Another bump to the top. I wrote several posts on Obama's Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney and gathered them into a working paper, Obama’s Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: Technics of Power and Grace, along with some other posts on the Black church. This is the first of those posts. I argue that the eulogy exhibits ring-form composition. I conclude with the complete text of the eulogy.
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Make no mistake, it was a remarkable performance. Nominally a eulogy, very much a eulogy. But also a sermon on the past and future of race relations in America.
Though Rev. Pinckney’s funeral was held on June 26, and I heard of Obama’s eulogy shortly thereafter, and heard about it again, and again, I didn’t bother to watch it until a couple of days ago when I was reflecting on some remarks the economist Glenn Loury and linguist John McWhorter made about the ‘authenticity’ of Obama’s performance. After all, Obama wasn’t raised in the church. And yet he chose to don the vestments of a black preacher, the rhetorical and oratorical style, to deliver his eulogy.
I’ll get around to Loury and McWhorter in a later post. In this one I want to look at the eulogy itself, which pretty much took the form of a sermon addressed to the nation. In my preliminary analysis that sermon has five basic parts as follows:
1. Prologue: Address to his audience, quoting of a passage from the Bible.
2. Phase 1: Moves from the Clementa Pinckney’s life to the significance of the black church in history.
3. Phase 2: The murder itself and presence of God’s grace.
4. Phase 3: Looks to the nation, the role racism has played, and the need to move beyond it.
5. Closing: Amazing Grace.
In the course of this analysis I will be referring to specific paragraphs by number. I have appended the entire text to this post and have numbered the paragraphs. Furthermore, I have uploaded an analytical table I am using as I think about the text. Each paragraph appears in the table along with comments here and there. You may view or download this document here:
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A draft of the Charleston eulogy was given to the president around 5 p.m. on June 25 and, according to Mr. Keenan, Mr. Obama spent some five hours revising it that evening, not merely jotting notes in the margins, but whipping out the yellow legal pads he likes to write on — only the second time he’s done so for a speech in the last two years. He would rewrite large swaths of the text.
Mr. Obama expanded on a short riff in the draft about the idea of grace, and made it the central theme of the eulogy: the grace family members of the shooting victims embodied in the forgiveness they expressed toward the killer; the grace the city of Charleston and the state of South Carolina manifested in coming together in the wake of the massacre; the grace God bestowed in transforming a tragedy into an occasion for renewal, sorrow into hope.
First, I would love to be able to compare Keenan’s draft with the eulogy that Obama delivered. Did that draft open with “Giving all praise and honor to God”? Did it quote Scripture at the beginning (Hebrews 11:13), as is typical of sermons? That is to say, did Keenan know he was drafting a sermon, or did that happen as Obama devoted five hours and who knows how many pieces of 8.5 by 14 lined yellow paper to the rewrite?
Kakutani is quite right to single out grace as the sermon’s theme. But Obama did more than use the word a lot – 35 times by my count. The word didn’t appear until about 1300 words in to this 3000 word sermon, that is, a bit before the mid-point. Roughly speaking, then, we can divide the sermon into two movements, 1) before “grace” and 2) after “grace”. Once we’ve done that the eulogy’s overall logic begins to reveal itself.
Let’s set the prelude and closing aside for a moment. Each is short and both are formulaic. The bulk of the sermon is in between, roughly 2700 words.
Let’s skip to the middle, the part that I’ve called the transition. It starts with paragraph 21:
We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. It was an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress. (Applause.) An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation's original sin.
This is the first time that Dylann Storm Roof is mentioned, but not by name, never by name. Obama establishes that this action was not a personal one. It was not aimed at individuals as individuals. In the killer’s mind it was a symbolic act. He was attacking a group of people and an institution. The paragraph ends by referencing “our nation's original sin”, by which, I assume, Obama meant slavery, but/and of course the phrase “original sin” has deep Biblical resonance.
In paragraph 22 Obama says, “God works in mysterious ways”. Utterly standard, a cliché. But in this context, in this eulogy, we ARE immersed deep in mystery, that of the violent willful senseless deaths of nine people. The next paragraph, 23, has the first use of “grace” and references the “alleged killer” twice.
We are now poised at the mid-point of our trajectory, our oratorical and ritual journey.
Let us skip to paragraph 28, which begins: “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we've been blind.” At this point we’ve moved through grace and are now prepared to contemplate that original sin – “allowed us to see where we've been blind” – and what we must set out to do.
What’s astonishing is how Obama got us there. Let us look at the opening of paragraph 23: “He [the alleged killer] didn't know he was being used by God. (Applause.)” Repeat: “He didn't know he was being used by God.”
Didn’t know he was being used by God.
What does that say; what does it imply? Was Dylann Roof’s murderous act willed by God? That’s what Obama’s words can be taken to imply, but it’s not quite what Obama is actually saying. His formulation – “being used by” – distances him and us from that implication – and remember, this is being delivered and comprehended in real time during which there is no time (nor inclination to) reflective second guessing. Roof does something and God takes it up and uses it.
And now we must take it up and use it. That’s what this sermon is about, taking it up and using it.
God works in mysterious ways.
We are deep in the thicket of what I’ve elsewhere termed
“myth-logic.” Myth logic is rigorous in its own way, but those ways are not those of science. They are the ways of the heart.
Obama’s job is to say something that will be uplifting, that will allow people to leave the service feeling good about themselves and the world they live in, feeling ready to go out and change things. And he has to do that in the middle of terrible tragedy, when people are grieving for their lost husbands, wives, sons and daughters, relatives and friends, and for their nation. How do you create joy from grief? That’s a job for myth logic, not for rational deduction.
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There’s much more to be said about this text, and perhaps I’ll devote another post to analysis. But I’ll close with some remarks about the prelude and the closing.
In the third paragraph Obama quotes Scripture:
"They were still living by faith when they died," Scripture tells us. "They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on Earth."
That sets up a template for the rest of the sermon. We are those who “did not receive the things promised” and yet we are too live by faith until we die, as those nine others did. And it sets up the theme of not being able to see (God’s mysterious ways) that is central to “Amazing Grace”. Divine grace itself is a mystery, coming as it does through no act or will of our own. That word “grace” pervades the second half of the eulogy, which ends in that hymn.
Thus Obama, in choosing his Scripture at the beginning, was also setting us up for the end. It is the song, which everyone sang along with him, that provided the salving grace people sought in that funeral.
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Those who have been following New Savanna for awhile know that I have a particular interest a kind of textual symmetry known as
ring-composition or ring-form. Such texts unfold as follows:
A, B, C … X … C’, B’, A’
A’ echoes A, B’ echoes B and so forth, with X being structurally central. Is Obama’s eulogy/sermon a ring-form text? Perhaps it is, and perhaps I’ll make an explicit argument in a later post. For now I note only that its structural center is that section where Obama talks about the murder, the only place he does so, and where he first invokes God’s grace.
