Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. I'll just say it. The general expectation, Rankine upholds, is that people of color must simply move on from their anger, letting racist remarks slide in the name, Claudia Rankines Citizen provides a nuanced look at the many ways in which humanitys racist history brings itself to bear on the present. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society. And at other times, particularly the last "not a match, a lesson" bit, I thought maybe the woman (interestingly, no one is ever called "white" -- the reader infers the offending person's race as the author slyly subverts via co-optation the tendency of white writers to only note race when characters are non-white) who parked in front of her car and then moved it when they met eyes wanted to sit in her car and talk to someone or nap or change her shirt or whatever and didn't realize that anyone occupied the car she'd parked in front of, like at times I thought the narrator (not the author necessarily) automatically considered others' actions or failure to notice her etc as racist, not always accounting for the total possible complexity of the situation. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. 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. Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, Yes, and the body has memory. Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesnt object. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. 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. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. Your neighbor has already called the police. 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. Perhaps this dissociation, seen in the literariness of Rankines poetics and use of you, speaks to the kind of erasure of self that happens when you experience racism every day. I repeat what Bill Kerwin reminded me of in his review of this book: At a Trump rally, there is a woman sitting behind him reading a book while he speaks. Some of them, though, arent actually all that micro. The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyones read in some portion. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. The voice is a symbol for the self. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. 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. In an interview with Ratik, Rankine explains that she is invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies. Like "Again Serena's frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . Its a quick listen at 1.5 hours. Download chapter PDF. The route is . No longer can 'you' abide by these misunderstandings, because you understand them too well. Rankine sees this type of ambiguity [that] could be diagnosed as dissociation in Serena Williams, whose claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae (Rankine 36) speaks to the kind of psychological disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. Nor are the higher echelons of the academic and literary worlds any insulation against such behavior. In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner's murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric.Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. A man in line refers to boisterous teenagers in the Starbucks as niggers. 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. These are called microaggressions. 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. As the photographs show Zidane register what Materazzi has said, turn around, and approach him, Rankine provides excerpts from the previously mentioned thinkers, including Frantz Fanons thoughts about the history of discrimination against Algerian people in France. We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. The erasure of Black people is a theme that is referenced throughout Citizen.Rankine describes this erasure of self as systemic, as ordinary (32). ", After reading Citizen, its hard not to hear Rankines voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. While Rankine recognizes that sighing is natural and almost inevitable, it is not the iteration of a free being [for] what else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind? (60). 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. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. Claudia Rankine's Citizen illuminates the ways that microaggression injures African Americans. 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. 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. 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. I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Microaggressions exist within and without black communities, among people of color and people of privilege. The way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. The artwork which is featured on the coverDavid Hammons In the Hood depicts a black hood floating in a white space. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Rankine describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. 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? Reviewed: Citizen: An American Lyric. In this memory, there is another person with you who isn't really present but somehow has a presence in the memory. At this point, Citizen becomes more abstract and poetic, as Rankine writes scripts for situation video[s] she has made in collaboration with her partner, John Lucas, who is a visual artist. Another sigh. Many of the interactions also involve an implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts. Rankines deliberate labelling of her work as lyric challenges the historical whiteness of the lyric form. by Claudia Rankine. Teaching Citizen by Claudia Rankine is a perfect text for such spaces. What is most striking about the visual image is the omission of a human subject. By utilizing form, visual imagery, and poetry, Rankine enables us to see the systemic oppression of Black people by the state. Claudia Rankine's acclaimed 2014 poetry book "Citizen" was a potent and incisive meditation on race. 3, 2019, pp. Eugene Jarecki, 2003) is about racial injustice. In response, the protagonist turns the question back around, asking why he doesnt write about it. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Rankines deliberate omission of the commas is powerful. 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). The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. Instant PDF downloads. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. What did he say? Gang-bangers. 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). Citizen: An American Lyric. Read it all in one flow. 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). Best to drive through the moment instead of dwelling on it. In the photograph, there are no black bodies hanging, just the space where the two black bodies once were (Chan 158). The therapist is yelling for you to leave, and you manage to tell her that you have an appointment. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. Charging. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. 1, 2008, pp. 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). It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. LitCharts Teacher Editions. featured health poetry Post navigation. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. Teachers and parents! As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). 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. 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 . By talking about her experiences in second-person, Rankine creates a kind of separation between herself and her experiences. He says he will call wherever he wants. This odd and disturbing choice of imagery, which blends a human face with a deer, acts as a visual representation for the dehumanization that Black people are subjected to in America. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. Hoping he was well-intentioned, the woman answered . The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. Ratik, Asokan. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. This consideration of numbness continues into the concluding section, entitled July 13, 2013the day Trayvon Martins killer was acquitted. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". While Rankine did not create these photos, the inclusion of them in her work highlights the way that her creation of her own poetic structure works with the content. 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. On the drive back from the movie, the protagonist receives a call from her neighbor, who tells her that theres a sinister looking man walking back and forth in front of her house. 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 . The book invites readers to consider how people conceive of their own identities and, more specifically, what this process looks like for black people cultivating a sense of self in the context of Americas fraught racial dynamics. By paper choice alone, Rankine seems to be commenting on the political, social, and economic position of Black life in America. Not affiliated with Harvard College. . LitCharts Teacher Editions. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). 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. Cerebral Caverns, 2011. Sometimes you sigh. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. 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 on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. 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