She says the things that we have all said and describes situations we have all been in. Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. The iconic image of American fear. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book. Rankine repeats: flashes, a siren, the stretched-out-roar (105, 106, 107) three times. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. 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. In the very last story, the racist realization is shouted down on the narrator. By doing so, he accounts for the ways microaggression pushes minorities down, and often precludes the opportunity for a response. 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. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. A man in line refers to boisterous teenagers in the Starbucks as niggers. This symbolism of the deer, which signifies the hunting and dehumanization of Black people, is emphasized throughout the work through the repetition of sighing, moaning, and allusions to injury: To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Each word is a lyrical tribute to Black Americans and all that isn't shouted out on a daily basis. This consideration of numbness continues into the concluding section, entitled July 13, 2013the day Trayvon Martins killer was acquitted. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as you. A child, this character is sitting in class one day when the white girl sitting behind her quietly asks her to lean over so she can copy her test answers. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. 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 . This has many meanings. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. C laudia Rankine's book may or may not be poetry - the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. 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. 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). "IN CITIZEN, I TRIED TO PICK SITUATIONS AND MOMENTS THAT MANY PEOPLE SHARE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC OCCURRENCE THAT MIGHT ONLY HAPPEN TO ME." Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. The purposeful omission of the black bodies highlights yet again the erasure of Black people, while also showing us that this erasure goes beyond daily acts of microaggressions or the systemic forgetting of Black communities (Rankine 6, 32, 82). 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. The mass incarceration of Black people, which was made explicit in the content and emphasized in the form, is reinforced in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (Rankine 102-103), which features the same young Black boy in each of the three photographs (Figure 3). This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. You say there's no need to "get all KKK on them, to which he responds "now there you go" (21). Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. Get help and learn more about the design. ISBN 978-1-55597-690-3 Format Paperback Memories are told through a second-person point of view, inviting the reader to experience them firsthand instead of at a distance. Rankine will answer . 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). Rankine illuminates this paradox in order to question the concept of citizenship. You exhaust yourself looking into the blue light. Rankine stresses the importance of remembering because forgetting is part of the erasure. 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. The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" Instant PDF downloads. (including. Figure 5. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. 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. The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. 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. Medically, "John Henryism . They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. Not affiliated with Harvard College. 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. 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). Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. 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). The route is often . 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. Graywolf Press, 2014. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. She repeats this again when she says, youre not sick, not crazy / not angry, not sad / Its just this, youre injured (145). For instance, when she and her partner go to a movie one night, they ask their frienda black manto pick up their child from school. Citizen: An American Lyric is the book she was reading. I can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why. Words can enter the day like "a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse" (15). Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. It was timely fifty years ago. You need your glasses what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist and author of Between the World and Me (2015),argues that: The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. It wasnt a match, she replies. The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. Claudia Rankine gives us an act of creativity and illumination that combats the mirror world of unseeing and unseen-ness that is imprinted onto the American psyche.I can't fix it or even root it out of myself but Rankine gives me, a white reader, (are there other readers - the mirror keeps reflecting), a moment when I can walk through the glass. Another sigh. Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). 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. A hoodie. She never acknowledged her mistake, but eventually corrected it. Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. Coates refers to these two institutions as arms of the same beastfear and violence were the weaponry of both (33). I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Charging. 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. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. 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. You take to wearing sunglasses inside. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Even the paper that the text is printed on speaks to the political nature of Rankines form, for the acid free, 80# matte coated paper (Rankine 174), which looks and feels expensive, holds within it so much Black pain and trauma. It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, Yes, and the body has memory. 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). All day blue burrows the atmosphere. 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). He says he will call wherever he wants. 31 no. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. 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. Figure 3. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. Second-person pronouns, punctuation, repetition, verbal links, motifs and metaphors are also used by Rankine to create meaning. 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. 38, no. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). 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. Suduiko, Aaron ed. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. 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. "Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. 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. Chingonyi, Kayo. Courtesy of Radcliffe Bailey and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. I'll just say it. This metaphor becomes even more complex when analyzing the way Rankine describes the stopping-and-frisking of Black people by the police. The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. Suddenly you smell good again, like in Catholic school. What did she just do? 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. Magnificent. Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. Their impact is the result, in part, of their . These are called microaggressions. 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. Read it all in one flow. This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. Complete your free account to request a guide. Citizen: An American Lyric Quotes and Analysis "Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. The highly formalised and constructed aesthetic of Rankines work is purposeful, for the almost heightened awareness of the form draws our attention to the function of form and the constructed nature of racism. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. 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 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. This parallel between erasure and lynching can be seen more clearly when we look at Hulton Archives Public Lynchingphotograph, whose image had been altered by John Lucas (Rankine, 91) (Figure 1). Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. 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. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . 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. They have become a you: You nothing. 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. Public Lynchingfrom the Hulton archives. 3, 2019, pp. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. 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. Overview Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. 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. 1, 2018, pp. At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. 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. Rankines use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political. I feel like Citizen is one of those books everyones read in some portion. The protagonist knows that her friend makes this mistake because the housekeeper is the only other black person in her life, but neither of them mention this. Three years later, Serena Williams wins two gold medals at the 2012 Olympic Games, and when she celebrates by doing a three-second dance on the tennis court, commentators call her immature and classless for Crip-Walking all over the most lily-white place in the world.. [White Americans] have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a centruy, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them thier suburbs. This narrator, who seems to be a version of Rankine herself at this moment, remembers a different time with a different racial make-up than the one in which she currently resides. The artist speaking to the protagonist is white, and he asks her if shes going to write about Duggan. 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. With rightful anger and sadness Claudia Rankine details the racism she has experienced in the United States, as well as the racism that surrounds popular black people in the media like Serena Williams, Barack Obama, and Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. Here, the form and figuration of the text, which emphasizes white space, works to illustrate this key theme of erasure through visual metaphor. This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are, Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs 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. Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankines Citizen. Journal of American Studies, vol. Figure 1. Citizen is definitely a must read for everyone, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. The physiological costs are high. When a man knocks over a woman's son in the subway, he just keeps walking. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. Some of them, though, arent actually all that micro. read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. 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). As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. As the chapter progresses, so does the strength of the negative feeling produced. The narrator contemplates why this person feels comfortable saying this in front of her. Best to drive through the moment instead of dwelling on it. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. 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. Claudia Rankine's National Book Critics Circle award-winning book of poetry and criticism, Citizen: An American Lyric confronts the myriad ways racism preys upon the black psyche. Rankine writes: we are drowning here / still in the difficultythe water show[ed] [us] no one would come (85). Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be "Citizen: An American Lyric", p.124, Macmillan . Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people addressable, opening them up to verbal attack by others. 3, 2019, p. 419-457. "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. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). Sometimes you sigh. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. . The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great 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. Rankines small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language. A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting, and imprisonment of African-Americans in the white hegemonic society of America. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. Jenn Northington. In this instance, the black body becomes even more animal-like. 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. 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. Biss, Eula. I nearly always would rather spend time with a novel. This dilemma arises frequently for the protagonist, like when a colleague at the university where she teaches complains to her about the fact that his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color. This disrupts the historically white lyric form even further because she is adapting and changing the lyric form to include her Black identity and perspective. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. Sharma, Meara. 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. A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of poetry and uses her gripping accounts of racism, through poetry to share a deep message. Look at the cover. By utilizing form, visual imagery, and poetry, Rankine enables us to see the systemic oppression of Black people by the state. The bare facts of Rankine's readership demographics are of no small importance: of the top ten hits on google search for 'claudia rankine citizen review', for instance, eight reviewers are white; three of the top four are white men working for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Slate. The erratum to the chapter is available at 10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_14. Furthermore, Black people like James Craig Anderson are killed on the road, squashed by a pickup truck (92-95). LitCharts Teacher Editions. Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. 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). A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). 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. 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