Journalist Luciana Grosso with the cover of the book
Zohran Mamdani, the candidate of the Democratic Party, has won the elections for mayor of New York: he will take office on January 1st for a four-year term. It is a historic achievement for several reasons: At 34, Mamdani will become the youngest mayor in over a century, and also the first Muslim.
He has very progressive positions, he defines himself as a socialist – something still unusual in the United States – and in addition to the Democratic Party he is part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), like the well-known congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also from New York.
Mamdani had been the favorite in the polls for weeks, and his victory was expected. With 91 percent of the votes counted, he took 50.4 percent of the votes, against 41.6 percent for Andrew Cuomo, who like him is part of the Democratic Party but had run as an independent after losing the primaries.
Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa took 7.1 percent. It was a very well-attended election: more than two million people voted, almost double compared to four years ago. Mamdani was the first candidate in more than fifty years to obtain more than one million votes: the last was John Lindsay in 1969. Donald Trump has always criticized Mamdani’s candidacy, describing him as an extremist, subversive and “communist” politician. He also tried to influence the outcome of the vote in various ways, for example by threatening to reduce federal funds destined for New York in the event of his victory. In Wednesday night’s speech, Mamdani addressed Trump directly, telling him to “turn up the volume” and proposed New York as a model of resistance to the federal government’s policies: “In this dark moment in politics, New York will be the light.”
We publish, courtesy of the author and publisher, an excerpt of the book Mamdani – A socialist in New York by Luciana Grosso (Obiezioni Series, pp. 136, €16.50). The author is a journalist specializing in European and US politics, she collaborates with Chora Media, Will, Political Report Card and ISPI (Institute for International Political Studies). Every week he writes a newsletter on the European Union, The Sword in the Stonefrom which a daily European press review podcast was born, Arthur.
And then comes Mamdani
In any case, in life you have to think.
Might as well do it big.
Donald Trump
On the evening of June 26, there was a strange atmosphere at Andrew Cuomo’s campaign headquarters. His supporters, who had been preparing for months for their favorite’s triumph, felt an unpleasant sensation of déja-vu. There was, in that wait for an obvious, obvious and already written victory, something that didn’t add up. Something that reminded many of them of the night at the Javits Center, in which they had waited for hours for the proclamation, obvious, obvious and already written, but which would never come, of Hillary Clinton’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections.
Cuomo was the predestined. He had been preparing for years for that role which in some respects rightfully belonged to him. A bit like Hillary Clinton, she was predestined who had prepared for decades for the presidency, a presidency that she felt belonged to her by right. This time too, as then, the polls said that Cuomo’s victory was more than certain, a walk in the park. The polls said it, of course, but rationality, common sense, experience of things also said it.
Who do you want to win if not Cuomo? And then, goodness, a twist like Hillary Clinton’s defeat is a once in a lifetime thing, right? Even the polls said so, very favourable.
But that night, just like on the surreal night at the Javits Center, at a certain point the polls went silent. And in their place came the real numbers. Seat after seat, ballot after ballot, a wave. It started like a hiss that was getting bigger, louder, more thunderous and was submerging, until it completely drowned, Andrew Cuomo’s chances of becoming the Democratic candidate and, at that point, the new mayor of New York. That wave was called Zohran Mamdani.
It couldn’t be true. Not twice in one lifetime. And yet it was happening. After all, America is a land allergic to the predestined and very kind to outsiders.
The man Google knew nothing about
If you had Googled the name Zohran Mamdani until last spring, the search engine would probably have asked you: do you mean Mahmood Mamdani? Yes, because Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most important and illustrious historians of postcolonialism, and there were plenty of results about him. On Zohran, his son, however, until June, practically nothing.
It’s not Google’s fault. On the contrary. It’s just that there was really almost nothing to say about Zohran Mamdani until less than a year ago. And the opposite would have been strange, given that he is thirty-three years old and had an almost non-existent political history behind him until the primaries last June. Born in Kampala, Uganda, into a decidedly wealthy family, Mamdani grew up as a Muslim, surrounded by reading and the stimuli that one can have when one has an illustrious academic and scholar as a father and one of the most fertile and successful directors of recent years, Mira Nair, author of films such as Salaam Bombay! (Caméra d’Or award at Cannes, Oscar nomination for best foreign film), Monsoon Wedding (Golden Lion in Venice) e The reluctant fundamentalist.
In his early childhood years, his family moved around a lot, between Uganda and India, until arriving, when Zohran was seven years old, in the United States, where his father had become a professor at Columbia University and his mother one of the most prominent intellectuals in the city.
At ten years old – a New Yorker for just three – his adopted city was shocked by the attack on the Twin Towers. And here lies a kind of anecdote, vaguely messianic, which his father recently told: immediately after the attack Zohran was understandably disturbed, not only by that atrocious action, but also by the anti-Muslim sentiment that had begun to spread in the city. So his father asked him which of three typical New York City jobs he would rather have: hot dog vendor, garbage collector or police officer. The Zohran of the time responded:
“Well, I can’t be a cop, not now in New York; I don’t think I want to sell hot dogs, which only make people fat and unhappy. I think I would prefer to be a garbage collector, the one who cleans places.”
Who knows if the anecdote is true. Who knows if it was really a premonition.
The fact is that, growing up, Mamdani was a good student, first in an exclusive private elementary school with a progressive orientation and then in high school at the Bronx High School of Science, an institution known for its attention to scientific subjects. While he was studying, he began to do a little politics within the limits and ways of a high school student: first by winning a simulated election with a program whose heart was to shift government funds aimed at the war in Iraq towards resources for education; then running, without winning, in the election for the role of student representative of the high school; finally deciding to found a cricket team within the school, attended by many students who like him were of Indian origin.
In 2010 he enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he graduated in 2014 with a degree in Africana Studies. During his college years his political commitment began to become more substantial and he co-founded a section of Students for Justice in Palestinea group that took the Palestinian issue to heart and organized boycotts of Israeli academic and cultural institutionsbelieving that the State of Israel violated the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
After college, things started to get messier: Mamdani first enrolled in Change Corps, a year-long training program for community organizers, but left after six months, convinced – like many in their twenties – that he had found his path in music and rap. So he stopped being Zohran and became Mr. Cardamom.
Mr. Cardamom
Imagine this scene: we are in the humble kitchen of a house in a suburban neighborhood of New York. There, an elderly and modest woman, with gray hair gathered in a long braid, is carefully cooking a dish following a recipe shown during a television program, fantasizing that she is the star chef of that program. The old woman is of Indian origin. The facial features and the painful look that elderly women often have betray the signs of a tiring life, made up of immigration, small things, great sacrifices and enormous dignity. Suddenly a voice, as loud as it is rude, is heard shouting: «Maaa’!».
Shortly after, the same woman, increasingly modest and frightened, is sitting at a table with her son who, in a rough and violent way, shouts at her that she cannot live with him and his family. The woman appears on the verge of tears. Then he tells her she’s a “terrible grandmother.” And then, as if by magic, her gaze lights up, the music starts and the old woman starts rapping:
I’m the best fucking grandma you’ve ever seen,
nothing other than the fucking top 5 or top 3
I’m number one and don’t bother me
Fuck all the grandmas who say they are better than Praveen.
This is the beginning of the video Dwarvesa 2019 song by Mr. Cardamom. It was his only moderately successful song, in a musical career that never really took off. What probably gave impetus to the piece was the video itself, in which Madhur Jaffrey, a sort of Indian Martha Stewart, famous for her television programs on cooking and bon ton, played the main role – an elderly grandmother who turns into the queen of the ghetto who all the young hoodlums in the neighborhood blindly obey. It was also the last video of the career of Mr. Cardamom who, shortly thereafter, just a year later, would become a congressman from New York State.
But now, flashback.
In 2015, when he officially began his very short musical career with the name of Young Cardamom, in collaboration with his friend Abdul Bar Hussein (rapper HAB), he released Kanda (Chap Chap)an up-tempo hymn to Ugandan chapati bread. In 2016 the duo Mr. Cardamom and HAB released a six-song EP entitled Sidda Mukyaaloin which he raps in six different languages. The title is the Luganda translation of There is no return to the village and, according to what Mamdani himself stated in an interview with the site OkayAfricathis title has a precise meaning: «I can’t go back to the village because, as an Asian Ugandan, I simply don’t have a village. The city is all I have.”
And in fact in the album we try to tell what it feels like to always be out of place: too African to be American, too American to be African, too dark to be white. A few months later – we are still in 2016 – the big opportunity arrives for Mr. Cardamom and HAB: a pretty good song, #1 Spiceis included in the soundtrack of the Disney film Queen of Katweof which his mother is the director and Young Cardamom is the music supervisor. Regarding that role, Mamdani himself jokingly declared that “nepotism and hard work take you a long way.”
The film, which is also a Disney production and tells the powerful and very true story of Phiona Mutesi, a girl from the Kampala slum who turns out to be a chess prodigy, is a semi-flop. As a result, the music that accompanies it doesn’t go anywhere either. It was 2016.
And while the career of Young Cardamom/Mr. Cardamom doesn’t take off – not even with the help of nepotism and hard work – three things happen around Zohran: the first is called Donald Trump, the second Bernie Sanders, the third Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
