In her book-length poem "Citizen," from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American.Her focus fell on what it means to be erased . ISBN 978-1-55597-690-3 Format Paperback By including Hammons In the Hood and the altered Public Lynching photograph, Rankine helps to bring the [black] dead forward (Adams 66) by asking us: Where is the rest of the lynched bodies in Lucas photograph, or the face in Hammons hoodie? . But then again I suppose it's a really strong point that her consciousness is so occupied by overt racism that she sees subtle racism everywhere -- "because white men cant police their imaginations, black men are dying," particularly -- even where it likely may not exist. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. By the time she and her partner get to their house, the police have already come and gone, and the neighbor has apologized to their friend, who was simply on the phone. She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. Rivetingly worth it for the Serena Williams section and the slices of life in the first half that so effectively/efficiently dramatize overt and less obvious instances of racism. This structure becomes physical in Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), which displays 32 plastered heads kept in a cupboard made of wood and glass (Rankine 165) (Figure 4). 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. Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankines Citizen. Journal of American Studies, vol. There is, in other words, no way of avoiding the initial pain. Amid historic times, Claudia Rankine feels a deep sense of obligation. It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . And this ugliness is some of what being an American citizen means. At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. Instant PDF downloads. 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. This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. You begin to move around in search of the steps it will take before you are thrown back into your own body, back into your own need to be found. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. 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. The thing is, most people who commit these microaggressions don't realize they are making them yet they have an accumulated effect on the psyche. The repetition of this visual motif highlights the existing structures of racism which has allowed for slavery to be born again in the sprawling carceral state of America (Coates 79). The protagonist is reacting to an encounter with "the wrong words" as one would to the taste of "a bad egg.". Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. You need your glasses what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. It's raining outside and the leaves on the trees are more vibrant because of it. 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). 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). 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 . View Citizen - Claudia Rankine (Full Text PDF, searchable).pdf from ENGLISH SL Y2 at Quabbin Regional High School. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] Rankines deliberate omission of the commas is powerful. One example is the employer who says he had to hire "a person of color when there are so many great writers out there" (15). "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 . Short on words, but every one counts and rings with purpose. Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Rankine illustrates this theme of erasure and black invisibility in the visual imagery, whose very inclusion in the work speaks to the poetic innovation of Rankines Citizen. C laudia Rankine's book may or may not be poetry - the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). The narrator hopes to be "bucking the trend" of the physical tolls racism imposes by "sitting in silence" and refusing to engage with racists (p.13). It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as "you.". PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. A seventeen-year-old boy in Miami Gardens, FL. read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. This direct reference to systemic oppression illustrates how [Black] men [and women] are a prioriimprisoned in and by a history of racism that structures American life (Adams 69). I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. Claudia Rankine, (born January 1, 1963, Kingston, Jamaica), Jamaican-born American poet, playwright, educator, and multimedia artist whose work often reflected a moral vision that deplored racism and perpetuated the call for social justice. Suddenly you smell good again, like in Catholic school. 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. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. Rankines use of form, visual imagery, and metaphor are not only used to emphasize key themes of erasure, disembodiment, systemic hunting, and the mass incarceration of Black people, but it also works to construct the history of Black citizenship from the time of slavery to Jim Crow, to modern-day mass incarceration. Until African-Americans are seen as human beings worthy of an I, they will continue to be a you in Americaunable to enjoy all the rights of their citizenship. Rankine wants us to look and pay attention to the background of the text, the landscape where these everyday moments of erasure occur. But when the interactions are put together, the reader can understand the "headache-producing" (13) capacity of these interactions. This emphasis on injury, of being a wounded animal (59, 65), all work in conjunction with the first image of the deer. From this description, it is clear that Rankine sees the I as a symbol for a human being, for she later states: the I has so much power; its insane (71). Download chapter PDF. By merging poetic language with visual imagery, and subverting lyric convention in pursuit of her own poetic structure and form, Rankine forces us to see the erasure of Black people in every aspect of Citizen. Citizen by Claudia Rankine Themes Acceptance Identity Rankine argues that African Americans have had to sweep aside these microagressions and to accept how they are treated in order to be a good citizen, to survive, to not be the targets of law enforcement. You take to wearing sunglasses inside. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Citizen by Claudia Rankine is an exceptional book which is much deserving of all the awards it has won. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. 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. In the light of the horrors that are finally coming out in the US concerning the police and its poor treatment of Black Americans, this book shines more not that, through words and pictures. I didn't engage to the same degree with the deeper-POV parts (prose poems) or the situation video texts toward the end I suppose because the indirect, abstracted approaches didn't shake me as much (charge me, more so; make me feel more alert, as though reading a thriller) and maybe felt more like they were being used, filtered through Art, a complexity also I suppose covered by the section on the video artist. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. It's a moment like any other. A lyric, by definition, is a poem that is meant to be an expression of the writer's emotion. Claudia Rankine's Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap.It's a sequel of sorts to Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), sharing its subtitle (An American Lyric) and ambidextrous approach: Both books combine poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, words and . They are black property (Rankine 34), black subjects (70), or black objects (93) who do not own anything, not even themselves (146). A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. Sometimes you sigh. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. This all culminates in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy(Rankine 102-103), which repeats the visual motif of bars or cells, by having the same Black boy in three separate boxes (Figure 3). Figure 5. This metaphor becomes even more complex when analyzing the way Rankine describes the stopping-and-frisking of Black people by the police. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. . Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. The destination is illusory. What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. Magnificent. Complete your free account to request a guide. Struggling with distance learning? In Citizen, Claudia Rankine's lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. "Yes, of course, you say" (20). Chingonyi, Kayo. Refine any search. In Citizen, Claudia Rankines lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Best to drive through the moment instead of dwelling on it. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 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. On campus, another woman remarks that because of affirmative action her son couldn't go to the college that the narrator and the woman's father and grandfather had attended. Continuing to detail the experiences of this unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates an instance later in the young womans life, when her friend frequently calls her by the name of her own housekeeper. You nobody. Male II & I. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". Graywolf Press, 2014. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. 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. InCitizen, Rankine does more than illustrate the erasure and lynching of Black people, for the image of a deer is also used as a metaphor to symbolize the dehumanization of Black people in America. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Trump is of course unapologetically and infamously racist against various races (and religions, women, and so on), so the woman behind Trump uses the opportunity to read this anti-racist book, knowing it will get national coverage; we see the title, we check it out: Powerful political commentary. Black people are facing a triple erasure: first through microaggresions and racist language that renders them second-class citizens; then through lynching and other forms of violence that murders the black body; and lastly, through forgetting. At Like in Sections IV and III, Rankine puts special focus on the body and its potentials to be made known. 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). View Citizen_ An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine.pdf from ENG L499 at Indiana University, Bloomington. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. She also writes about racist profiling in a script entitled Stop-and-Frisk, providing a first-person account by an unidentified narrator who is pulled over for no reason and mistreated by the police, all because he is a black man who fit[s] the description of a criminal for whom the police are supposedly looking. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . Microaggressions exist within and without black communities, among people of color and people of privilege. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." 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. A cough launches another memory into your consciousness. 134, no. 1 It is quite unusual in this age . Both this series and Citizen combine intentional and unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives. In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. Rankine moves on to present situation video[s] commemorating the deaths of a number of black men who were killed because of the color of their skin, including Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. The natural response to injustice is anger, but Rankine illustrates that this response isnt always viable for people of color, since letting frustration show often invites even more mistreatment. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . A hoodie. 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. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a multidimensional work that examines racism in terms of daily microaggressions (comments or actions that subtly express prejudice) and their larger implications. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. All day blue burrows the atmosphere. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. In response, the protagonist turns the question back around, asking why he doesnt write about it. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). This structure which seems to keep African-Americans in chains harkens all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (59), where Black people were subjected to the most dehumanizing of white supremacys injuries, chattel slavery (Javadizadeh 487). The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. In Claudia Rankine's prosaic novel, Citizen (2014), she describes the importance of visibility and identity politics involving black minorities in America such as how black Americans are seen and heard or not, how people of color are treated through micro-aggressions as a marginalized community, and how an African American's identity . Brilliant, deeply troubling, beautiful. Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. No, this is just a friend of yours, you explain to your neighbor, but it's too late. A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. Eugene Jarecki, 2003) is about racial injustice. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. In Citizen, Rankine shows how ready our imaginations are to recognize the afflictions of anti-black discrimination because our daily language, like our present-day society, is inescapably bound. 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 movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. (Rankine 59). Its rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many. Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. Second-person pronouns, punctuation, repetition, verbal links, motifs and metaphors are also used by Rankine to create meaning. 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. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. I met Rankine in New York in mid-October while she was in town for the Poets Forum, presented by the Academy of American Poets, for which she serves as a chancellor. Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of poetry and uses her gripping accounts of racism, through poetry to share a deep message. Yes, and leads to a narrow pathway with no forks in the road. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. She writes in second person: "you." I highly recommend the audio version. 38, no. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. Complete your free account to request a guide. Whether Rankine is talking about tennis or going out to dinner, or spinning words until youre not sure which direction youre facing, there is strength, anger, and a call for white readers like myself to see whats in front of us and do better, be better. An even more pronouncedly racist moment occurs when the protagonist is in line at Starbucks and the white man standing in front of her calls a group of black teenagers the n-word. The wearer of the hood no longer exists, and the now empty hood has been cut off or detached from the rest of the body. Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. Figure 3. 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. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. Get help and learn more about the design. . Rankines small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great The voice is a symbol for the self. These structures which imprison Black people are referenced in Rankines poetics and seen in the visual motifs of frames, or cells, referenced in the three photographs of Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), John Lucas Male II & I(96-97), and in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (102-103), which frame and imprison the black body: My brothers are notorious. The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. The placement of the photograph at the bottom of the page is deliberate, as it makes the empty black space seem even smaller in comparison to the white figures and white space that surrounds it. Rankine writes, [T]he first person [is] a symbol for something. We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. 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). In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. The iconic image of American fear. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". Figure 4. Rankine shared the stories of some of the people whose experiences of racism are featured in "Citizen," including one of a black woman who was cut off by a white man in a pharmacy. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. This reminds the narrator of a medical term "John Henryismfor people exposed to stresses stemming from racism" (16). Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. In the final sections of the book, the second-person protagonist notices that nobody is willing to sit next to a certain black man on the train, so she takes the seat. Instant PDF downloads. You raise your lids. 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. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". And this is why I read books. 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). A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. Medically, "John Henryism . Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. More books than SparkNotes. When he says this, the protagonist realizes that the humorist has effectively excluded her from the rest of the audience by exclusively addressing the white people in the crowd, focusing only on their perspective while failing to recognize (or care about) how racist his remark really is. You can't put the past behind you. 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). Javadizadeh, Kamran. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of . Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen The 92nd Street Y, New York 261K subscribers Subscribe 409 Share 32K views 7 years ago Poet Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen=, her recent meditation. It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. The background of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge `` you. Rankines small of! 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