Barack Obama

Weep no more, my lady,
Oh weep no more today

You're back to the corner illuminated by the sun in the forest shade. You came back with imperfect time machine, but still you heard the chorus, My Old Kentucky Home, moody song that for many years was heard even afar off from Mississippi river, since Stephen Foster wrote it in 1853. Black slaves who tried respite from scorching and fatigue in the tobacco fields. A simple distraction from the long routine that never named as "Sucking". A corner of the forest into a hidden chamber. A space for people who were chained and humiliated to gather and to ask, "What exactly is all this?"

You did not know when you're coming. But with the imperfect time machine you saw an old woman speaking in front of the assembly, in front of the congregation who were afraid to mention the Lord's name. She reminded you to Baby Suggs in Beloved by Toni Morrison. You heard her talking about something amazing but ignored, something ordinary but unexpected: meat, hides, bones, joints which could bear the brunt and bondage blow, tears glands, congested heart before the tears, the body that heals its own wounds, body of the pain can sing, dance, sing.

My brothers and sisters, our bodies can surprise us. Sometimes with valor. Sometimes with beauty. Everything is limited, but with it we reach the infinite. Everything is mortal, but each time it gives eternal meaning. So do not cry anymore.

You see the people brooded. Maybe you do not know why: they want to believe. But they also heard, there's Fate at the top of the body. Something remains. Tough. Straight and brightly lit. Whose hands spread its own power, permeated into the brain, speck-by-speck.

The brain is then producing reasons. Been born explicit explanation, that there's fate that put pigment in the skin. Our pigments make our nature. There are black people, there's "nigger", there is also the "white". The colors directing history. Identity is a fortune-teller. There is the essence before existence.

But is it true the Fate designing everything? In Mississippi's forest assemblies, the old woman said modestly, "My brothers, the darkness is with us."

The darkness behind the pores, in the niche of red blood cells and lymph. The darkness in a hoarse voice, in the song Old Black Joe which became heavy when dying. The darkness of death, the darkness words of God which we do not always understand. The darkness which dodging from the fate which more and more white.

"The darkness that let us not have a name, which dismisses name when name is a list belonging to our gentlemen. This is a shady forest darkness. The darkness that protects us from cruelty."

Blood on the leaves
And blood at the root
Black bodies swinging
In the southern breeze
Strange fruits hanging
From  the poplar trees



You never see the cruelty. Your imperfect time machine just found the portrait of George Hughes's body hanging from a tree branch. Not only hanged. He was burned. This is Sherman, Texas, 1930.

You can read in the town's library : a nigger hodge was arrested for the murder of his employer and raping the lord's wife. In a small village which was sparsely populated, circulating whispers," Hughes is an animal who knows exactly what he wants."

Skin-white farmers who lived in the village had a reason for more wildly than before. They who forever scared of, suspected, and hated to creatures with different pigments had an excuse. They stormed the courthouse where Hughes arrested. They burned it. They dragged Hughes out and they threw him on the truck. The police did not do anything, even they helped to regulate the traffic. In a field near the residence of blacks, Hughes tied and hoisted to the top of a tree. Large fire was lit.

In a portrait you see: Hughes in a low tree.

Orosco immortalized the scene in a lithograph from 1934, Negros Colgados. See, not only a "nigger". Dead bodies hanging like dozens of strange fruit. Billie Holiday revealed it in Strange Fruits: half husky voice, with a melancholy that seemed to have so breath: Blood on the leaves / Blood at the root / Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees.



There is something else on that song, which first appeared in Orosco's lithographic : trees and branches -- without leaves -- as if it confirms the strength of the straight, straightforward, stand-up. Also it is a compelling exhibition. Orosco in advertently reminds us that a country, a system, is a strong building because it shows something straight and at the same time threatening. In other words: bitterness.

Cruelty is often covered with the words: "intact", "harmony", "consensus", as if something precious has been achieved. As if there is no political struggle behind it. As if there is only the God's architectures.

But Billie Holiday's song reveals the hidden contradictions: she whispered about South American hinterland which have the gallant history, the gallant South, but she immediately called the facial pain of black people being suffocated. She called "the sweet fresh scent of magnolia flowers ", but in the next line "the smell of burning skin wafted suddenly".

Each system is formed by the taxonomy of "white", "black", "bourgeois", "proletarian", "original", "non-native", "majority", "minority". Each taxonomy begins with falsehood and coercion.

But this means there is no hand of fate designing. There is no essence of what is done before. There is no essence before existence. Division, especially racial segregation, is entirely the result of a political process. The "black" is not so "black" because it's created for "black", but because it's stamped and censused and grouped into the category of "black". History of "black" and "white" is a history of struggle, sometimes with battle, sometimes with the shout to bring forward, in unison, marching, a thousand cries of hot vocal cords.

Yes, we can
Yes, we can

You hear the sound in human crowd in Grant Park, Chicago, 4 November 2008 night. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. We -- people say it -- can make an American with a strange name chosen to be president with a convincing support. We can change the historical legacy that has fueled the Civil War in the 19th century. We're able to shake the tree where ruthlessness displayed as if a beautiful structure.

But this is not just a victory story which can traverse the taxonomy of black-and-white. This is primarily a story about the triumph of the other understanding of "politics". Because what comes with Obama is not politics as tips to get what is possible. In the year 2008, in the U.S. we just watched "politics" as desire, half desperate, to achieve the impossible.

Indeed, the impossible will be forever the impossible. But the impossible to be meaningful because it calls continuously, and it makes us feel something infinite, which seems to cause millions of people are willing to queue for hours to select and change history: they call it Justice, or Freedom, or any other name that inspires the heart. Just as a haltingly love but quite sincere, such as one stanza rhyme but quite thrilling.

Like the bodies you see singing in the forest.

Weep no more, my lady,
Oh, weep no more today.


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