In a video that routinely makes its rounds on social media, James Baldwin tells an interviewer, “You always told me it takes time.… How much time do you want for your progress?” Though the clip has been removed from its original context, Baldwin’s point is clear: you (whoever that might be, whenever it might be) are focusing on the wrong thing. In the clip, of course, Baldwin’s you is white America, but as commentators have often said of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a you can also function a bit more capaciously. “You take in things you don’t want all the time,” she writes. “You…want time to function as a power wash.” The you isn’t always either-or, white or Black, you or me or her. The you blurs across the book. It is blurred across time.
Perhaps it was impossible to consider when the book was still new, but Rankine also takes a capacious approach to time—a word that appears in 41 instances across the book’s lyric, prose, experimental scenes, and poetry. Time, times, sometimes. (The word progress never appears.) We’re meant to consider not only the who of the you alone but also the when, its duration, how time goes on and on and on. “Who did what to whom on which day?” the speaker asks, collapsing the details and sites of aggression in its narratives into a singular stream of interchangeable moments. Regardless of what year we’re reading in, like the speaker, we begin to question: When are we?
Take, for example, the book’s second section, which moves from a reflection on Hennessy Youngman and Zora Neale Hurston into a reflection on Venus and Serena Williams as figures “thrown against a sharp white background.” Rankine introduces the Williams sisters into Citizen’s landscape to demonstrate that the Williamses’ complex humanness is reduced to a symbol. She serves up scenes of petty umpires and snobby audiences poking at Serena across her career. It feels as if all these authorities of the lily-white tennis world are prodding her on purpose, watching and waiting for her to combust.
It was as if Rankine predicted the future: the difficulty that she describes in the book followed Serena across the next decade—in 2015, when she was poised for a 22nd Grand Slam win, and in 2018, when she lost in the finals of the U.S. Open to Naomi Osaka. But Rankine wasn’t forecasting the future. She was just recording what had already happened. To Rankine, it was a lived reality; to others, it was what would become more widely recognized as misogynoir. She reproduces Serena’s words for us: “Aren’t you the one that screwed me over last time here?” She makes the identities of the aggressors (the umpire, the you) and the instances in time indistinguishable: both past and future lead to the same ends. Citizen renders these aggressions undeniable. They’re endless. They recur. On the tennis court, in therapy, in your place of work, in your neighborhood watch. It’s intolerable, and Rankine tells us so: “The world is wrong.”
Citizen and its conception of time are structured like a tennis match. The moves are the same: all serves, returns, points, and matches—slight variations making up the tense sport of it. Rankine’s questions echo across the book’s sections: “Why do you feel comfortable saying this to me?” then later, multiple times, “What did you say?” then later, “What do you mean? / Exactly, what do you mean?” They compound on one another, even as they’re volleyed back and forth. Anti-Blackness in America is as easy as a series of questions. It’s as easy as sport, televised for the world: “There are no memories to remember, just the ball going back and forth.”
The final sequence of the book’s seventh section is signposted with “July 13, 2013”—the date George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Instead of addressing this explicitly, Rankine’s speaker tells of a time waiting in a parked car when a white woman, after seeing her, “backed up and parked on the other side of the lot.” But the speaker can’t question the woman about why. The speaker must go. She is “expected on court.” This detail is a surprise both to us and the speaker’s partner, who is impelled to ask if she won. But he’s asking the wrong question: “It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.”
Citizen’s narratives aren’t resolved by the end of the book, nor are they presented as solutions. Instead, Rankine offers us knowledge. There isn’t a single battle to be won. There is a lesson to be learned. The court will be reset, and we can begin again. We can study the patterns, and maybe we can predict the moves. The rally will be a long one. We should tighten our grip.•
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.
