Rankine stays with the unnamed protagonist, who in response to racist comments constantly asks herself things like, What did he just say? and Did I hear what I think I heard? The problem, she realizes, is that racism is hard to cope with because before people of color can process instances of bigotry, they have to experience them. African-Americans are still experiencing hardships every day that stem from slavery such as racial profiling, and stereotyping. The first of these scripts is made up of quotes that the couple has taken from CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the terrible aftermath of the disaster. Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). Caught in these moments of racism, the Black subject is forced to ruminate on these microaggressions, processing how they have become reduced to that of an animal. Although the man doesnt turn to look at her, she feels connected to him, understanding that its sometimes necessary to numb oneself to the many microaggressions and injustices hurled at black people. Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. Johanning, Cameron. And this ugliness is some of what being an American citizen means. Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine 32-page comprehensive study guide Chapter-by-chapter summaries and multiple sections of expert analysis The ultimate resource for assignments, engaging lessons, and lively book discussions Access Full GuideDownloadSave Featured Collections Popular Book Club Picks A picture appears on the next page interrupting Rankine's poem, something that the reader will get used to as the text progresses. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. The fact that only the hood of the hoodie exists, with the seam rips still evident and the strings still hanging, alludes to the historical lynching of Black people in America, which has erased and dismembered the black body. the exam room speaking aloud in all of its blatant metaphorsthe huge clock above where my patients sit implacably measuring lifetimes; the space itself narrow and compressed as a sonnetand immediately I'm back to thinking . The narrator assures her: "The world is wrong. Rankine seems to ask this question again in a later poem, when she says: Have you seen their faces? View Citizen_ An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine.pdf from ENG L499 at Indiana University, Bloomington. The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. "Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. With the sophistication of its dialectical movement, the gravitas of its ethical appeal, and the mercy of its psychological rigor, Claudia Rankine's Citizen combines traditional poetic strains in a new way and passes them on to the reader with replenished vitality. Figure 2. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. Recounting several of Williamss outburst[s] in response to this unfairness, Rankine shows that responding to racism with angerwhich understandably arises in such situationsoften only makes matters worse, as is the case for Williams when shes fined $82,500 for speaking out against a line judge who makes a blatantly biased call against her. Teachers and parents! In the foreground there stands a sign indicating that the neighborhood juts out off a street called Jim Crow Roadevidence that the countrys racist past is still woven throughout the structures of everyday life. By rejecting previous poetic structures in favour of a new poetic form, Rankine forces us to think about the possibility and the importance of creating a new social frameworkone that serves its Black citizens, rather than erasing them. 137163., doi:10.1017/S0021875817000457. A cough launches another memory into your consciousness. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. The route is . In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. 3, 2019, pp. Rankine does a brilliant job taking an in-depth look at life being black. Rankine repeats: flashes, a siren, the stretched-out-roar (105, 106, 107) three times. Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. Gang-bangers. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives. Racist language, however, erase[s] you as a person (49), and this furious erasure (142) of Black people strips them of their individuality and the rights that come with an I that are given during citizenship. GradeSaver, 15 August 2016 Web. I highly recommend the audio version. The childhood memories are particularly interesting because they give the reader a sense of otherness right from the start. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about. (Rankine 59). So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . The frames, which create 35 cells on either page, also allude to Black imprisonment, as the subjects appear to be behind wooden prison bars (Rankine 96-97). Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. Its a quick listen at 1.5 hours. The protagonist insists that the man is her friend, reminding the neighbor that he has even met this person, but the neighbor refuses to believe this, saying that he has already called the police. The inescapability of their social condition and positioning, of their erasure and vulnerability, is also emphasized in Rankines highly stylised poem about the Jena Six (98-103). Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). She teaches at Yale and is also the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. Published in 2014, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to paint a provocative portrait of the African American experience and racism in the so-called "post-racial" United States. Ratik, Asokan. In addition to questioning unmarked whiteness, Claudia Rankine's Citizen contains all the hallmarks of experimental writing: borrowed text, multiple or fractured voices, constraint-based systems of creation, ekphrastic cataloging, and acute engagement with visual art. Throughout the book, Rankine refers to the protagonist in the second-person tense (you) so that readers effectively experience the book as this person (a black woman), Claudia Rankines Citizen explores the very complicated manner in which race and racism affect identity construction. "Yes, of course, you say" (20). Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. is so apt, especially for those of us living in multicultural environments. It was a lesson., Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Nick Laird. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. Cerebral Caverns, 2011. (including. Even though it will be obvious that the girl behind her is cheating, the protagonist obliges by leaning over, wondering all the while why her teacher hasnt noticed. Citizen as one of the inspirations for her album. Struggling with distance learning? You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. I Am Invested in Keeping Present the Forgotten Bodies.. Believer Magazine, 28 June 2020, believermag.com/logger/2014-12-10-i-am-invested-in-keeping-present-the-forgotten/. This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. You raise your lids. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . In the very last story, the racist realization is shouted down on the narrator. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." She repeats this again when she says, youre not sick, not crazy / not angry, not sad / Its just this, youre injured (145). In disjointed and figurative writing, Rankine creates a sense of desperation and inequity, depicting what it feels like to belong to one of the many black communities along the Gulf Coastcommunities that national relief organizations all but ignored and ultimately failed to properly serve after the hurricane devastated the area and left many people homeless. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. They are black property (Rankine 34), black subjects (70), or black objects (93) who do not own anything, not even themselves (146). This erasure would also happen on a larger scale, where whole Black communities would be forgotten about, abandoned in the crisis that was Hurricane Katrina (82-84). Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. In this moment, the protagonist realizes that being black in a white-dominated world doesnt make her feel invisible, but hypervisible. This, in turn, accords with the author Zora Neale Hurstons line that she feels most colored when shes thrown against a sharp white background. These thoughts, however, dont ease the painthe persistent headachethat the protagonist feels on a daily basis because of the racist way people treat her. Yes, and it's raining. In this poem, which is the only poem inCitizen to have no commas, Rankine begins in the school yard and ends with life imprisoned (101). My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class., Requesting a new guide requires a free LitCharts account. To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. 52, no. Rankines visual metaphor and allusions to modern-day enslavement is repeated in John Lucas Male II & I(Rankine 96-97), which also frames Black and white subjects and objects in wooden frames (Figure 5). By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen. A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. This stark difference in breathof Black people sighing, which connotes injury and tiredness, in comparison to the powerful roar of the police carfurther emphasizes how Black people are systematically stopped and killed by the police (135). 1 Citizen has continued to amass resonance in the years since this essay was first written in 2017, a ; 1 Since its first publication by Graywolf Press in 2014, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric has cleared a remarkable path in terms of acquiring garlands and gongs, making its way onto American poetry booklists and curricula at a dizzying pace. Bella Adams(2017)Black Lives/White Backgrounds: Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyricand Critical Race Theory,Comparative American Studies An International Journal,15:1-2,54-71,DOI:10.1080/14775700.2017.1406734. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. (143). To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. While this style of narration positions the reader as [a] racist and [a] recipient of racism simultaneously (Adams 58), therefore placing them directly in the narrative, the use of you also speaks to the invisibility and erasure of Black people (Rankine 70-72). The dominance of white space in the text (Rankine 3, 12, 21-22, 45, 47, 59, 81-82, 93, 108, 125, 133, 148-149) illuminates how this erasure of the black body takes place in white spaceswhere the environment is white or dominated by whiteness. (That part surprised me.) Many of the interactions deal with a type of racism that is harder to detect than derogatory slurs. Read it all in one flow. I nearly always would rather spend time with a novel. What did she just do? Courtesy of Radcliffe Bailey and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. A man in line refers to boisterous teenagers in the Starbucks as niggers. She also calls upon the accounts lip readers gave of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane, revealing that Materazzi called him a Big Algerian shit, a dirty terrorist, and the n-word. The decision to place Clarks image right after Rankines recount of a microaggression, where Rankine is yelled off the deer grass (Skillman 429) of a white therapist like some unwanted wild animal, shows us how white America views Black people: as pests and prey. You nobody. "Jim Crow Rd." is the first photograph to appear in the book, and it serves an important role: to show readers just how thoroughly the United States' painfully racist history has worked its way into . Rankines deliberate labelling of her work as lyric challenges the historical whiteness of the lyric form. This decision to use second-person also draws attention to the second-class status of black citizens in the US (Adams 58), or blackness as the second person (Sharma). Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. More books than SparkNotes. She joined me at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City. Amid historic times, Claudia Rankine feels a deep sense of obligation. Leaning against the wall, they discuss the riots that have broken out in London as a response to the unjustified police killing of a young black man named Mark Duggan. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. Both this series and Citizen combine intentional and unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives. Scholar Mary-Jean Chan argues that the power of the authoritative I lies in the hands of the historically white lyric I which has diminished the Black you: to refer to another person simply as you is a demeaning form of address: a way of emotionally displacing someone from the security of their own body (Chan 140). It just often makes that friendship painful. Their impact is the result, in part, of their . Most important poetry book of the year. The work incorporates lyric essay, prose poem, verse poem, and image in its exploration of the ways in which racism can affect identity. The disembodied heads of the Black subject does not only allude to lynching and captivity, as the 16 sections of the cupboard look like 16 prison cells, but it also represents the way bodies are stacked on top of one another in slave ships (Skillman 447). Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). By subverting lyric convention, which normally uses the personal first-person I, Rankine speaks to the inherently unstable (Chan 140) positionality of Black people in America, whose bodily existence is threatened on a daily basis by microaggression which treat the black body either as an invisible object, or as something to be derided, policed or imprisoned (Chan 140). There is, in other words, no way of avoiding the initial pain. As Michelle Alexander writes in. This confounds and seemingly irks him, prompting the protagonist to wonder why he would think itd be difficult to properly feel the injustice wheeled at a person of another race. This juxtaposition between black space and white space, body and no body, presence and absence, conveys the erasure of Black people on a visual level. Read the Study Guide for Citizen: An American Lyric, Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankines Citizen, Poetry, Politcs, and Personal Reflection: Redefining the Lyric in Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation, Citizen: A Discourse on our Post-Racial Society, View our essays for Citizen: An American Lyric, Introduction to Citizen: An American Lyric, View the lesson plan for Citizen: An American Lyric, View Wikipedia Entries for Citizen: An American Lyric. The picture of a deer first appears in Kate Clarks Little Girl (Rankine, 19), a sculpture that grafts the modeled human face of a young girl onto the soft, brown, taxidermied body of an infant caribou (Skillman 428). And this is why I read books. At times I wondered why she for example attributes a single horrible quotation about Serena to a monumental non-existent entity called "the American Media." In a way, Citizen becomes a modern manifestation of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the United States from a French perspective in 1835 in Democracy in America. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. Citizen: An American Lyric. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Although this is meant to help avoid misunderstandings, oftentimes too much is understood. It is part of a 3-part PBS documentary series called "RACE - The Power of an Illusion. Whereas Citizen focuses on the minute-to-minute racism of everyday life, this documentary series focuses on systematized racial inequalities. Instant PDF downloads. The celebrated poet and playwright is preparing to deliver a three-part lecture series at the University of Chicago during a pivotal moment: Russia has invaded Ukraine; the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world; and the United States, she said, still teeters between fascism and fragile notions of democracy. Lyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen. American Literary History, vol. The visual motifs of frames and cells illustrate the way racist ideology, which endorsed slavery, continues to keep Black people in chains in modern-day America. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. Instead, our eyes are forced to complete the sentence, just like how young Black boys are given a sentence, a life sentence, with no pause or stop or detour. We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. April 23, 2015 issue. Oxford Dictionary defines the word "citizen" as "a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized." Rankine challenges this definition in two ways. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] A hoodie. Rankine continues to examine the protagonists gravitation toward numbness before abruptly switching to first-person narration on the books final page to recount an interaction she has while lying in bed with her partner. In this instance, the black body becomes even more animal-like. What is more concerning than the injured, cut-off state of the deer is the fact that a human face looks pinned onto the animal (163). Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. In an interview, Rankine remarks that upon looking at Clarks sculpture, [she] was transfixed by the memory that [her] historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal. This is a poignant powerful work of art. She determines that its either because her teacher doesnt care about cheating or, worse, because she never truly saw the protagonist sitting there in the first place. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. This trajectory from boyhood to incarceration is told with no commas: Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving, butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of, aggravated adolescence charging forward in their way (Rankine 101). Many of the interactions also involve an implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts. A damn hard read but a damn necessary one. Your neighbor has already called the police. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 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