Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine was born in 1963 in Kingston, Jamaica, and studied at Williams College, then took an MFA at Columbia. Since then, she has had great success publishing collections of poetry, anthologies, and has received many awards and fellowships. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College as well as a chancellor in the Academy of American Poets. To say that Ranking has reached a bounty of success in her life is an understatement. In Citizen: An American Lyirc she presents her life as lived in the mostly Caucasian world of the academy, of privilege: she speaks of tennis lessons, housekeepers, conferences. Many pieces are about how her color precludes acceptance in this white space she inhabits. She foregrounds
…show more content…
her own position (“Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat…”) as a means of demonstrating an all-pervasive racism that cuts through economic and social privilege. The micro-aggressions she suffers may seem small compared to the brutality and indignity experienced by those less fortunate, but they are still presented as corrosive, undermining, and overwhelming.
Citizen suggests that racial harmony is superficial—skin-deep—and Americans revert readily and easily to their respective racial camps. A friend’s son is knocked over in the subway—again, the ethnicity of those involved is not made explicit—“but the son of a bitch kept walking.” Mentally stimulating, thought-provoking, and a plethora of emotions are all that come to mind when thinking of Rankine’s CITIZEN: An American Lyric. However, one word that summarizes the work greatly would be, important. Although citizen was written long before any of the recent current events, it is utmost relevant for those who have been keeping a blind eye to the history of violence and hate towards African-Americans. As Rankine claims: what passes as news for some (white) readers is simply quotidian lived experience for (black) others. Rankine manages to encapsulate with power racial aggression and presenting them in a way that the viewer manages to make an emotional and heartfelt connection as well as making the viewer question themselves whether or not they have made unconscious insults as the ones being performed. There is a lengthy essay on Serena Williams that beautifully unpacks the “angry black woman” motif in a way that could also be seen as timely. And there is a series of “scripts,” some created in
collaboration with the photographer John Lucas, that blend text and image to create a kind of revisionist remix of major media coverage of racialized incidents. Rankine has called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities.” Those realities include the acts of everyday racism—remarks, glances, implied judgments—that flourish in an environment where more explicit acts of discrimination have been outlawed. “Citizen” begins by recounting, in the second person, a string of racist incidents experienced by Rankine and friends of hers, the kind of insidious did-that-really-just-happen affronts that startle in the moment and later expand, poisonously, in the mind. A friend jokingly calls you a “nappy-headed ho” when you show up late to a date; a stranger wonders why you care that “he has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers”; standing outside a conference room before a meeting, one of your colleagues tells another that “being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.” Such exempla end after the initial shock of confrontation, leaving it to the poet to channel the daunted response, the choked comeback. Rankine's lyrics don't look like poems. They're more like parables. They zoom in on micro-dynamics, speech acts, misunderstandings. In Rankine's world, a child can be knocked down on the subway by what she calls a person who has never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. Rankine's meditations go wide to Serena Williams, Trayvon Martin, Judith Butler. But they also sink down, and they trace how the odd force that is race also emerges as grief, as longing, as trauma.
Rankine shows how dynamics of racial selves are not isolated or even present tense, but also communal, unconscious, historical. This is how you are a citizen, she writes. Come on. Let it go. Move on. These poems contained in this lyric wish - that somehow, even through the racism within and around us, we each stay awake to ourselves and one another. Rankine says, all our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes. But she also challenges us all when she writes each moment is an answer.
her own position (“Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat…”) as a means of demonstrating an all-pervasive racism that cuts through economic and social privilege. The micro-aggressions she suffers may seem small compared to the brutality and indignity experienced by those less fortunate, but they are still presented as corrosive, undermining, and overwhelming.
Citizen suggests that racial harmony is superficial—skin-deep—and Americans revert readily and easily to their respective racial camps. A friend’s son is knocked over in the subway—again, the ethnicity of those involved is not made explicit—“but the son of a bitch kept walking.” Mentally stimulating, thought-provoking, and a plethora of emotions are all that come to mind when thinking of Rankine’s CITIZEN: An American Lyric. However, one word that summarizes the work greatly would be, important. Although citizen was written long before any of the recent current events, it is utmost relevant for those who have been keeping a blind eye to the history of violence and hate towards African-Americans. As Rankine claims: what passes as news for some (white) readers is simply quotidian lived experience for (black) others. Rankine manages to encapsulate with power racial aggression and presenting them in a way that the viewer manages to make an emotional and heartfelt connection as well as making the viewer question themselves whether or not they have made unconscious insults as the ones being performed. There is a lengthy essay on Serena Williams that beautifully unpacks the “angry black woman” motif in a way that could also be seen as timely. And there is a series of “scripts,” some created in
collaboration with the photographer John Lucas, that blend text and image to create a kind of revisionist remix of major media coverage of racialized incidents. Rankine has called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities.” Those realities include the acts of everyday racism—remarks, glances, implied judgments—that flourish in an environment where more explicit acts of discrimination have been outlawed. “Citizen” begins by recounting, in the second person, a string of racist incidents experienced by Rankine and friends of hers, the kind of insidious did-that-really-just-happen affronts that startle in the moment and later expand, poisonously, in the mind. A friend jokingly calls you a “nappy-headed ho” when you show up late to a date; a stranger wonders why you care that “he has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks as niggers”; standing outside a conference room before a meeting, one of your colleagues tells another that “being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.” Such exempla end after the initial shock of confrontation, leaving it to the poet to channel the daunted response, the choked comeback. Rankine's lyrics don't look like poems. They're more like parables. They zoom in on micro-dynamics, speech acts, misunderstandings. In Rankine's world, a child can be knocked down on the subway by what she calls a person who has never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. Rankine's meditations go wide to Serena Williams, Trayvon Martin, Judith Butler. But they also sink down, and they trace how the odd force that is race also emerges as grief, as longing, as trauma.
Rankine shows how dynamics of racial selves are not isolated or even present tense, but also communal, unconscious, historical. This is how you are a citizen, she writes. Come on. Let it go. Move on. These poems contained in this lyric wish - that somehow, even through the racism within and around us, we each stay awake to ourselves and one another. Rankine says, all our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes. But she also challenges us all when she writes each moment is an answer.