From Personalization to Parrhesia: A Multimodal Analysis of Autobiographical Recalls in Barack Obama’s Political Speech - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 357

leaders nod or look at the floor, expressing the same focused attitude shown by the
speaker. After giving a frank, parrhesiastic account of colonial violence, exemplified
by his family memories, Obama turns now to recall the historical change that ended
this structural social imbalance, to change Africa's destiny starting with the history
of the country that is now hosting him as a democratic nation and an important
political partner (min. 4.42):
“My father grew up herding goats in a tiny village, an impossible distance away from the
American universities where he would come to get an education. He came of age at an
extraordinary moment of promise for Africa. The struggles of his own father's generation
were giving birth to new nations, beginning right here in Ghana . ”
During this part of the autobiographical recall, Obama keeps signaling the need
for his audience to pay close attention to his words. His voice reaches a peak of
intensity on the words “impossible,” “new nations,” and “here”: keywords to stress
the pariah status of his father, very far from everything, and the historic achievement
of democracy in the very place where he is now giving his speech. He supplements
his sentence with many gestures: iconic, representing the small village of his father
and the huge distance separating it from the rest of the world; batonlike, stressing
the importance of what is said; and deictic, pointing both to himself and to the
place where they are now all gathered. He moves his eyes around continuously,
looking at his audience, except when he is imagining his father's distant village,
when he almost closes his eyes (Vincze and Poggi 2011 ), as if inviting his audience
to imagine how it was to live at that time and in that place. Also, his body vacillates
slightly as if joining in his effort to link together autobiographical memories and
African history: moreover, he jumps slightly in jubilation when he recalls how the
first new nation of the free Africa was precisely in Ghana. In this last part of the
sentence, his gestures alternately point to himself and to the place where the speech
is being held, connecting his pride for his family's memories with his pride for the
democracy of the new nations today living in an independent Africa. Nevertheless,
this sharing of positive emotions lasts only a little while: since Obama, after openly
describing the difficulties suffered by his family, seriously invites his audience to
play the risky but salutary parrhesiastic game as well. Therefore, he openly declares
that (min. 5:53):
“In many places, the hope of my father's generation gave way to cynicism, even despair.
(6.08) It is easy to point fingers, and to pin the blame for these problems on others. Yes, a
colonial map that made little sense bred conflict, and the West has often approached Africa
as a patron, rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of
the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as
combatants .
Score 4. Ghana (Table 17.5 ).
This is perhaps the most risky and important passage of this difficult speech.
In a somehow unexpected way, Obama in fact uses here his commonalities with
the audience, owing to their shared suffering in the colonial past, as a way to
encourage his listeners to look as soberly at their condition as he did when recalling
the humiliations his family was forced to undergo. He looks sternly and sometimes