Below, you’ll find some stray reflections on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric – – surely one of the most powerful, complex contemporary poems. These reflections are only meant to prime the pump for your reading journal. I almost always find that I see things and understand things in literary texts most helpfully through conversation and discussion. So, think about these reflections as my effort to get a conversation going.
Not sure what I mean about a “reading journal”? See this post. I’ll check on your reading journals for Citizen next week – – so you definitely want to have your journal ready by Thursday, April 9.
Rankine published her book in 2014 – – on the eve of the Trump Era. The volume won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and several other significant literary awards. It even made the NY Times bestseller list in 2015, a rarity for poetry. There are probably several reasons for this breakthrough into popular (or at least middlebrow literary) culture – – Rankine’s direct engagement with well-known subjects and scenes (from Trayvon Martin to Hurricane Katrina to Selena Williams), the “prose” quality of its poems, its mix of word and images. There are probably lots of other reasons as well. Why do think Citizen captured so much attention in 2014/2015?
One really central feature of many of Rankine’s poems is her use of the pronoun “you” – – often, it seems, in place of the more expected “I.” It’s probably worth paying attention to this motif. Take the first “poem” – – the one about Sister Evelyn: who is the “you” here? what effect is Rankine after by deploying the second-person singular? The use of this pronoun seems to shift between poems. In the second poem we see both “I” and “you” – – why? are these different people? if they are the same person, why two pronouns? A few poems later, we have the “you” in a car at night. But here, again, the “you” seems to shift between the speaker and their companion. Maybe the “you” works in at least two ways – – to “split” the speaker between object and subject and/or to interpolate the reader (as addressee) into the events, emotions, dilemmas of Citizen. What do you think?
A central theme in Citizen seems to be the interplay of “erasure” and visibility – – figures, events, and subjects are either rendered invisible or spectacular. This reminds me of the dilemma W.E.B. Du Bois explored in his tour de force, The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Du Bois opens that book by describing the peculiar (but common) experience of b/Being in a racialized society:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
DuBois is seen and recognized here – – but the way he’s seen and recognized as a “problem” also paradoxically makes him invisible as a person. Rankine seems to echo this paradox in the opening to the second section of Citizen, where she talks about Hennessy Youngman. The speaker describes a kind of anger that “responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence, and the energy required to present, to react, to assert is accompanied by visceral disappointment: a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived.” Citizen then launches into an extended reflection on Serena Williams and what her angry outbursts on the tennis court signify. Can you make sense of the visibility/invisibility paradox in this section? Can you see other sections of Citizen which also engage with this racialized dialectic between recognition and erasure – – what Rankine refers to elsewhere as being “hypervisible”?
Finally, the “lyric” poem of Citizen tries to break free from poetry in a variety of ways – – most obviously by adopting the conventions of prose. The book also mixes media – – image and text, video and writing, drama and poetry. Sometimes the images mixed into Citizen seem to amplify or illustrate the poem. For instance, what do you make of the “deer” (?) picture that closes the first section? I’m really fascinated by the sixth section of the poem, titled “August 29, 2005/Hurricane Katrina” and the various “Script[s] for Situation video” that follow. What is a “script” and how is a “script” different from/similar to a poem? What kinds of events seem to “scripted” here? What role(s) do the images inserted into these scripts play? This section “quotes” or cites images and other texts (cf. a birth certificate, Franz Fanon, Ralph Ellison, Frederick Douglass, etc.). Why is this section in particular so “multi-textual”? What is the relation between Rankine’s voice and all these other voices? How does all this citation confuse or challenge the way we might “normally” read a poem?
Citizen is a rich, complex text, and I’m sure it’s posing questions to you that are different from some of the ones I point to. You can follow my bread crumbs and/or use your reading journal to explore the questions you find – – to describe how the text poses these questions and how you reading may or may not answer or clarify them.
Finally, I hope you’re all maintaining. These are the strangest times in my lifetime (stranger even, imo, than experiencing 9/11 from my home base in the Bronx). I desperately hope that you are staying healthy and reasonably sane. At the least, reading Citizen and the other texts on our syllabus might distract you from more immediate worries. Perhaps, Citizen et al. can even supply some helpful equipment to think through our present moment.