Happy birthday, Claudia Rankine!
She’s been a big influence on many of us here at Cut Collective and as September 4 is Claudia Rankine’s birthday, we thought it would be a good idea to mark it in some way.
When I first read Citizen: An American Lyric her 2014 book it permanently changed the way I looked at writing. Part poem, part lyric essay, the work also utilises art and images from the media in order to look at the black experience in the US, and in its mention of Mark Duggan, in the UK.
While studying my MA Creative Writing at University of Sheffield, I was moved to write an essay about it. Here is a short extract from the essay, looking primarily at what I feel is one of Citizen’s greatest strengths – the manner in which it draws white readers into the everyday black experience in a powerful act of empathy. I hope you enjoy it.
Mark Lindsey
UNIVERSALISING ‘YOU’ AND ERASURES AS EXPOSURES IN
CLAUDIA RANKINE’S CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC
Shortly after the publication of Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine was asked who she felt she was talking to in her full length poem, focusing on the experience of living as a day-to-day target of racism in the United States. She answered:
I’m talking to myself. I feel like in a lot of ways I’ve allowed myself also to take things without challenging them, to step around things, to feel that confrontation is messy, to feel that feeling uncomfortable is not what I want, even if it sacrifices my own freedom, my own sense of movement. I think first I’m talking to me and then the person next to me. So, for me this book is about intimacy, how I want to go forward in terms of my encounters with others.1
With this comment, Rankine sets out a map for how a readership might approach the book: first to examine one’s own relationship to the material, then to use the insights gained to change our behaviour. What this means, of course, differs from person to person and while Rankine doesn’t allow anybody off the hook for their part in the problem, her approach is determinedly inclusive ensuring that anybody reading receptively will deepen their understanding of racism and the ways in which they might, even unwittingly, be perpetrating it. Through this, the book is particularly effective at communicating the experience of living with racism to white readers.
While Citizen addresses high profile racist incidents such as the shootings of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, it is arguable that it is most effective when looking at more intimate, mundane expressions of racism, the sort of incident that might have ‘grown to a point where it becomes invisible even as we’re committing these acts.’2 Three of the seven sections cover racist microaggressions collected from Rankine’s own experiences and that of her friends.
Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible – I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.3
It's easy to mistake the records of microaggressions as the writer speaking to her past self, but Rankine is more subtle. By taking a collage of testimonies from many Rankine enables readers to understand how universal such events are for black Americans. Furthermore, she retells these incidents using second person throughout, typically though not always avoiding reference to the gender of the addressee. The cumulative effect of reading these accounts is that the reader inevitably begins to identify with the you that is being addressed. Judith Butler has said, ‘Sometimes a mode of address is quite simply a way of speaking to or about someone. But a mode of address may also describe a general way of approaching another such that one presumes who the other is, even the meaning and value of their existence.’4 While the mode of address demonstrated by the microaggression is the primary focus for the reader, it is Rankine’s care with how she addresses the reader – that calm, respectful, measured tone, without the presumptions Butler identifies – that invites them into the moment so successfully. It’s a powerful empathic trick and inevitably leads readers to question how they might have responded to the incident as both target of the microaggression and, with a necessary degree of discomfort, as a potential perpetrator. No opportunity is given ‘to step around things’ here.
1 Detroit Public TV, Claudia Rankine on Citizen: An American Lyric - 2015 L.A. Times Festival of Books, online video recording, YouTube, 18 May 2015, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upCFbREUvtk&list=PL-HVn24TYO9LPSi3DbjeQswvCacdxj4lK&index=1> [accessed 14 June 2020].
2 Ibid.
3 Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (United States: Penguin, 2015) p.12.
4 Judith Butler and George Yancy, ‘What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?’, The New York Times, 12 January 2015 <https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/whats-wrong-with-all-lives-matter/?_r=0> [accessed 15 June 2020].