HAMID DABASHI ON BARAK HUSSEIN OBAMA

Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University

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The New York day on that fateful Tuesday morning was long and electrified -- everything was abuzz with the thing called "history." Above all, children were visible on that fateful day -- parents taking them along to take their pictures on voting lines, against campaign posters -- for posterity. Rushing, meanwhile, to polling stations, rescheduling their day based on the length of the line they had to wait in, all the while arranging to have a few friends over for takeaway Chinese that evening, while glued to the television screen as the electoral votes were counted, waiting for Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida -- the swing states that could go one way or another -- their parents waited until exactly 11pm Eastern Standard Time when Wolf Blitzer at CNN and Keith Olberman at MSNBC went cosmic and declared Barack Obama the elected president.

From our apartment windows on the Columbia University campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan we could hear the gradual but steady outburst of joyous screams, spontaneous songs, initially murmuring, but, like Ravel's Boléro, ever so slowly beginning to crescendo. The melodious joy began in Harlem to our east and north and slowly spread citywide. Ella Fitzgerald was in the air, as was Mahalia Jackson, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

All the way from Harlem to Times Square, young people were pouring into the streets, cars and trucks blowing their horns, the privacy of homes and the solitude of living rooms nowhere near enough to contain this explosion of joy. In more than 30 years of living in this country I had never seen anything like this -- an instantaneous outburst of inarticulate happiness, a gushing forth of ecstatic delight simply to be alive at this dawn of a renewed covenant with history.

It was the end of a long day for ordinary folks, after a far longer number of years and decades and a catastrophe called "George W. Bush," but what a blessed sight for the world finally to heave a sigh of relief, to awake from the nightmare, and to see the light, that good can happen! It was a cathartic moment, a sudden change of vista and a vision of hope -- for all of us to have been around, to be here at this moment, to see this come to pass, and to imagine (in our fondest dreams, if not our damnedest delusions) America other than it has been.

OBAMA MAY NEVER do a thing he has promised -- but that will detract nothing from tonight. For tonight he belonged to eternity, to the succession of African slave ships brought to this shore, to the millions of African-Americans upholding their dignity against racism, sustaining their struggle, facing bigotry fiercely and awaiting victory. Along with millions of others, Jesse Jackson, an aging warrior of the Civil Rights Movement, was crying on television for the whole world to watch: the tears of African- Americans, young and old, remembering their parents' sufferings, their bondage, their history, and now this cathartic moment. What an unsurpassed honour to have been alive, to have been part of it, to have witnessed it, to have cast a silent and humble vote for it!

This night belonged to Malcolm X, to W E B Du Bois, to Martin Luther King, Jr, to Booker T Washington, to Frederick Douglass, to Harriet Tubman, Miles Davis, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and it belonged to every defiant soul who has stood up to the tyranny of white racism, has said no to injustice, and has upheld the dignity of an entire people on behalf of humanity at large, just in order to stay alive and see the dawn of this day.

On this momentous occasion, though "in equal scale weighing delight and dole," this liberating election must first and foremost be celebrated and not marred by any premature and undue hesitation. This moment belongs to African-Americans and to the generations and centuries of suffering they have endured. The celebration comes with a clear understanding that the colour line is no longer the problem of the twenty-first century.

Any concerns at this moment will have to remain theoretical conjectures in anticipation of the months and years that will follow that fateful day of Tuesday, 20 January 2009, when one singularly charismatic African-American will stand on the historic steps of the United States Capitol, with his hand on the Bible, and swear his oath of office in the voice he has learned from Malcolm X: "I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..."

Along with the millions of ordinary, decent, courageous, and hopeful Americans who have voted for him and made this moment possible, the world has every reason to join the occasion and listen to the assured nobility of that voice. Even more than to that solemn oath, the world will hold Obama accountable to that voice.
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