Lineage in the Eyes
from the notebook
The Lineage Behind African Eyes
a handwritten draft page for your website
As an extension of the Kehinde Wiley exhibition, organized at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini during the 59th Venice Biennale, the Musée d’Orsay is displaying three monumental works by the artist within its Nave: a painting, Femme piquée par un serpent (Woman Bitten By A Snake) (Mamadou Gueye), and two recently-completed sculptures (An Archeology of Silence and The Young Tarantine).
I have begun this essay eight times and deleted it eight times. I keep seeing your eyes, which are also the eyes of my father, mother and brother. It’s heartbreaking really that I can’t find the words, and I’ve been abusing the notebook where this draft originated from.
“I rarely see a person who remains the same through parenthood and all its changes,” the journal entry I started read. Why did I write this down? In order to begin an essay, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to start? How much of this was apart of the draft for this piece or just something I was feeling? Are these thoughts obvious? Why do I journal at all? The impulse to write things down for you, my child, is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
What is it about the world where you want to leave it better once you have children?
Imagine, then, Atlanta, Georgia in 2067, when the city at last removes the bronze Confederates from their pedestals and, with them, begins to reckon more honestly with the region’s most prominent surviving monument to the Lost Cause: the massive Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial fifteen miles east of the city, the world’s largest high-relief sculpture, where Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson still ride in state-protected stone. Imagine that, in answer, Atlanta raises instead a great statue of Mansa Musa in a newly renamed square. Gold pours from his sculpted hand. His robes are worked in metal so bright they catch the Georgia sun and throw it back at the glass towers. Schoolchildren are brought there on field trips. Politicians speak of restoration, of dignity, of the correction of history. Some of us, of course, would be pleased. Some amused. Some unsettled. For what, precisely, would this emperor of medieval Mali have to do with the Black people of Atlanta, with their mortgages and churches, their rap music and bus routes, their dead and their dreams? Would the statue stand as knowledge, or as compensation? Would it tell a story we had recovered, or one we had merely needed? The old Confederates had been torn down because they lied about power and virtue. But monuments erected in the name of justice may also flatter. They may console. They may offer splendor where understanding has not yet been won. And so the question would remain, as it remained with the Confederates: not simply what image has been torn down, but what image has been chosen to remain, and why.
No one sees what I see when I look at African history, for behind every African American breathing today stands a lineage far older than any document, older than any nation, older than any name by which the modern world has tried to contain it. Behind every living face is an innumerable procession of other faces, forgotten by history but not lost to time, each one having passed through the flames of existence and carried something forward. And this is what the ancestry tests cannot tell you. They can hand you regions, percentages, fragments, little administrative rumors of origin, but they cannot go back far enough to tell you the truth. They cannot tell you of the millions of selections, the millions of desirings, the millions of dangers survived, by which one life led to another and another and another until, against all the brutality of the earth, you appeared.
Your DNA was here. Since the beginning of time. For every African alive today bears, within the body, the record of having come from people who were worth choosing. This worth was not some sentimental thing. It was strength and beauty. It was cunning, tenderness, endurance, intelligence, fertility, grace under pressure, the mysterious force by which one human being turns toward another and says “yes” to life. And that yes had to be spoken again and again under conditions the modern mind can scarcely bear to imagine: drought, plague, war, captivity, hunger, migration, humiliation, grief. 23andme cannot tell you this, because the test traffics in data and the truth is written in narrative.
And narrative is no small fact. Narrative means that, however harsh the conditions, however merciless the selection imposed by nature and by man, your story remained. They suffered and remained. They were wounded and remained. They buried their dead, endured the weather, endured the lash, endured the theft of language and land and kin, and still they loved, still they chose each other, still they brought forth children. That is what lives in the blood, in your eyes that belong to my father, mother and brother.
Kehinde Wiley’s contemporary painting Ship of Fools has commanded attention since arriving at the Queen’s House in 2018. The work is on display in the King’s Presence Chamber, providing a deliberate contrast to the more traditional artworks found in the Queen’s House collection.
There is nothing outrageous in anything I have told you so far. Western society deifies lineage, blood, and houses in such a way that it can dimly confess, now and then, that it has betrayed its own myth of self-determination, but never so long, or so honestly, as to endanger its faith in itself. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. For they worship inheritance because the ancient human desire to come from something old and chosen carries with it the suggestion that some people belong more fully to the earth than others ever will. And this deification is not finally about nationhood. The royal family of the United Kingdom does not reach backward through history merely to justify a practical right to govern, for it scarcely governs in any meaningful sense at all. Its claim is more symbolic and therefore, in another sense, more profound. It is a claim not simply upon the United Kingdom, but upon continuity itself, upon reality, upon existence. It declares: we have been here, we were ordained to be here, and we shall remain. And that same logic, secularized and brutalized, runs beneath the American idea of whiteness. The question, then, is not whether America has believed in the people, but whom it has permitted to stand inside that sacred word, and whose blood, whose ancestry, whose very claim to continuance it has labored to sanctify.
I remember being struck, almost absurdly, by a 2009 finding from a seventh-grader and her grandfather that Barack Obama and every American president up to that point, except Martin Van Buren, were related to King John of England. I found this odd at the time, and I find it odd still, because it seemed to reveal something the country is usually too proud to confess: that even in a republic founded on the renunciation of monarchy, bloodline continues to exert a ghostly power over the imagination. The fact was not important because it proved any serious political point about governance. King John could not reach across the centuries and authorize a presidency. What made it linger in my mind was its symbolic force. It suggested that beneath all our democratic language, Americans remain fascinated by lineage, by the old romance of descent, by the notion that history can be inherited through the body and not merely through ideas. Even here, in a nation that insists it broke from crowns and houses and elected it’s first black president, there was something almost pleasing to the national subconscious in the discovery that its rulers could be traced back to a king.
My hope is that you read this in your twenties. Around that time, I began to wrestle with my identity as if it were new. I write to you now because I may not be here when you are old enough to hear all this without flinching, and because by then the arguments will have multiplied, taken on new names, new slogans, new costumes, while remaining, at bottom, very old confusions. You will hear people say African American and mean only America. You will hear others say ADOS (American Descendants of Slaves), say FBA (Foundational Black Americans), and speak as though the whole story of our people can be enclosed within the borders of this republic, as though the wound were the beginning, as though the auction block were the first chapter, as though the fifty states were vast enough to contain the whole of Black memory. And I want to tell you, before the noise gets too loud, that there is nothing extreme in refusing this reduction. There is nothing extreme in saying that our history did not begin in America, that our meaning is not exhausted by America, and that no people can know themselves by staring only at the site of their injury.
American power has always wanted to swallow Black children into its own narrative. It has wanted us to believe that the continent is a rumor, a backdrop, a primitive prologue to the real drama, which is said to begin here, under this flag, under these laws, under this long and brutal arrangement. It has wanted us to believe that the known world of the African is Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, and no further. But history is larger than the empire that attempts to name it. History is older than the plantation, older than the whip, older than the category Negro, older than the invention of whiteness itself. And so true knowledge of self cannot be built only from the American scene, though one must study that scene with all seriousness, because it is the scene of our maiming. True knowledge of self must also point backward, outward, and deeper, toward the continent from which the drama was interrupted, toward the civilizations, migrations, languages, cosmologies, kingdoms, lineages, and human experiments that preceded America and will outlive it.
This is why I found it revealing, years ago, to see the delight with which people repeated that Barack Obama was related, through his white ancestry, to a long line of American presidents and even to King John of England. I do not say the fact was meaningless. I say the fascination with it was instructive. For why was the research so eager to travel down that corridor, through the documented halls of whiteness, through the titled houses and paper trails and preserved names of Europe? Why was the nation so pleased to find a Black president joined, however distantly, to its white and royal archive? And what would have happened had that same public hunger turned itself with equal seriousness toward the inheritance that came to him through his African father? What would they have found if they had tried to follow not the lineage that led conveniently into presidents and kings, but the blood that returned them to Africa? They might have found no palace that Americans recognized, no crown they had been taught to revere, no genealogical story that confirmed the country’s old romance with whiteness. But they might have found something far older and far more unsettling: a human inheritance that cannot be made meaningful only by proximity to Europe, a history not validated by English kings, and a line of being that does not need America’s permission in order to matter.
You must understand what is at stake here. The struggle is not only over policy, nor only over who gets called American, nor only over which labels gain prestige for a season. The struggle is over whether we will permit our origins to be shrunken to fit the imagination of the country that enslaved us. I do not say this to condemn those who reach for ADOS or FBA, because I understand the hunger beneath the naming. I understand the desire to make a people visible where they have been made fungible. I understand the need to say that what happened here was specific, that its injuries were not abstract, that the dead had names, that the dispossessed had descendants, and that the debt has an address. But one can affirm the specificity of the crime without mistaking the crime for the beginning of the people. One can insist upon the American wound without granting America the right to author the whole Black soul.
And I would not have you become merely reactive, merely tribal, merely eager to answer one chauvinism with another. I would not have you spend your life battling ADOS, battling FBA, battling white nationalists, or battling any other congregation of frightened men who believe that narrowing the story makes them safer. That is too small a destiny for you. I want something better than combat for you. I want orientation. I want proportion. I want you to know that this is a great country, perhaps the greatest in the world in its scale, its energy, its contradictions, its wild promises, and yet its greatness does not make it total. To recognize the splendor of the earth does not require one to lose interest in the cosmos. In the same way, to recognize America, to study it, to suffer it, to even love parts of it, does not require that you mistake it for the whole field of Black existence.
So when the innocents tell you that this is bitterness, that this is extremism, that this is ingratitude, you must try to see them clearly. Most of them do not yet know that you exist, not really. They know your category. They know your polling value. They know your market segment. They know the uses to which your image can be put. But they do not yet know the depth from which you come. They do not know the continent they have treated as darkness except when they wished to plunder it. And because they do not know these things, they cannot yet know you. This is not a reason to hate them. It is a reason not to be instructed by their limits.
What I hope for you, then, is not innocence and not revenge, but a steadier kind of sight. I want you to be able to say, without embarrassment and without apology, that the story of Black life in America is complicated, singular, and worthy of exact study, and also that it is not the first chapter of our existence. I want you to know that your people were not born in a cotton row, nor invented in a census, nor first made real by the Constitution’s refusal to count them properly. I want you to know that behind the terror here lies an older majesty, and behind the categories of this country lies a human inheritance too ancient to be reduced to fad, slogan, or faction. And if I am gone by the time you can fully receive this, then let this letter stand where my voice cannot. Let it tell you to look beyond the wound without denying it, to look toward Africa not as fantasy but as depth, not as ornament but as origin, and as one of the great historical answers to the question of who you are.
Obama is seated, the chair resting, one assumes, on a soft, unseen bed of soil. But the bottoms of his shiny black shoes simply float.
I am sorry that I cannot make this world much better for you, however, it is my dream. I am sorry I cannot protect you from all that waits outside of my reach, because that, too, is life. A father discovers quickly that love is not sovereignty. I cannot clear the road for you. I cannot bargain with history on your behalf. I cannot force this country, or this world, to become gentle simply because you are here. What I can do, and what I have tried to do, is leave behind some record of how we lived, what we saw, what we endured, what we refused to forget. What begins in my journal, in those private wrestlings with memory and fear and meaning, I pray may become something more than private. I pray it may become a way of keeping our people’s narrative alive, so that you will know that you did not appear here alone, and that the life before you did not begin with your own.
For when you look at yourself in the mirror, when you stand still long enough to study your own face, you must understand that you are seeing more than yourself. In your eyes are mine. In mine were my mother’s, my father’s, my brother’s. Behind your face stand other faces. Behind your voice are other voices. Behind your life is a long human chain of love, labor, injury, endurance, sacrifice, error, and survival. I cannot give you a world free from danger, nor one free from grief, nor even one free from the old lies men tell about blood and belonging. But I can try to give you this: a record. A witness. A trail of words by which you may remember that you come from somewhere, that you belong to a people whose story did not begin in your lifetime and must not end there either.
And so we write. We write because I know too well how easily a people can be buried beneath the stories told about them. We write because memory is fragile, because history is always being simplified, parceled out, domesticated, made harmless. We write because if I cannot build you a safer country, I can at least leave you a truer inheritance. Something perhaps more durable: the knowledge that we were here, that we felt, that we suffered, that we loved, that we thought seriously about the meaning of our lives, and that we tried, however imperfectly, to tell the truth about them.