For the past century, schoolchildren in the United States have been given Walt Whitman’s poems the moment their imaginations kick up a thrumming like cicadas in August. The bearded bard’s barbaric yawp in “Leaves of Grass”—“I am large, I contain multitudes”—has been treated like the libretto to America’s proclaimed ideals: the concepts of freedom and liberty, equality and the right to happiness, etched into the nation’s founding documents. Yet right alongside these great notions—in the three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as a fraction of a human being—live some other ideas. Namely, those of exclusion, white supremacy, and justice for some, not all.
The history of the United States is the story of how these competing ideas clash, creating a racial space—a contested field where the fantasies, projections, myths, and fears produced by this collision enact themselves. In daily life and in culture. What it means in this context to have a self is a very different thing depending on where you are placed (or place yourself) in this racial field. What is defined as singing? What does it mean to have a body? To celebrate? To make visible—and what needs to be made visible? All of these questions power the work of Claudia Rankine. Drawing from the worlds of theater, visual art, popular culture, and poetry, she has fashioned a way of exposing these questions that is unique, powerful, and so vital that it feels as if America finally has a bard not just for its ideals but for the reality in which we live.
For most readers, Rankine’s voice emerged in 2014, the year she published Citizen, a lyric essay, featuring artwork from her partner, John Lucas, that collages together intimate tales of racially charged encounters, told in the second person, with imagined or edited accounts of recent shootings of unarmed young Black men. The mixture of the second-person’s collusion requirement—in reading, you, the reader, become the you who speaks—and the distance required to look at the various images creates a dynamic reading experience. You cannot simply regard the book and its ideas without confronting the assumptions you bring to it. Are the exhaustion, fury, sadness, and constant vigilance that the “you” voice describes new to you? Is it a relief to hear these feelings aired aloud? All too familiar, infuriating? Do the images Rankine collects and curates accept or refuse where you wish to place them?
Citizen was originally published after the long, hot, soul-sickening summer of 2014. Eric Garner strangled by several police officers while protesting, “I can’t breathe.” Michael Brown shot on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson, his body left there for hours. All of these images and more were played and replayed, as if simply being exposed to Black death was enough for those (mostly white) bewildered by this carnage to understand it or their place within it. In truth, incidents like these have happened and continue to happen in America. (More unarmed Black men were shot in 2018 than in 2014, at a rate of five to one whites. The flagrant murder of George Floyd, in 2020, ignited a summer of pandemic-defying marches, historic ones in terms of scale and duration, and yet, in 2022, the trend of killings was higher still.) One of the reasons Rankine’s book struck such a chord then, and still does now, is that it acknowledges this terrible ongoingness and also its invisibility to whites. But it also reveals how these most lethal forms of racism are the tip of an iceberg of often-unrecorded encounters—microaggressions—that every non-white American will be deeply familiar with, interactions (sometimes even daily ones) that make the recipient feel destabilized, highly visible, embarrassed, hurt, less than, degraded, or depressed.
The setting and format of these interactions, as Rankine depicts them, make it impossible for many liberal white readers to opt out of the problem. Because this is their world, the universe of organic salads and of academe and of elite-status seating arrangements of airlines; even if people of color are entitled to such spaces, too—whiteness comes with the presumption of policing access to them, an entitlement Citizen makes clear. One of the many questions a reader of this book must ask is, Where did you put yourself in these situations? Was the ripple of threat a surprise? For the you who narrates Citizen, these settings are always a charged field. “Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel,” goes one segment, “you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.”
The variety, intensity, and volume of these experiences lend Citizen the feeling of a reckoning; the way Rankine writes this into the body gives it overwhelming force and poetic power. Just prior to this incident, the book describes how such encounters lodge in the throat.
Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life, Eventually, she stopped doing this, though she never acknowledged her slippage.
Rankine is a writer who finds so much of what defines us in those slippages—in the silence of you, in the friend’s inability to (or desire not to) acknowledge what was just revealed. In this regard, she has not changed much in 30 years of publishing. From the very beginning of her work, Rankine demonstrated what is often called a restlessness with form—but what ought to be called a distrust of stable narratives, of familiar plots, of nostalgias, and of gazes that are assumed to be somehow indivisible. Even when they turn out to have come from her own life.
Rankine’s debut collection, Nothing in Nature Is Private, is nearly 30 years old. “American Light,” the volume’s first poem, announces a major voice, one in control of its effects, asking big questions about what of the world can be seen and how they are seen.
In the lit landscape, in its peeled
back places, making the space
uncomfortable, representing no fault
in the self is a shadow
of a gesture of wanting, coveting
the American light.
A shadow on ships, in fields
for years, for centuries even, in heat
colored by strokes of red, against
the blue-white-light—and in it
I realize I recognize myself.
Rankine’s eye has always been attuned to light and perspective, asking why certain things are put in the foreground while others in the background. Hers is an art-historical eye, an eye tuned to the figure, to patterns in representation. In this poem, she draws herself into a scene shaded by the context of slavery at the last minute, then is surprised to find herself belonging there. A feeling of being arrested into history recurs across Nothing in Nature Is Private as she inhabits other personas, tells stories in creolized language, writes on love and lovemaking and moments when the world reduces her out of this context into a single feature of her body, its color. One poem reads like an outtake from Citizen. “This morning when the doorbell rang / and a man stood outside my door, / I thought he must be official…he looked past me / in search of—I’ll use his words — / I need to speak to your employer, / to someone who lives here.”
Rankine’s interest as a writer has been to reveal the layers of experience, then to tilt and renovate it from within. If Nothing in Nature Is Private performs this excavation through history and the prism of a family’s journey, The End of the Alphabet tunnels inward; it makes a quarry out of these impulses. Told in stark, brief sections, stutter-stepped by swift, interrupted attempts to make similes—the words “as if” repeating like a failed schematic—it chronicles an experience with pain so great that the self breaks down. Language, pulverized by anguish, becomes a seeking, broken instrument, forever suspended in its labors.
The End of the Alphabet is a difficult book to read, not because its style is impenetrable, but rather because it achieves an overwhelming intensity and then does not relieve the reader of its pressure until the very last page. Sentences run together, uncapitalized, like a voice spoken from within: “rip the mind out. go ahead.” Will this directive unplug the source of pain? Not here. The internal dialogue is taunting, pleading, descriptively cruel. “You. you are defeat composed.” Gradually, though, turning and pivoting on the endless task of describing from within what feels to come from within and without, relief arrives. “Laughter has the house to itself.” It may be simply that the lungs come to the rescue of the mind, but the release of pressure is immense, and the book eddies toward a survived peace with itself. The effect of the book’s arc is harrowing.
Pain and laughter are conjoined in Rankine’s work. In Just Us: An American Conversation, her most recent book, which begins as an attempt to try to talk about whiteness with white men, her encounters ricochet with destabilizing laughter—sometimes at the absurdity of patently unfair situations. In other works of hers, the sound of a moan can break into cackles, as it does in Citizen, or an idiocy can produce disbelieving guffaws, as in her play The White Card, in which a white benefactor is perplexed by a Black artist’s lack of joy when the benefactor unveils his latest acquisition, Michael Brown’s autopsy. Here is the body responding to stimulus: expelling air. Breath. Here is the body as a system of hydraulics that produces meaning that can cut through projected fantasies, falsehoods. It is a system that can even propel a sign of resistance to the forefront when the gears of language have ground to a halt. Humor turns the gears of many scenes in Plot, a book-length meditation on pregnancy, childbirth, creative work, and coupledom. Liv and Erland are expecting a child, and Plot charts the changing landscape of Liv’s body, their space together, his attitudes. At times, their collective bewilderment—their highly intelligent dialogue about her going from one self to a vessel for two—reads like a form of feminist intellectual sitcom.
Not long after becoming pregnant, quoting Virginia Woolf, Liv feels “herself as beached debris,” thinking, if she were an image, that she’d ask: “What kind of log is that?” As their child grows, she feels displaced and, also, simply baffled at the mechanics of it. “How to separate an interior out? / How to keep from polluting one in the other? / How to stay in and out of it?” In a late poem, “The Ouch in Touch,” about making love while nearly due, Rankine describes perfectly the way these dilemmas often animate a woman’s life, from mundane moments to her most intimate. The question they produce: How to experience “the reflected emotion surmounting the real, surviving it.”
We live in a mediated world, and Rankine’s great breakthrough arrived with the method of collaging registers of language, reading them closely, and using this stop-motion study to show Americans seeing ourselves being seen. All while meditating on the forms of projection and using forms of lyric address to create disquieting and intimate effects. This breakthrough began in her 2004 book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the first of a trilogy, which continues through Citizen and concludes with Just Us. Taken as one continuous movement of thought, the trilogy is as tremendous a chronicle of living through an era of rising violence, spectacle, and unraveling public truth as this nation has had to date.
To return to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is to appreciate how rapidly America’s media environment has evolved, at least technologically, in under two decades. The book opens with an image of a television set stuck on interchannel fuzz. It’s a symbol of what follows, wherein the signal of a message or communication is often distorted, and in that way, the book redefines watching as a form of trying to see around one’s misunderstandings—or limitations. The poet finds her father, forlorn on their front steps, the day his mother died. He says not a word, but his posture tells her everything she needs to know. A few segments later, the speaker—now writing as “you”—calls a suicide hotline, wondering: “Am I dead?” Moments later, an ambulance attendant turns up. “By law, I will have to restrain you,” he explains, with firm delicacy. “His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.”
Much of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is about the gap between seeing things and being inside them, between knowing a thing and remembering it. Friends of the speaker begin to die of cancer. Another develops Alzheimer’s, clinging to his dignity by writing out a sentence, “THIS IS THE MOST MISERABLE IN MY LIFE.” Meantime, Bush wins the second election but cannot remember basic details about the horrific dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in his home state of Texas. How, the book wonders, do we live in states of relative pain, where some of it is invisible and forgettable, while other pain is intolerable? The book is a kind of psychopharmacology of unseen pain: of drugs and remedies, of sayings and repressed feelings, quietly shared confessions among people of color. Of breakdowns.
In many ways, this is the world of unseen suffering that finally surfaces into a specific, acute description in Citizen. “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is,” Rankine writes in Citizen. “Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it. This makes the first person a symbol for something. The pronoun barely holding the person together.”
On the basis of Citizen, Rankine was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the proceeds of which she used to help fund the Racial Imaginary Institute in Manhattan, the point of which is to study the ways our lives are being affected by people’s understandings and misconceptions of race. Whiteness—often neglected in conversations about race that are driven by whites—is at the heart of its project. What props up whiteness? What beliefs does it hold dear? Why is it not seen so often by those who live within it? These are the questions Rankine is most obsessed with today. As the Black artist Charlotte tells the older white benefactor in The White Card, “your imagination, like mine, like everyone’s, is a racial imagination, except you don’t really think of yourself as having a race and being shaped by the belief of that race.”
Just Us concludes Rankine’s trilogy with the author in the role of questioner, confronting assumptions of whiteness as they happen. Why must a man, with whom she has been having a pleasant transatlantic airline flight chat, punctuate the moment of their greatest comfort, her finally letting her guard down, with, “I don’t see color”? Whereas in Citizen Rankine often describes the effect of these interactions on her, or “you,” she starts conversations in Just Us. In this particular moment on the flight, she replies sharply to her new acquaintance, and later, he writes her a letter, excerpted in the book with his permission.
This is one of more promising interactions, in which the highlight Rankine places upon a deflective move leads to a continued conversation. Others are less so, and they often have to do with whiteness exercising one of its most intricate privileges: the ability not to see itself. To step outside what it is declared to be. Leaving a party, for example, Rankine is “paused in the hallway in someone else’s home when a man approaches to tell me he thinks his greatest privilege is his height.” At a play in which the fourth wall is broken and a Black actor asks white audience members to come onstage, the white person with whom Rankine has attended stays in her seat. “My tension begins to couple with a building resentment against my white friend. I feel betrayed by her.” When the play is over, she says to her friend: “I didn’t know you were black.”
One of the most thrilling aspects of Rankine’s trilogy is watching the way she begins to deploy herself in scenarios—not only her life and her history but herself as a kind of actor—and how this risk in the work has borne unexpected fruit. In this theater scene, for example, the way that she wields a rolling series of questions is similar to the interrogations the speaker has of herself and interactions in Citizen. Two pages after she announces her feeling of betrayal at the play, Rankine continues,
Is my friend’s refusal to move, to be seen moving, a move she needed to make? Is it a message, a performance of one? Is she telling the black audience, you all don’t get to look at me. You don’t get to see me as a white specimen. This is fucked up, the man behind me had said. The unconscious, as I understand it, can lose context or perspective. Maybe my friend cannot bear to be told what to do, and how that started and where it will end has little to do with her whiteness or everything to do with her whiteness. My perception of a blind spot around racial dynamics could lead to a larger discussion of white feminism and white entitlement.
Those questions and thoughts usher in the one she eventually asks out loud: Why didn’t you go onto the stage? Rankine’s friend’s response, “I didn’t want to,” both is and isn’t an answer. When Rankine writes up this experience, she hands it to the friend, as much to be sure she hasn’t misrepresented the event but also, possibly, as a provocation. It works. The friend replies and acknowledges her dodge of what had been a moment to feel a segregation and that it worked in opposite. “And then she did something I didn’t expect but that explains why we are friends,” Rankine writes. “She sat down and wrote.”
Just Us invites white readers to share in this burden of America. The isolation in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which is carried through Citizen as a burden of vulnerability, emerges differently in Just Us as a burden to carry alone the weight of American history—and what it means to come from a nation that is founded on genocide and slavery but says that all people are created equal. As Toni Morrison reminded in the dedication to her masterpiece Beloved, “Sixty Million and more” perished as a result of transatlantic slavery, which depended on an idea of race that ranked whites higher than Blacks. Without it, slavery would have been unimaginable. The founders of the United States couldn’t imagine their way out of the imprisoning fallacies of their new creation of race. Rankine’s work is a profound demonstration of the complex and beautiful ways it is yet possible to try.•
Join us on April 20 at 5 p.m., when Rankine will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Helga Davis to discuss her landmark book Citizen: An American Lyric. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
