It's strange, this obsession with the flag. Everywhere, a riot of flags. At crossroads, on building fronts, on car hoods, on payphones, on the furniture displayed in the windows, on the boats tied to the dock and on moorings with no boats, everywhere in every form, flapping in the wind or on stickers, an epidemic of flags ... — Bernard-Henri Lévy, “American Vertigo.”
Dear America
... But does it matter?
The words kept bubbling up. But does it matter? I thought, tossing and turning, nights before the announcement. The announcement! Will it bring us anything new?
Forget us. Will it bring them anything new?
America, you and I know each other a bit. Growing up many worlds away from you, across a huge expanse of blue waters, I was nonetheless raised under you.
Raised under your art, music, films, righteous, visionary religious mavericks. In other words, you are my, you are our surrogate parent. The nanny I grew up to love. Sometimes grudgingly, every time in awe. You knew me for decades before I even arrived on your shores and stayed a little longer at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. A century, I kept on hearing everywhere I went; in the South, the East, middle America, hailed as “the American Century”.
Therefore you know me as much as I do you. A little bit. But good enough for our belated frank talk.
America, you know there is nothing that makes me cringe more than cheap cynicism. Performative radicalism. Abandonment of a will to live, or to die for an unimpeachably righteous cause, deep in the veins. Screws-loose, scribes wise, I guess, I'm James Baldwin, perhaps even Albert Murray; perhaps too much of Steve Biko, and of Fannie Lou Hamer's young-old convert.
Better still: son of my mother. A woman who raised all seven of us alone until raising seven of us alone killed her at 47. “A baby,” you’d say.
I remember her as a spirited soul.
A believer among the believers cannot deny that a bit of her optimism of spirit done stitched itself my genes from before I was born.
We have seen the “historic elections”. Sure, we’ve grown to believe that all elections held in America are “historic”. It did not matter to us that, even from a distance, America did not seem old an entity to warrant a stamp etched, knots in the soul, slower, knowing, history of its own.
That for all its glories and triumphs in the world and some within its frontiers, it was, it’s still, a developing idea. With all that I carry from my youth, a youth wherein a local village had nicknamed me “The Star”, short for “The Star of America”, I think of America right now, at this very moment, and I ask myself, and by extension, you dear friend.
By next week this time, or months, perhaps a year and moons past, will it make a difference whether it is Kamala or Donald?
Haven't America's overall establishment politics, and all the houses in parliament (“on the Hill”, you say), as well as the wealthy, university management, all policy levers in every city and every state, tilted white and right-wing?
If she had won (the optics were, she would; Bruce Springsteen does not yowl out and strum the guitar for losers, Barack Obama does not dance the waltz for anyone, indeed, to many, this was Obama's candidacy in stilettos, mild policy differences notwithstanding), would Kamala's era have altered the soul of America?
Just to be clear on this. In aura and soul, in office and, fundamentally, style, Obama spoke left and walked centre right. We loved him all the same. America, by its definition, is centre right, even when some of its brightest speak left.
Obama was centre right and Harris is on the right side of Obama's reach.
And so, I found myself the other day coming out of the studios of a radio morning show in Johannesburg when the janitor, wearing a worried, weary face men of his paygrade should not be burdened with, called me aside.
‘Bra Lucas’ was listening to me talking expensive crud about P Diddy and the long, slow burial of the “American Dream”, and the coming of its wake. He caught me as I stepped off the elevator.
Without a topic introduction, sans a formal greeting, words tumbled out of him: “Can she do anything, or, add anything to that nation that Obama never really achieved in his two terms?”
Phew! Don't ever look down on janitors, though we refer to them as “cleaners” here in the transoceanic South.
Under Harris, an Afro-Indo woman with biological roots in Africa via Jamaica and, in subcontinental India, a daughter of immigrants on both sides of her parentage but ultimately a “child” of California, would America have come around to question itself on its initial and continued genocidal erasure of a whole nation of people native to their land — Palestinians?
These are just questions the world out there, beyond America's borders, beyond its immediate oceans, asked itself.
But I guess for most of America and Americans, the elections signify a biblical injunction, symbolical Gospel and Blues moment, reaching the crossroads and having to decide between the classical Good and Evil. That's how this is painted.
And this is how this is staked.
Way longer, before even Reagan, decades longer than Clinton, far more in the distance than the age of Obama, America long revelled in the politics of personality. Performative in nature.
This could be because of its origins in both conquest (of Indian nations, of the frontiers, of canyons, of land, rivers, of stone and of vegetation) and, in its origins of the circus, of the revue out of which the roots of the cult of personality were forged into the fibre of political leadership.
This is a dice roll, a gamble, a gambit too, upon which America, pre and post Union, has, for centuries, staked its future and its soul. Man (the personality) is the human force invested with overwhelming power, passion and vision to alter a country's trajectory. Its very being. The pulsation in its heart.
Its future.
Your future!
America, we both know that some of your most illustrious sons (always “suns”, never “moons” for don't moons looks so lonesome in those holy moments they bleed red?), therein, therefore, some of its most illustrious “suns” have never disappointed in delivering such attributes, visionary possibilities, even at the risk of life, their lives: tall Abe (Lincoln), Jefferson, Washington and many more. Monroe, Roosevelt(s), even JFK.
This is the America the world is familiar with.
The America familiar with itself even though amnesia is also a key cultural signifier, perhaps a necessary factor in its continued complexity, riddle, play, circus and vaude-"villain” nature.
An America that recoils rather badly, lashes rather angrily, at everyone reminding it of the historical, and by unaccountability, unconscionable violence coursing through its reds, whites, stars, stripes and blue blood.
In Kei Miller's third novel, August Town, set in Jamaica, Ma Taffy is a canny, and cunning little old blind woman, around whom, it often feels, the whole of the book, and of Jamaica, with its patois, swirls.
In one moment of haplessness, Ma Taffy's niece, Gina, not the other one, Kaia, is enveloped in an uncomfortable conversation with her lover, “a rich white boyfriend”.
The things, between lovers, they are in a heated exchange about are the things that Jamaica, America, South Africa, the Middle East, heck, the world, cannot continue sitting on without developing a nasty case of bum “rush”.
“What am I supposed to do about it, Gina?” he throws up hands in frustration, more like in damnation, and unalloyed, a weariness white privilege always wears.
“Find every striking person on this island (Jamaica) that has less money than my family does and say sorry to them? I’m so sorry that my father makes a f*ckload of money. I'm sorry that I speak good English. Would that help, Gina?”
You can easily swap the Jamaican boyfriend with a whole history of a country, a bigger country just up northeast and the picture remains gorgeously messy. The picture remains assiduously, and, with a chest propped forward, proudly American.
I forget that my people dispossessed your people of this piece of land, this flowing stretch of rivulet, not far from the green marshes under my jurisdiction.
That I have transgressed the boundaries — of decency, of land, of the market place, if acceptable language, of the pain you can feel, and the pain I can allow you to feel — the boundaries I had set, myself.
I forget that people who look like me, who talk like me and, are prepared to die for people like me, have since the harmattan winds across the bluest of blue oceans, looked at people like you, with deep-set suspicion, even as they loaded the fittest of them on nocturnal ferries.
And I forget that for long, this land staked its salvation and, as a result, sought to wash off the stains that, upon rendering the earth red, longed for a cleansing ritual. A ritual that even pailfuls of fresher blood can never satiate.
“Blood of my blood is His blood”, this America believes in, is premised on the idea that this land is the land of Christians, of the devout. A belief that the most devout and demonstrative, theatrical — even in the theatre of devout — will inherit, not only America, but the world.
That if America stays resolute in its beliefs that if it desires and toils for purity at its alchemical best, even though the country was founded on impurity, God, forget saving the king, will always be by its side. It will inherit the right to decimate anything and everything on its path to the promised perch next to the Creator, the Almighty.
This is a country where the “chosen ones” are valued and enshrouded in valour. The places from which they lead, bequeathed to those who care for the wonders of this country, as shrines to the power of individual vision.
This is an election theatrical showcase scripted around the force, vigour and vitality of its main protagonists. Which is to say, it’s all about personality. Theirs, and the American voter's, in 2024. This is not about core, partisan politics or philosophy. But that's not how it is packaged and sold.
American Fall 2024 is sold a political and crime auto-fiction novella, in which one character is portrayed as “The American Psycho”, albeit in its weary, lumbering, grumpy, twilight years, and the other as “The Sexy Lady Sheriff”, some kind of “Blaxploitation” era's Foxy Brown redux, out to enact revenge on the wayward men who had offed her boyfriend in cold blood.
What is not said, however, in 2024, as in decades before, at least not nearly enough, is that the individual who will be elected to ascend into the White House — for an ascension it is, since well we've mapped out the mystical and faith roots of the occupied land, frontier after frontier — can only survive as only a living cell can survive in the host body, out of the intrinsic knowledge that it exists solely on the prerogative, the grace, as it were, of the host.
Throughout history, all American presidential candidates, if they are not too arrogant or too foolish to acknowledge, dance in the acid rain knowing too well that, a certain amount of knowledge, of curiosity and respect for the system is wholly requisite for the dance to fully commence.
The cell in the system understands more than anyone that it can only survive and, perhaps thrive a bit, self-duplicate and multiply in the offered safety that it, the living particle in the host's body, is only just a micro elemental cog in the wheel.
If the system is sick, its somatic body rejecting rehabilitation and remedial reboot, and if the system survives, astonishingly, within and, as a result of the decay within, there is nothing a brave, perhaps maverick, cell can do to alter the body without dying first. Even then change is not guaranteed, or for longer.
While presidential elections, even in far away, smaller and seemingly inconsequential sovereignties so small you could fold and put in your back pocket, are marketed as the brutal dance, the game of death, between individuals (you can imagine how many times Hillary Clinton has died, for self and for American establishment, and for Bill), ultimately, no sole politician in the “House” can be bigger than America. Policy, an American policy, and there is such a thing as, singularly, “American Policy”, is as important as sentiment, though, in America, it often overrides, hijacks and recasts itself as the latter.
And if it succeeds in co-opting sentiment, which might have been fugitive and oppositional in the first place, or acquiescent and looking for stately endorsement, such policy, American policy, cannot waste time seeking validation.
To us, outchea in the “Colonial metros”, in the “sh*t-houses” of 21st century civilisation, and, ruefully, to a few thousands of the un-dead in America, a day is coming, perhaps not as a metaphor, a day upon as anyhow, wherein the election results are announced.
At that moment we will raise our peepers northwards, cast our gaze up beyond the eye-level, and see in a political class, the engine of the American policy, whether robed in red, or blue, stars or stripes.
It is at that close scrutiny that it all dawns on us.
It is at that point that we will see a policy manifest in the daily hustle of American reality, and of its fantasy, we will bear witness, to a state of being, that America just doesn't give a flag, either way.
It is then that we are reminded of the words of one of your most gifted scribes. In The Human Idea, a brief essay in response to The Atlantic magazine’s call for artists, politicians, novelists and others to “celebrate” its 150 years, and with it, “The Future of the American Idea”, the novelist, Joyce Carol Oates takes us into her confidence in America:
What is most questionable — indeed most dangerous — about the American idea is its very formulation: that there is a distinctly American idea, standing in contrast to Canadian, British, French, Chinese, Icelandic, Estonian or mere human ideas.
Our unexamined belief in American exceptionalism has allowed us to imagine ourselves above anything so constrictive as international law.
Oates gets to the heart of its blues here when she invites us to consider that:
Perhaps the most pernicious of American idea is the revered “(It is) My country, right or wrong,” with its thinly veiled threat of punishment for those who hesitate to participate in a criminal patriotism.
And so, criminally, and with our hearts cupped in our hands, we await your results, America.
Sincerely Yours
The Star!
Bongani Madondo is the author of several non-fiction books on Black Magic allegories, the politics of faith and punk cultures. “Among the Believers” was initially conceived as Songs for an Abandoned Ziegfeld Girl.
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