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him and the large crowd listening to his speech. As he pronounces these words, his
gaze relaxes into a smile, expressing in an intimate way the pleasure he gets from
being there. After a few minutes, however, he changes this good-humored beginning
by recalling to his audience the difficult historical circumstances in which he was
born, which influenced in different yet equally serious ways both his personal story
and the history of the Czech people (min. 4.09):
When I was born, the world was divided, and our nations were faced with very different
circumstances.
Both the serious and concerned
gaze
he shows the audience and his
body
movements - he moves brusquely to the side and forward, while shifting his
weight alternately to either leg
- express the emotional distress he is feeling when
recollecting such a dramatic past. To better stress the violence of the past historical
situation and how helpless it seemed to be - a helplessness sadly witnessed by the
wall in Berlin - Obama goes on to frankly describe how “realistic” politicians could
have foreseen both the future of a social outcast such as himself at the time and the
future of a nation situated behind an Iron Curtain that was segregating into two parts
the peoples of Europe (min. 4.20):
Few people would have predicted that someone like me would one day become the president
of the United States. (Applause.) 4.34 Few people would have predicted that an American
president would one day be permitted to speak to an audience like this in Prague
.
Score 2. Prague (Table
17.3
).
In this part of his speech, Obama's facial expression changes, becoming sad, but
he is also regulating his emotion, as if accepting the reality of the old historical
situation, which wrought havoc on lives with the same violence that tore apart
the socially segregated American society and the societies of the Soviet bloc
countries, which were forcibly removed from their natural ties and connections
with their European neighbors. Also, Obama's body movements clearly express
his distress, evidenced by how he shifts frequently from one leg to the other.
However, in this same sentence he expresses not only the sadness of the situation
but also the comparison of these apparently “realistically” poor chances assigned
both to “someone like me” as a political leader and to the Czech people as an
important nation of the European community. By evoking his position as pariah
in the American society of the times, Obama points proudly to himself by patting
his own chest (Tracy and Robins
2007
), as if to express with his entire body
the self-confidence that helped him to react defiantly to social prejudice. The
audience stresses this proud sentence with a big round of applause, which Obama,
now president of the USA and no longer a “strange” incumbent among powerful
competitors, accepts and pauses in gratitude, looking straight back at the audience.
In the second sentence, he assumes the same parrhesiastic attitude he used regarding
his personal unfortunate circumstances to recall to his audience the fact that they
were pariahs, too, when Europe was still divided by the Berlin Wall.
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