the president sang amazing grace

“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.”

The first line of Chris Marker’s La Jetée presents a narrative of ontological search haunted by its ghostly absence. The image is fixated somewhere between life and death, like Orpheus’s journey to save Eurydice, attempting to look back at the shades. 

To tell such a story, one must always invite the ghosts. 

I have always been marked by such an image. It is June 2015, days before my first arrival in the United States. On television, I saw the shooting that happened at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine days later, as part of the eulogy process, President Obama stood before the congregation and sang Amazing Grace. His voice cracked under the weight of the moment, and the nation held its breath. 

This event somehow marks my first impression of America. The very image sticks, more than any trauma or understanding associated with the event itself. Almost ten years from the shooting now, when I look back at that very moment, shadows grow faster than actual things. Despite cycles of outrage and attempted reform, little has changed — whether it is gun control, hate crime, or the structural poverty embedded in free-market neoliberalism. The nation remains haunted by its past. Every failed social experiment and economic reform, specters of lost futures, still linger on land, returning in the shelter of nostalgia. 

While the image remains in my mind, the world around it has also shifted. Nostalgia, too, is an image that can be easily weaponized.  It does not mourn the past but rather resurrects it. It smooths over wounds without healing them, offering remembrance as a substitute for reckoning. A nation burdened by its memory searches for escape and, finding none, turns backward instead. The failure of institutions, the exhaustion of language, the slow unraveling of promises, and the hollowing out of economic security — all these fractures become openings for something else. Not just disillusionment, but something more insidious: the longing for a past that never truly was. A past that can be rewritten, reclaimed, and worn like a mask in the storm of populist resurgence. The same country that once watched its president sing Amazing Grace in mourning would, a year later, elect the man who amplified the voices of its most dangerous specters.

How can we buy ourselves free from the past then? The answer remains elusive. Even Obama, years after leaving office, confessed that he had run out of words. In a podcast with Bruce Springsteen, he recalled his decision to sing at the funeral:

“You know, I’ll want to go to the funeral, but I don’t want to speak. I don’t have anything left to say. I feel like I’ve used up all my words.”

If words fail, what remains? With that inquiry, I return to the image. The one that lingers, and refuses to fade. Perhaps all we have are the ghosts. Perhaps they have been here all along. But to see them — to name them — is to resist their quiet dominion. The journey should start with such recognition.

— Xinyu Liu