Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the fourteenth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
They read like the names of women in a Norman Rockwell painting — the First Ladies of the past 40 years, I mean. Pat, Betty, Rosalind, Nancy, Barbara, Hillary, Laura: good ol’ homestead America names. One imagines their forebears toiling, cheerfully or cryptically, over a wood-burning stove in a dim-lit log cabin, with, outside, a bow-legged hubby lassoing a mare in the corral, and all around them the windblown prairie, Walt Whitman’s “leaves of grass.”
But Michelle?
It seems as inappropriately sybaritic a name for a First Lady as Eleanor today seems stuffy and quaint. Aren’t First Ladies, first and foremost, supposed to be sexless? Think of Lynda Bird Johnson, or Pat Nixon. Think of Laura Bush!
Mih-ssshelle. The sexy sibilance, and the liquid labial in which it concludes: too French, too fey, by far! Even Jacqueline was too foreign for the American ear, which democratically Anglicized it and claimed its owner as Jackie.
Her name is one reason why, I suspect, it’s actually harder to imagine Michelle Obama as First Lady, spirit and proprietress of the White House, than to imagine her husband as President of the United States. (As for the Obama part, we won’t even go there.)
Indeed — except for the fact that she has made it her own — ‘Michelle’ seems an unlikely name for Mrs Obama, the tall and big-boned, 44-years-young African-American woman with the prominent cheekbones, deep-set eyes, strong jaw and high forehead, the last only partially disguised by what a Vogue editor called “the Jackie flip.”
The strong, defined shoulders and biceps, which 30 years ago would have been considered masculine but which have long since been sanctioned by America’s gym culture as the mark of a no-nonsense and independent woman. The substantial hips and bottom; the big hands, and big feet. Surely there’s just too much corporeality, just too much there, for a petite and soft-voiced, ‘fun’ type like a Michelle. Shouldn’t she have been Lorna or Anita Obama instead?
Too late for that, of course — she’s Michelle. And if you look, atypically, not at her guarded eyes, but at her mouth — which is where, invariably, the tension in her gathers, but which in another mood can seem startlingly private: cheeky, sexy and young, a girl’s mouth, inquisitive or abashed-amused, the lips parted — you can make a case for ‘Michelle,’ after all.
At any rate, it’s a fair guess it was with the owner of that mouth that the young Barack Obama first fell in love…
…and with whom he is manifestly still in love, 19 years later.
The US media made a big deal — mostly, good-naturedly — of the fist-bump or ‘pound’ which the Obamas exchanged on stage the night Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. But none remarked the affectionate bottom-slap with which the man then ushered the woman offstage, though it was much more casual, carnal, and revealing of the vitality of their marriage than Al Gore’s abrupt and manic French-kissing of a startled Tipper Gore onstage at the 2000 Democratic Convention. It’s clear that Michelle is the rock whence cometh both Obama’s strength and his remarkable emotional freedom. Just as, in the moment of Hillary Clinton’s second, ill-fated reference to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, it was the image of Michelle that came to mind, giving her husband a look that would brook no demurral, and that said, ‘That’s it; she’s finished’ as a potential running mate.
All this would be premature, except that in the past month the rightwing attack machine has made it clear it intends to go after the Democratic presidential candidate’s wife. As NYT columnist Maureen Dowd observed (June 11): “Now Republicans can turn their full attention to demonizing Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is the new, unwilling contestant in Round Two of the sulfurous national game of ‘Kill the witch.’”
She isn’t invulnerable. Between them, the Obamas made three potentially serious political missteps in the course of the primaries, and one was Michelle’s confessing to being proud of America for the first time in her adult life. (The other two: Obama’s ‘bitter-cling’ remark, and his ill-advised toss at bowling, which in a less formidable candidate might have been his Dukakis-in-a-tank moment.) It’s not a remark the Republicans will allow their flags-and-guns supporters to forget.
She’s not invulnerable, too, because while her husband is genuinely ‘post-racial’ — not an African-American, but an African and an American — Michelle Obama, for all her impressive academic and corporate prowess, still often exudes the watchful, embattled air of a black woman out of Chicago’s South Side — the tension in the mouth! — and she will need to be perennially on guard not to signal, in her very person, something of the mutual racial animosity that still bedevils the black-and-white American cities.
The difference between her and her husband’s big missteps is instructive. Obama’s bitter-cling explanation was pedagogical; he was explaining, one felt, something that might affect him politically, but not personally. By contrast, Michelle’s ‘first time proud of America’ was personal, even intimate. Plainly visible behind it was the hinterland of justified black resentment.
Already there are rightwing websites painting her as (Dowd) “a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing ‘Mrs. Grievance’ depicted on the cover of National Review.”
So the next four months are going to be much harder for Michelle than for Barack, the Golden Boy who’s evinced such a mysterious ability to rise up, ‘as on wings,’ above whatever’s the crisis of the moment. (Jeremiah Wright, eg, would have destroyed a lesser candidate.)
Yet the desperation of the rightwing smear machine is already proving entertaining. In the wake of the Democrats’ nomination night, a Fox News commentator wondered aloud whether the Obamas’ fist-bump was in fact “a terrorist fist jab.” Another gasped when Michelle strode onto the stage bare-legged — “without stockings!” And Fox’s reference to her as Obama’s “Baby Mama” (a term the Urban Dictionary defines as ‘some chick you knocked up by accident during a fling who you can’t stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now’) was so ridiculously racist, it highlighted by contrast the Obamas’ robust marriage and their doting parenting of their two pre-teen daughters.
In any case, there’s another, happier narrative emerging apace with the sick stuff: that of a coming ‘Black Camelot’. In ‘She Dresses to Win’ (NYT Fashion Diary, June 8), Guy Trebay haloed “the sleeveless purple silk crepe sheath made for Mrs. Obama by Maria Pinto,” and reported the beauty director of Essence magazine, Mikki Taylor, as seeing “in Mrs. Obama’s appearance on [nomination] Tuesday a message that she is primed to become first lady, although not necessarily first hostess.”
“Every woman I talked to was saying how she has this confidence that is empowered,” Ms Taylor said.
And she went on about Michelle’s faux pearls necklace: “Those are not little ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ pearls. Those are large pearls. Those are pearls you have to deal with.”
Just as, if an Obama presidency comes to pass, Michelle Obama — big-boned, strong-minded, tense or sexy-young — will be, like none before her, a First Lady Americans will have to deal with.
