely ideas in the images, though. Too bad they're wasted on the son of a African chief whose family was wealthy enough to send their son to the U.S. t o study. The problem is that this is simply not the appropriate poem for Barack Obama. I'm no fan of his as a politician, but doesn't he deserve to have a poem that is actually about HIM?

4 comments:

Todd Camplin said...

I think it is a nice poem. People can represent more than their own biography and I think that is what the poem is about.

Troy Camplin said...

It says that he's in overall and straw hat. The implication is that he's a descendant. The issue here is that the poem doesn't ring true precisely because Wolcott's trying to give Obama a biography he doesn't have. You can write a poem about Obama's symbolism without evoking a false connection between him and the rest of the African-American community. And considering where in African Obama's father's from, Obama doesn't even have any distant relatives who are descendants from slaves. In the end, the poem is sloppy in many levels.

Anonymous said...

I agree with Todd Camplin. I don't think Walcott is referring to literal ancestors, more to metaphoric ones as Martin Luther King referred to all African-Americans as brothers and sisters. I do particularly like the way that the progression of America, and its black population have become organic, with the re-representation of the stars and stripes in the cotton-heads and ploughed furrows of the land it represents.

Troy Camplin said...

I could buy that, except for this line: "his unforgotten / cotton-haired ancestors". My point is that they are not his ancestors. He is neither descended from American slaves, nor the relative of anyone descended from slaves. Comparisons to JFK have been made several times, but in fact that's a great analogy. Kennedy was opposed as President because was seen as bringing a foreign influence in: Catholicism. This was directly related to his being Irish, and the U.S. had a history of racism against the Irish -- something definitely overturned by Kennedy. After him, it seemed absurd to be racist against other Caucasian groups. Nobody's going to bat an eye if someone of Polish descent runs for President. The same is true of Obama and African-Americans. He's not descended from African-Americans, never really fit in among African-Americans, and in fact has demonstrated he's more comfortable among white radicals. I don't deny the symbolism -- and Walcott certainly more than hints at that with his double use of the word "emblem," but he also undermines it by proclaiming Obama shares American slave ancestry, which he doesn't. Again, I wish Walcott hadn't been so sloppy with the poem. Obama deserves better than a sloppy poem from a great poet. This poem reminds me of Paul McCartney's song he wrote immediately after 9-11. One wishes he had taken some time to really work on it rather than giving us the first thing that gushed out of his head.