", After reading Citizen, its hard not to hear Rankines voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. No one else is seeking. 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. They have not been to prison. 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. Rankine writes from great depth, personal experiences, and also from a greater, inclusive point of view. . In the image (Figure 2), the deers body looks distortedits legs are oddly bent, its fourth leg is obscured, and one of its legs is cut off by the margin of the page. 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. It was timely fifty years ago. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. 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). In context, the author is referring to the weight of memory, the racial insults, the slights, and the mistreatment by other players. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. 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. She joined me at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City. Figure 2. A friend mentions a theoretical construct of the self divided into the 'self self' and the 'historical self'. Many of the interactions also involve an implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. To see so many people moved and transformed by her work and her vision is something that should give us all hope. 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. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. Graywolf Press, 2014. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Citizen: An American Lyric is the book she was reading. But even Tocqueville could not estimate the extent to which microaggressions would come to rule the lives of many in the states. Refine any search. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. You say there's no need to "get all KKK on them, to which he responds "now there you go" (21). 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. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. You can't put the past behind you. LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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. An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. By doing so, he accounts for the ways microaggression pushes minorities down, and often precludes the opportunity for a response. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). And this is why I read books. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. Page forty-one describes an incident about a friend rushing to meet with another friend in the "distant neighborhood of Santa Monica . I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. 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). 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? Figure 3. By utilizing form, visual imagery, and poetry, Rankine enables us to see the systemic oppression of Black people by the state. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. 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. "Citizen: An American Lyric", p.124, Macmillan . To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. 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. Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is right. 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. Brilliant, deeply troubling, beautiful. Claudia Rankin's novel Citizen explores what it means to be at home in one's country, to feel accepted as an equal in status when surrounded by others. 38, no. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. Claudia Rankine's Citizen opens with a sequence of anecdotes, a catalog of racist micro-aggressions and "moments [that] send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs." Words can enter the day like "a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse" (15). Furthermore, Black people like James Craig Anderson are killed on the road, squashed by a pickup truck (92-95). He is, the neighbor says, talking to himself. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. All day blue burrows the atmosphere. 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 (including. There is, in other words, no way of avoiding the initial pain. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. 31 no. And this ugliness is some of what being an American citizen means. Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetryrepetition, metaphor . Citizen is definitely a must read for everyone, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together. Yes, and leads to a narrow pathway with no forks in the road. High-grade paper, a unique/large sans-serif font, and significant images. "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 . So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. While she highlights a vast number of stories that illustrate the hate crimes that have occurred in the United States during the 21st century, the James Craig Anderson case is prevalent because his heartbreaking story is known by few individuals throughout . "Yes, of course, you say" (20). The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. (143). 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). Rankine writes, You cant put the past behind you. 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. Teachers and parents! This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. -Graham S. Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an . 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). Read it all in one flow. is so apt, especially for those of us living in multicultural environments. 1 It is quite unusual in this age . In particular, she considers the effect anger has on an individual, illustrating the frustrating conundrum many people of color experience when they encounter small instances of bigotry (often called microaggressions) and are expected to simply let these things go. You are told to use the back entrance of her house because this is where patients go to get trauma counseling. 3, 2019, pp. Citizen: An American Lyric. It's a moment like any other. Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. 475490., doi:10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.475. Teaching Citizen by Claudia Rankine is a perfect text for such spaces. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. 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. 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. Although this is meant to help avoid misunderstandings, oftentimes too much is understood. Jenn Northington. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. 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). Claudia Rankine's acclaimed 2014 poetry book "Citizen" was a potent and incisive meditation on race. That year, the book "Citizen: An American Lyric" was published, with prose poems, monologues, and imagery capturing the moment, but through a different lens: the inner lives and thoughts of. The narrator contemplates why this person feels comfortable saying this in front of her. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. 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). When you get back, apologies are exchanged and you tell your friend to use the backyard next time he needs to make a phone call. The erasure of Black people is a theme that is referenced throughout Citizen.Rankine describes this erasure of self as systemic, as ordinary (32). 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. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Nick Laird. 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.. 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. Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. 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. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] At a glance, the interactions seem to be simple misunderstandings - friends mistaken for strangers, frustrations incorrectly categorized as racial, or just honest mistakes. 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. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. 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 describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. Lyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen. American Literary History, vol. RANKINE, 2016. Gang-bangers. Suduiko, Aaron ed. 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. In the photograph, there are no black bodies hanging, just the space where the two black bodies once were (Chan 158). In the very last story, the racist realization is shouted down on the narrator. 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. At one point, she attends a reading by a humorist who implies that its common for white people to laugh at racist jokes in private, adding that most people wouldnt laugh at this kind of joke if they were out in public where black people might overhear them. 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). Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. This reminds the narrator of a medical term "John Henryismfor people exposed to stresses stemming from racism" (16). Placed right after the Jena Six poem, the images allude to the trappings of Black boys in the two institutions of schools and prison shown in the images double entendre. The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. Hoping he was well-intentioned, the woman answered . I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. The protagonist is reacting to an encounter with "the wrong words" as one would to the taste of "a bad egg.". Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. 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). Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. Little Girl, courtesy of Kate Clark and Kate Clark Studio, New York. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. The pronoun barely [holds] the person together (71). The voice is a symbol for the self. 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. 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. Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. For Rankine, there is no escaping the path from school to prison. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. 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. 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. You can also submit your own questions for Claudia Rankine on our Google form. Ratik, Asokan. 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. Skillman, Nikki. Male II & I. After a tense pause, he tells her that he can take his calls wherever he wants, and the protagonist is instantly embarrassed for telling him otherwise. The emptinessthe lack of a corpse or a live body or faceis a literal representation of the erasure of African-Americans. Medically, "John Henryism . 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). The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. She says the things that we have all said and describes situations we have all been in. The way the content is organized, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in. By Parul Sehgal, Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2015. The narrator assures her: "The world is wrong. Did you win? her partner asks. The first section of Citizen combines dozens of racist interactions into one cohesive chapter. 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. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. 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. Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. It's raining outside and the leaves on the trees are more vibrant because of it. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. 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. Magnificent. The question itself responds to an incident at the 2004 U.S. Open, during which, Williams loses her temper after a Rankine switches between several speakers, although the reader may not be informed of these switches at all. 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. Figure 4. A damn hard read but a damn necessary one. What did she just do? Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. You nobody. What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. Her son went to another prestigious university instead. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. Claudia Rankine (2014). These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. 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. Analysis Of Citizen By Claudia Rankine. 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. Look at the cover. Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of . She repeats this again when she says, youre not sick, not crazy / not angry, not sad / Its just this, youre injured (145). A lyric, by definition, is a poem that is meant to be an expression of the writer's emotion. 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 way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. 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. 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. She teaches at Yale and is also the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . He says he will call wherever he wants. 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