In Triage, Claudia Rankine’s new blend of essayistic prose, memoir, and art criticism, the narrator falls in the street and lands in the triage center. “If only triage existed before the collapse,” the narrator, who may or may not be Rankine, says. “I think much of my life I was awaiting the one who would act, awaiting the moment that would coexist compatibly, or, more precisely, commensurately with what was being experienced.” Indeed, the “toomuchness” of the world can take anyone down, the narrator reflects as the doctor pulls her dislocated fingers back into place.
Triage follows the narrator’s friendship with another character, named only “the theorist,” beginning in college, where they invent a game of “collapse.” Whenever they see each other around campus, they spontaneously fall to the ground together. Other students either get it or don’t. “[We] stayed vigilant to our falling as our way of apprehending life and all its crimes, every cry, taken in with each breath,” Rankine writes. “The collapse was an antidote to an unbearable but borne disturbance we glimpsed in the face of each other.”
Soon enough, as their friendship progresses, the collapse functions on additional levels. It’s not only a personal gesture but also a reference to global meltdown, as the two separately struggle to deal with the everyday realities of economic disaster, xenophobia, white supremacy, and politicized Black bodies, plus the refugee crisis, climate destruction, and genocide.
As the narrator and the theorist age and refine their political voices, they also develop differing responses to the injustices of the world. We follow the arc of their friendship; we learn about their wounded childhoods, which haunt each of them in distinct ways. New methods of articulating their positions arise. And then come the questions. Is collapse an alternative to surrender? Has naming fascism ever actually stopped fascism? Is silence capitulation?
That last one, about silence, dominates the narrator’s struggle. The pair part ways and keep in touch however they can, even as their professional lives straddle different trajectories. The theorist blossoms into a combative activist and scholar, relentless in their refusal to accept the world’s toomuchness, while the narrator settles into complacency and feels “conquered by the discomfort of comfort.”
As the theorist travels, teaches, writes books, and sounds off, the narrator finds solace in the poetic realm of metaphor. She is especially drawn to couches, imbuing them with symbolic value: “From within the collapse, the couch seemed a place to land.… A symmetry persists in a couch’s function to receive and our need to fall.” Inspired by both Antigone of the ancient Greek tragedy and the psychotherapist Sana Goldberg, the narrator discovers the couch as an adequate construction, a place where the fatigued body and psyche might launch into self-care more productively. Writes Rankine, “When Goldberg handed over the phrase ‘inner body unlearning’ from her analytic work, I knew it was what drew me to the couch in my own writings.”
Thus numerous photos of couches, among other artworks, accompany the text: Cement couches. Repurposed couches. Dysfunctional couches. Or couches distorted beyond their original intention. Rankine uses the couches to help fuse the political with the poetic, developing a measured response to global grief as the planet takes a turn for the worse.
At one point, a man comes over to clean the carpets. He tells the narrator that her velvet couch absorbs dead skin, dust particles, and dirt much faster. “Faster than what?” she responds, but the noise of the machinery drowns her out. “Left to my own reason, it occurred to me, the velvet of the couch functioned like grief—silently absorbing bodies,” Rankine writes, her style fusing poetry and art criticism.
The narrator requires stillness; she cannot perform the extroverted behavior of the theorist. Jennifer Packer’s painting Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!) features a Black man collapsed on a couch, alerting Rankine to a familiar flavor of exhaustion. “Embedded in its quietude, in the oil and brushstrokes, resided a world, lonely and cold,” she explains, adding that the intangible hung low, grabbing hold of her. “The colors black and blue found me, though the painting’s yellow covered everything.”
David Hammons’s sculpture Hair Relaxer also makes an appearance. A classic white ladies’ fainting couch is covered in what appears to be dirt but is actually black hair, a critique of Black capitulation to white beauty standards.
As they both reach their 60s, the narrator reunites with the theorist to view some artwork. Despite all the time spent in art museums in their 20s, the latter now seems unsatisfied with the narrator’s belief that a consideration of visual art is empowering. The theorist demands actions and decisions, while the narrator desires a more poetic response to the ruinous world around us. Likewise, the narrator resents the theorist’s ability to move into “affective drama and out of the daily negotiation of the acceptance of the sheer brutality of humans.”
Even as the book nears conclusion, their friendship remains characterized, if not strained, by a dichotomy many of us might recognize: silences, routines, and quietude versus determined, concrete responses to the toomuchness of everyday life, in both its personal and its political dimensions. We then consider: Silence might not mean complacency. It might reveal an expertise at navigating the area between stimulus and response.
Maybe those two approaches are indeed halves of the same person, opposite yet complementary forces that, when properly harmonized, just might stand a better chance at managing the collapse.•
Gary Singh’s byline has appeared over 1,500 times, including on newspaper columns, travel essays, art and music criticism, profiles, business journalism, lifestyle articles, poetry, and short fiction. He is the author of three books, including The Unforgettable San Jose Earthquakes: Momentous Stories on and off the Field, published in 2024.
