The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Microaggressions exist within and without black communities, among people of color and people of privilege. The physiological costs are high. Claudia Rankine's book Citizen: An American Lyric was a New York Times bestseller and won many awards. He is, the neighbor says, talking to himself. 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. View Citizen - Claudia Rankine (Full Text PDF, searchable).pdf from ENGLISH SL Y2 at Quabbin Regional High School. This sighing is characterized as self-preservation, (Rankine 60) and is repeated multiple times (62, 75, 151), just as breath or breathing is also repeated (55, 107, 156). The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. Reviewed: Citizen: An American Lyric. It was timely fifty years ago. But when the interactions are put together, the reader can understand the "headache-producing" (13) capacity of these interactions. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. Furthermore, Black people like James Craig Anderson are killed on the road, squashed by a pickup truck (92-95). In this memory, there is another person with you who isn't really present but somehow has a presence in the memory. For Rankine, there is no escaping the path from school to prison. African-Americans are still experiencing hardships every day that stem from slavery such as racial profiling, and stereotyping. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. 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. 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. At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. 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. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. . dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of 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. Complete your free account to request a guide. It's a moment like any other. 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 You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. 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. 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). Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. Read it all in one flow. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. 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. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. At a glance, the interactions seem to be simple misunderstandings - friends mistaken for strangers, frustrations incorrectly categorized as racial, or just honest mistakes. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Amid historic times, Claudia Rankine feels a deep sense of obligation. Her repetition of this question beckons us to ask ourselves these questions, and the way the question transitions from a focus on the lingering impact of the event (haveyou seen their faces) to a question of historicity (didyou see their faces) emphasizes the ways these black bodies disappear from life (presence) to death (absence). Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. ", After reading Citizen, its hard not to hear Rankines voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. 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. Rankine narrates another handful of uncomfortable instances in which the unnamed protagonist is forced to quietly endure racism. By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen. Struggling with distance learning? Words can enter the day like "a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse" (15). No longer can 'you' abide by these misunderstandings, because you understand them too well. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. Courtesy of John Lucas. 1, 2018, pp. I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. 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. Anyway, I read this is a single sitting in bed and recommend it to everyone. What did he say? 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. Memories are told through a second-person point of view, inviting the reader to experience them firsthand instead of at a distance. Using frame-by-frame photographs that show the progression leading to the headbutt, Rankine quotes a number of writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. Stand where you are. In an article discussing the Black Lives/White Backgrounds of Rankines Citizen, Bella Adams states: the blank and typically white backgrounds on which Rankines words and images appear (69) is representative of the hierarchical racial formation that is rendered nearly invisible by its colour (white) and positioning (background) in the contemporary, so-called colour-blind or post-racial United States (55). Teachers and parents! While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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). 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. 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. The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great 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. 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. 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. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. They have become a you: You nothing. A friend mentions a theoretical construct of the self divided into the 'self self' and the 'historical self'. Rankines deliberate labelling of her work as lyric challenges the historical whiteness of the lyric form. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. The separation of the Black and white subjects acts as a visual metaphor for the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, as the Black and white subjects are separatednot only by the wooden frame of the image, but by the page itself. In keeping with this indication that its difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called Jim Crow Rd. by the photographer Michael David Murphy. The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. It wasnt a match, she replies. Biss, Eula. Ratik, Asokan. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. 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). Gang-bangers. These are called microaggressions. . The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" 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. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. 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. Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, Yes, and the body has memory. Essays for Citizen: An American Lyric. 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). 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. So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . 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. 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. She repeats this again when she says, youre not sick, not crazy / not angry, not sad / Its just this, youre injured (145). 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 . I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. 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. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. 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. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. 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. This confounds and seemingly irks him, prompting the protagonist to wonder why he would think itd be difficult to properly feel the injustice wheeled at a person of another race. This 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. Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". Rankine stresses the importance of remembering because forgetting is part of the erasure. 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. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Jenn Northington. The voice is a symbol for the self. 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). 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 protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. 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). LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. What that something else . 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. It was a lesson., Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs 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. You (Rankine 142). Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. You can also submit your own questions for Claudia Rankine on our Google form. 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. Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. You can't put the past behind you. 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. Eugene Jarecki, 2003) is about racial injustice. The artwork which is featured on the coverDavid Hammons In the Hood depicts a black hood floating in a white space. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Rankine stays with the unnamed protagonist, who in response to racist comments constantly asks herself things like, What did he just say? and Did I hear what I think I heard? The problem, she realizes, is that racism is hard to cope with because before people of color can process instances of bigotry, they have to experience them. Citizen: An American Lyric essays are academic essays for citation. Nick Laird is a poet and novelist who teaches at NYU and Queen's University, Belfast, where he is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". 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 These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. 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). It just often makes that friendship painful. 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). At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. "Yes, of course, you say" (20). In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . 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). 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. 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. 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. Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. Did you win? her partner asks. It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. Rankines deliberate omission of the commas is powerful. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. 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. 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. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. 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 . It's the thing that opens out to something else. Best to drive through the moment instead of dwelling on it. 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. Many of the interactions deal with a type of racism that is harder to detect than derogatory slurs. Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. Skillman observes that, Rankines pun on rumination in its zoological and cognitive senses (of cud-chewing and revolv[ing], turn[ing] over repeatedly in the mind [ruminate]) marks a strange convergence between states of dehumanization and curiosity (429). By my middling review, I definitely dont mean to take away anything from. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. 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. Its buried in you; its turned your flesh into its own cupboard (63). 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. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. 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. "Citizen: An American Lyric", p.124, Macmillan . Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Teaching Citizen by Claudia Rankine is a perfect text for such spaces. A man in line refers to boisterous teenagers in the Starbucks as niggers. As the chapter progresses, so does the strength of the negative feeling produced. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] 52, no. Analysis Of Citizen By Claudia Rankine. Its a quick listen at 1.5 hours. Chingonyi, Kayo. Page forty-one describes an incident about a friend rushing to meet with another friend in the "distant neighborhood of Santa Monica . 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. 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). The same structures from the past exist today, but perhaps it has become less obvious, as seen in the almost invisible frames of Weems photograph. The iconic image of American fear. The first of these scripts is made up of quotes that the couple has taken from CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the terrible aftermath of the disaster. 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