Obama écrivain (2) --- Obama as a writer

L'extrait que nous présentons aujourd'hui se situe à la fin du premier séjour de Barack Obama à Chicago, alors qu'il avait été admis à poursuivre des études de droit à Harvard, espérait pouvoir être de retour dans cette communauté où il trouvait sa vocation d'animateur social avec de meilleurs armes, mais juste avant son voyage au Kenya, pour accomplir ce retour aux sources qui lui était devenu nécessaire. Lisez ces quelques lignes et venez ensuite prétendre que cet homme est mauvais.

"That night, well past midnight, a car pulls in front of my apartment building carrying a troop of teenage boys and a set of stereo speakers so loud that the floor of my apartment begins to shake. I've learned to ignore such disturbances--where esle do they have to go? I say to myself. But on this particular evening I have someone staying over; I know that my neighbors next door have just brought home their newborn child; and so I pull some shorts and head downstairs for a chat with our nighttime visitors. As I approach the car, the voices stop, the heads within all turn my way.
"Listen, people are trying to sleep around here. Why don't y'all take it someplace else."
The four boys inside say nothing, don't even move. The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposes, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. I can't see the faces inside the car; it's too dark to know how old the are, whether they're sober or drunk, good boys or bad. One of them could be Kyle. One of them could be Roy. One of them could be Johnnie.
One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inartulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps for some forgotten reason. The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, kawing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath, just daring them to say something. I start picturing myself through the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations they might now be making, that if one of them can't take me out, the four of them certainly can.
That knotted, howling assertion of self--as I try to pierce the darkness and read the shadowed faces inside the car, I'm thinking taht while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this: The worl in wihich I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they syrely sense but can't admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man's injured pride. Their anger won't be checked by the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boys lip or raced down a highway with girl clouding my head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and hard for that order--indeed, any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. And that suspicion terrifies me, for I now have a place in the worls, a job, a schedule to follow. As much as I might tell myself otherwise, we are breaking appart, these boys and me, into different tribes, speaking a different tongue, living by a different code.
The engine starts, and the car screeches away. I turn back toward my appartment knowing that I've been both stupid and lucky, knowing that I was affraid after all."

Barack Obama Dreams from my father Three Rivers Press, NY, 1995, 2004 ; pp. 269-271.

Un peu plus haut, dans cette autobiographie, Obama prétendait que malgré les différentes situations auxquelles il avait été exposées dans ses fréquentations de différentes communautés pauvres et défavorisées, lorsqu'il grandissait, d'Hawaï en Indonésie, et de Los Angeles à New york, ensuite, à Chicago où il prit ses premiers engagements professionnels marquants, qu'il ne s'était jamais senti menacé physiquement. Mais on voit que dans ce passage, qui prend place en 1986, soit à la fin de son premier séjour chicagien, il admet, finalement, que la pression d'insécurité qui marque la vie de tout afro-américain l'avait toujours déjà atteint plus ou moins consciemment, lui aussi, héritier de deux cultures au moins, car produit du croisement de deux races et au confluent de plusieurs civilisations.

Cet homme s'est affiné dans les épreuves et a dû composer longtemps avec ses démons avant de trouver la force intérieure de les confronter. Je nous en souhaite tous autant, dans le cours tortueux de la vie.

Live long and prosper.

Phil Phantasio