California Book Club host John Freeman started off an hour-long discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric by noting the beautiful and disturbing images in the book. When Rankine joined, he asked her about why the book got its bold title. Rankine responded that all of her books begin with the title “Danger: Will Robinson.” She has many files on her computer, but she never knows which is the work she’s looking for because they all have this title. This book got its title from a tennis match with huge cameras, featuring Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka at the U.S. Open Tennis Championships. It was sponsored by Citizen, and she thought, “That’s it. That’s the title.”
Freeman asked her about the origins of Situations, the videos she’s made with her spouse, John Lucas, in which each video dialogues with a major event such as Hurricane Katrina, and which are part of Citizen. Rankine said the first piece she and Lucas wrote was based on CNN coverage of the hurricane. “We were watching the coverage.… Weeks before, they were talking about the levee breaking, and it was located in communities of color. And then the storm came and you thought, Why are they not evacuating those neighborhoods?”
Situations grew organically out of that. Rankine tired of hearing people say, “How did this happen? How could something like this happen in the United States?” And she thought, “When did America start caring about Black people? What planet do you live on?” She wanted “to build a trajectory where those very people who were asking, ‘How did this happen?’” were on a daily basis asking egregious things of people of color and to show how this was the same trajectory that arrives at a police killing or Katrina.
Freeman asked her how many of the experiences she wrote about in Citizen were ones that happened to her, versus ones that happened to other people. Rankine responded that she had conversations with people in which she asked them if they could tell her a time when they were doing something ordinary and someone else said something that rerouted them emotionally, where they “understood the comment was only happening because of their skin color.” Many stories were told to her multiple times, but the ones that wound up in the book are there because of the way they were told.
Freeman commented that the book is deeply collaborative in how it portrays experience. Rankine said that it’s been embraced by many people in her community because they recognize themselves: “They are experiences that we all share. Slightly different.” She continued, “I don’t think I would have been able to communicate the vastness of the experiences if I were just pulling from myself.”
While she was working on Citizen, she was in treatment for cancer. She said it was interesting to work on a book when you think that anything could happen—that it could be the end and a goodbye. “It seemed like the perfect time, actually, to look at the way one feels about what the body can hold,” she said.
When special guest Helga Davis—who had previously spoken with Rankine for her podcast, Helga—joined the discussion, she referred back to an earlier part of the conversation and commented that she couldn’t help but feel that nothing had changed and that in this moment, the ground is the same ground that has always been there.
Rankine commented that she’s often asked a horrible question: “Can we be hopeful when we are constantly being confronted with the same, same, same sameness of samenesses?” She said, “We can argue about 1619 as the beginning of enslavement or we can argue about—but it doesn’t matter. The devaluation, the dehumanization…continues.”
In the course of their discussion, Davis shared an anecdote about a Columbia University student who was stopping strangers on the street to ask them questions about love. “She asked me, Do I believe in love for our society? And I just said no. I said I think it’s ridiculous, and these are the questions that keep us in this place of hope and that keep us wrapped up in what is not the question.” Davis remarked that the real question is, “What work are you doing right where you’re standing, right there?”
Rankine agreed: “And in relation to the person next to you. Because that—I think we have some control. How I treat you—I have some control over that.”•
If you are at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, April 22 and 23, come by the Alta booth (#111) to say hi and meet some of our authors and contributors. Join us on May 18 at 5 p.m., when Percival Everett will appear in conversation with Freeman and a special guest to discuss Telephone. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
