Wolfram’s Lesson
Posted by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan on November 15, 2008
Politics aside, what is remarkable about Barack Obama’s victory is that, for the first time in history, it puts a “black” man in the White House.
Of course Obama is not black. I for one have never met a black person. Nor have I met a white person for that matter. Black and white might have served as useful descriptors in the era of monochrome television, but those days are gone.
Shall we say then that Obama will be the first U.S. President of African origin? The problem here is that “Eve,” the nearest common matrilineal ancestor of all humans, seems to have lived in East Africa. From George Washington to George W. Bush, all forty-three U.S. presidents have been of African origin.
All right then, let us say that Obama will be the first U.S. President whose immediate ancestors were not of exclusively European lineage. This is remarkable enough.
Obama reminds me of a childhood hero of mine, the character Feirefiz in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Arthurian epic Parzival. I played Feirefiz in the school play in 4th grade. Feirefiz was the Muslim son of a French king and a Saracen princess. Wolfram describes Feirefiz’s complexion as being “parti-colored … like a parchment with writing all over it, black and white all mixed up.” As a child of dual descent—Anglo-Indian, in my case—I identified with him.
In the penultimate scene of the play, my character crossed swords with the story’s namesake, the Christian knight Parzival. The scene reached its climax when Parzival’s blade shattered. Rather than pressing on, I (Feirefiz) courteously declared a truce. Sitting down on the grass together, we introduced ourselves and discovered that we were sons of the same father. What had begun as a clash of arms ended in a tearful embrace.
Recent scholarship suggests that Wolfram wrote Parzival as an answer to the moral confusion of Christendom following the failure of the Third and Fourth Crusades. The narrative of Parzival and Feirefiz is a coded call to Christians and Muslims to overcome their enmity and recognize their kinship as sons of the same heavenly Father. The happy outcome of the brothers’ mutual discovery is the attainment of the Grail, the symbol of abiding spiritual peace.
In the Middle Ages, Christians and Muslims waged battle upon bloody battle because they did not recognize their kinship. The story is the same today only the weapons have progressed. Will a bi-racial President help us to finally learn Wolfram’s lesson?
