David L. Ulin: Good evening everybody, welcome back to the California Book Club. We've got a very exciting program tonight with Claudia Rankine, discussing her essential book, Citizen in Conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman, and our special guest Helga Davis.
Before we get to get to the interview, I want to talk a little bit about the California Book Club and Alta Journal; I'm the books editor of Alta Journal.
Alta Journal is a quarterly magazine published out of San Francisco with a very active web presence about California history, California culture, and California literature. The book club grew out of an essay that was published in the magazine by John Freeman about the new California cannon, and every month we welcome a California writer to discuss an iconic and essential work of contemporary California literature. As I mentioned, tonight's guest is Claudia Rankine and the book that we'll be discussing is Citizen.
Before, again, I'd like to explain the book club and our partners. The California Book Club's monthly events and continuous content leading up to each book club meeting are always free. If you haven't had the chance to check it out, you'll definitely want to.
There are essays from numerous contributors with reflections on the work under consideration, essays related to that work, there's an excerpt of Citizen, and other features. All of this is included in our weekly California Book Club newsletter, which is also free. So sign up, and take a look, and come visit with us every month while as we discuss California literature.
We couldn't do this without our partners, so I want to take a moment to acknowledge them. They are, Book Passage, Book Soup, Books Inc. Bookshop, Bookshop West Portal, Diesel: A Bookstore, Green Apple Books, the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West, the Los Angeles Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library, Narrative Magazine, Vromans Bookstore, and Zyzzyva. And, a special congratulations to Oscar Villalon, who is one of our selection committee members who has just been named the new editor of Zyzzyva.
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You can find out more about that at altaonline.com/join, or watch tomorrow's thank you email for a link to the deal. You can also join Alta as a digital member for $3 a month. All of these options are good options and you'll be reading some amazing work.
In any case, it really is a thrill tonight to welcome Claudia Rankine. I'm a huge admirer of this book and of her and her work, and so without further ado, let me introduce a colleague, John Freeman to start the proceedings. John?
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Thank you everyone for coming from New Orleans, from Alaska, from where I lived for a while in downtown Carmichael. It's a pleasure to be here with Helga Davis and Claudia Rankine to be talking tonight about Citizen. The point of this book club, among others in terms of sharing what we felt were great books written in, or about, or from, or by Californians, was also to look the book breeding new ground.
The word canon can sound contentious, except when you realize hopefully the best of it is to allow us a container for the complexity of existence. And the canon often needs updating, because existence changes.
And, the last 20 years have been heavily mediated in our lives, as in, not only has American life continued, but we've also watched it continuing. We've watched ourselves continuing and suffering. And one of the extraordinary things about Claudia Rankine's work is not only the way that she has found a new mode in collaging poetry, interviews, found documentary recordings, encapsulating a reality that is driven often through racist means.
She's also in a trilogy that began with Don't Let Me Be Lonely, which is also subtitled an American Lyric. Citizen, the book we're going to be talking about tonight and her most recent nonfiction and poetry work, Just Us. She's managed to find a way to talk about whiteness and racial difference, and the ways that American life has created films of suffering, and what it means to live within those as a white person, as a Black person.
The poems in Citizen are beautiful. They have extraordinary lines. The images that she has in there are beautiful and disturbing. And the stories that come through the whole book in second person sometimes are instantly affecting, because they're told in the second person. And as a result, as a reader, you have to decide whether you are the you who's having these experiences, where something has been said, which is a microaggression and makes you the listener hypervisible.
It's an extraordinary book. I'm so pleased to have her with us tonight to talk about it, how she wrote it, and where she's going with her work now. Please join me in welcoming Claudia Rankine.
Claudia Rankine: Hi, John. It's so nice to be here with you.
Freeman: It's nice to be here with you too. I want to start with just the really basic question about the word citizen. It appears 150 pages into the book. It's a very bold statement to put that at the heart of the book. When did you realize that this book would be called Citizen? And why Citizen?
Rankine: All my books begin with the title, "Danger, Will Robinson." I have many files in my computer, I never know which book it is, because they're all called, "Danger, Will Robinson."
But I was at a tennis match, and there was the huge cameras, and Serena and Victoria Azarenka were playing at the U.S. Open Final. And, it was being sponsored by Citizen Bank. And, I thought, "That's it. That's the title. Citizen."
Freeman: So, how did this book, as I tried to describe, it brings together poetry, there are situational second person essays in which a speaker is describing interactions with people in which they, she, become hypervisible as a result of interaction based on racial assumptions.
There are what could be described as found poems or scripts for situation videos that you make with John Lucas, one of which is composed of All Things Said during the CNN coverage of Katrina.
Orchestrating this must have been a fantastic and extremely difficult task. And so, I want to know where did the project fully begin? Was it through talking to friends? Were you taking notes? Was there a poem or a lyric that began?
Rankine: The project actually began with the situation videos. The very first piece written was written based on those CNN interviews. I was living at the time in Houston, and we were watching the coverage and it was one of those weird things where weeks before they were talking about the levee breaking and that it was located in communities of color and that they would all... And then, the storm came and you thought, "Why are they not evacuating those neighborhoods? Because they have told us they're going to be underwater."
And then, it happened. And then, Katrina happened. And we had been taping with no purpose. I don't know why we were taping it, but we were taping it.
And so, that was the very first one. And, it organically grew out of that, because that was a huge event. But, I got very tired of people saying to me... And excuse me, but mostly white people saying to me, "How did this happen? How could something like this happen in the United States?" And I thought, "When did America start caring about black people? What planet do you live on?"
And so, I wanted to build a trajectory where those very people who were asking how did this happen, in their day-to-day lives were saying some of the most egregious things to people of color. And to show how that builds into... It's a very same trajectory that arrives you at a police killing or Katrina.
Freeman: The parts of the book where you're pulling from conversations with friends, or you're recording interactions in second person. How many of those were based on your experience, versus experiences that you had described to you?
Obviously later in the book you've talked to a friend who's a lawyer who's frequently pulled over by the police anytime there's an APB for a black man who's allegedly committed a crime.
When you're writing in second person, is that always you?
Rankine: No, I interviewed... Or I don't know if interviewed is the right word, but I had conversations with people.
Freeman: Yeah, sorry, I keep using the word interview, and that's a terrible word.
Rankine: But I simply asked them, "Can you tell me a time when you were doing something ordinary in your day, in your life, and suddenly somebody said or did something that rerouted you? And it rerouted you many times emotionally. It pulled you out of one mood into another. It paused you. You understood the comment was only happening because of your skin color."
And so, many of the stories were told to me multiple times, but the one that ended up in the book ended up because of the way it was told.
Many people talked about not being seen and somebody cutting in front of them in line. And, sometimes you think, "Well, everybody's been cut." But they would say, "Well, this time I knew it was because..."
But then, a friend of mine told me a story. Actually she lives in Los Angeles, or she lives in Southern California. And, she told it in the way that it appears in the book, that the guy cut in front of her, the woman at the counter said, "Sir, she's standing right there. She's next." And then he turned to her and said, "I didn't see you." And she says to him, "You must be in a hurry." And he says to her, "No, I just didn't see you."
And, I was fascinated by the fact that she would've said to him, "You must be in a hurry." I kept thinking, "Why say that to somebody in that situation?" Because you could think of a lot of things you could say. And, it occurred to me that she was giving him an out.
She was giving him an excuse, we can all be in a hurry and just blindly move forward. And he was like, "No, no, no, I didn't see you." And so, it's that telling that would've ended up.
So, I was listening not only for the moments themselves, but for how they were told. And, as you can see, I can say it from memory, because I remember very distinctly when she told it to me.
Obviously, the opening piece about being in grammar school was my experience. And that was because I was trying to think of the first time it occurred to me that someone was saying something based on my race. And, there's a piece that has to do with going to see a film that belongs to me. But many of the others came from these conversations I had.
Freeman: So, in many ways this book written by, orchestrated by, arranged by you is also a deeply collaborative book in the nature of how it portrays experience.
Rankine: I think, that's in a way why it has been embraced by so many in our community, because they recognize not themselves in a one-to-one way, but their experiences that we all share, slightly different, slightly maybe a different thing was said, but it is that. And, I don't think I would've been able to communicate the vastness of the experiences if I were just pulling from myself.
Freeman: When you decide to read from the book, has the book all become part of you, or when you are reading from different sections of the book, are you occasionally remembering the person who told you what you read?
Rankine: Yes, I am. And, I had one friend who said, someone called her up and said, "I read this book by Claudia Rankine. And in it, something happened that happened to you." And the person was like, "Yeah, because I told her about it." Yeah.
Freeman: So what would you read for us tonight? I'm very curious.
Rankine: Well, tonight I thought I would read a more meditative section, rather than the pieces that live in episodes. So, I will do that now.
The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be steward in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did she just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?
Memory is a tough place. You were there. If this is not the truth, it is also not a lie. There are benefits for being to being without nostalgia. Certainly nostalgia and being without nostalgia relieve the past. Sitting here, there are no memories to remember, just the ball going back and forth. Stored up by this external net, the problem is not one of a lack of memories; the problem is simply a lack, a lack before, during, and after. The chin and your cheek fit into the palm of your hand. Feeling better? The ball isn't being returned. Someone is approaching the umpire. Someone is upset now.
You fumble around for the remote to cancel mute. The player says something and the formerly professional umpire looks down from her high chair as if regarding an unreasonable child, a small animal. The commentator wonders if the player will be able to put this incident aside. No one can get behind the feeling that caused the pause in the match, not even the player trying to put her feelings behind her, dumping the ball after ball into the net. Though you can retire with an injury, you can't walk away because you feel bad.
Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go. Come on. Come on. Come on. In due time the ball is going back and forth over the net. Now the sound can be turned back down. Your fingers cover your eyes, press them deep into their sockets - too much commotion, too much for a head remembering to ache. Move on. Let it go. Come on.
Freeman: Thank you so much for that reading. In The End of the Alphabet, you're looking very closely at how language breaks down under pressure. Sometimes pressure on the body, pressure in the form of an illness. And I wanted to talk to you about writing the body in Citizen in the wake of an illness, and how that affected your sense of what a poetic line was, and how to use language about the body.
Rankine: Well, I think, when I was working on Citizen, I had been diagnosed with cancer, and then was in treatment. So it's interesting working on a book when you think anything could happen that it could be the end of all of that, and it could be goodbye to all that.
And so, it seemed like the perfect time actually to look at the way one feels about what the body can hold, in a certain way. I mean, there's a way of looking at Citizen as something that is concerned with the too-muchness of life, and that African-Americans have been asked to carry more than they can carry. And white people have been asked to be in service of the killing of other people, as part of their dailiness. And, both positions should be untenable for all the bodies, in a certain way.
I mean, when you think about the kid who was shot in the head by the guy when he tried to pick up his siblings, or the white woman who was shot when she turned around in the driveway. Both of those situations are situations where suddenly the body seems not to matter, and then to seem only to matter.
These people are like, "We don't want anybody approaching our body." It's a really interesting place that we've arrived in.
Freeman: Yeah, it's astonishing. Especially when you consider both of those arrivals should be greeted by some form of hospitality, rather than instant hostility.
Rankine: Mm-hmm. Exactly.
Freeman: Someone comes to your door, "Hello." Someone pulls into your driveway, "Oh, you look lost." And instead, in both cases, the response is the lethal or attempted lethal violence.
Rankine: And I think for African-Americans that whether you're on the scale of an insult that's coming out of somebody else's mouth, or a gun, it's still the same thing. It's still the feeling of the body not mattering in any way, form, and being asked to hold violence actually.
Freeman: Mm-hmm. I would like to bring in Helga Davis, who is a multidisciplinary artist and vocalist, but is also the host of the podcast, Helga, which is hosted by WNYC. It's in its fifth season, and incredibly impressive for any podcast these days. And she also has a one-hour interview with Claudia Rankine on there. So if you do not get enough Claudia Rankine tonight, which I probably think you will not, you can go over to Helga's podcast. But Helga, come on now, and join us, and take it away.
Helga Davis: I am here. Hey, you.
Rankine: Hey, how are you?
Davis: All our fingered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes. Though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer.
And I wanted to start reading you back to yourself, because there's something very interesting that happened in the beginning of this conversation that John was speaking about breaking new ground and how the container changes. And, I cannot help but feel in this moment that the new ground is the ground, is the same ground, it has always been here. And that the container changing, okay, but the container is still a container. And there is nothing about either of those two things that is serving us as a society and that is serving us as citizens. And so, I'm wondering if you would talk about that a bit.
Rankine: Yeah, I mean-
Davis: Particularly coming from this, which you've already said it, and here we are again.
Rankine: And here we are again. And here we are again.
I'm always at odds with myself around... Because another way of thinking about this question, the horrible question that everybody asks, that you're not asking, but that's in there is, can we be hopeful when we are constantly being confronted with the same, same, same of sameness? And, we can argue about 1619 at the beginning of enslavement, or we can argue about... But it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
The devaluation, the dehumanization, all of that continues. And, it's gotten to the point now, where you have enough dehumanizing black people, as you have the institutions of white supremacy and whiteness doing the job that it was set up to do.
And yet, is there change? There is some change. I think there is change.
But, the real question is, it's not about hope, is where the change lives. Where is it not just the same same?
And, that's a question that I've been thinking about. And, where can we look not for solutions, not for a way for us to stop thinking about these questions, because they remain active, and alive, and dead at the same time? And I really think, I have to say, I think it is in the culture. The culture continues to do its job as a force that keeps certain parts of the population resisting what seems to be inevitable.
Davis: Mm-hmm.
Rankine: And so, the resisting has stayed. And as long as you can keep that going, I think that that is as alive as we get, in a way. But does it mean that a change is going to come? No, I don't think so.
Davis: I agree with you. I mean, someone asked me that recently. I was stopped by a Columbia student on the street who was asking strangers questions about love. And, she asked me, "Do I believe in love for our society?" And I just said, "No. I think it's ridiculous."
And that these are the questions that keep us in this place of hope and that keep us wrapped up in what is not the question.
Rankine: Mm-hmm.
Davis: And, this idea to really just look, and know, and accept that this is crap here. I don't think it's about making the community understand or any of that.
Rankine: Yeah.
Davis: It is what work are you doing where you're standing right there.
Rankine: Mm-hmm. Exactly. And in proximity, and in relation to the person next to you.
Davis: Yes.
Rankine: Because that, I think, we have some control over. How I treat you, I have some control over that.
Davis: Yes.
Rankine: And I think, civility is gone the way of something. But, I still think one-to-one, we have control.
Brian Stevenson always says, "Start proximate." And, that man I think is incredible in living his own advice, in terms of what he's done. And, those of you who haven't read Just Mercy, I say read Just Mercy.
But I don't want be a Debbie Downer, in that, I do think, you and I have a lot of good times.
Davis: Sure.
Rankine: And so, there is a life to be lived. But, how much power do we have inside all of this? I think there is a powerlessness that we have had to negotiate as black women all our lives.
Davis: John, will you come back and join a bit of this part of the discussion?
Freeman: Absolutely. Helga, thank you. And, we'll bring you back in the latter part of the hour as well.
Davis: Great. Thank you.
Freeman: I'm curious about in the middle of the book Citizen, the word "you" begins to repeat and acquire this really interesting sonic quality, where it sometimes it feels like a repetition and sometimes it feels like a different "you."
And, the culmination of this sequence ends with, "No, it's a strange beach. Each body is a strange beach. And if you let in the excess emotion, you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads." And it's this incredible three lines. And the book is constantly sliding away from conclusions towards bigger questions.
And sometimes it slides towards an image and that image of the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads, not your heads, my heads, our heads. Can you talk to us a little bit about that image and how it arrived and what it has come to mean?
You've probably read this line a few times in the last nine years and how people have received it.
Rankine: Well, I don't know how people receive it, but certainly, one of the things that I tried to do in Citizen, and probably the hardest part of writing it, was how do you get the language to be transparent and still hold all of the history?
So, it meant trying to get each word to do all the work it could do in terms of the Atlantic slave trade, in terms of police shootings, and to bring it into a kind of ordinary vernacular that, as Yeats says, "All the stitching and un-stitching would be for naught if it doesn't seem a moment's thought." So, how do you take and make something very simple but not simple, simple... Yeah, simple but not simple.
And, it meant a lot of crossing and a lot of ego. Am I writing this just to say I know it? Take it out. Am I using this word just because I have it as part of my vocabulary? Take it out.
If we can get it to be that the reader can just drop through the language into the flow of what it's communicating, then you've achieved it. So, that line had to do with that. It had to do with bringing in history in the way of this thing is bashing me on my head. This thing is hitting us all, hitting us all.
And I do think it succeeded in that moment.
Freeman: Staying on the word "you," there's a question from an audience member who says the part of the book that you read is the part that she loves the most. A local artist, Amina Robinson believed the African concept of Sankofa, understanding the past so that we can learn from its joys and mistakes.
The question is, "Do you think the past that is buried in 'you' a negative force?"
Rankine: No, no. I mean, it is our history. It's history.
Does it have brutality, and enslavement, and betrayal, and sadness? Yes. Does it also have family, and intimacy, and secession? Yes. So, it's all of that.
It's everything that we are. And, Paul Salon said, "What is it when a conversation has turned into a fight?" And I feel like that's what has happened. The inability of two racists to coexist in the same space, partly because one was forcibly brought here, but nonetheless, has been the struggle of this nation.
And, white people like to say, "No, it's economics." But it's not. Those forces are there. Economics are there. Class struggle is there. Gender, all of it. But, at the end of the day, it's the inability of people to reduce themselves to their humanity, to their humanness. And, holding tight to this idea that they can only exist if they exist relationally and in a position of superiority to somebody else.
Freeman: Is that what you mean in the line where you say, "Join me down here in nowhere"?
Rankine: Exactly.
Freeman: The rhyming and wordplay. I mean, the section is you as a poet talking to yourself to some degree, "Tried rhyme, tried truth, tried epistolary, untruth, tried and tried." And it feels like you're talking through the ways that you've tried to write towards the failures of what you just described, of people unable to relate without relationality and-
Rankine: Exactly. I mean, I was thinking also in that section of Robert Lowell, somebody who came through the tradition was knighted by T. S. Elliot as the next bar, the next poet. And then, had a breakdown talk about the body. Had a breakdown.
And, his shrink said to him, "Write your life." And then he looked at the oppressiveness of this Brahman life that he had come from as a white man. And, everything that carries with it, the supremacy.
And, I was looking at some of the early drafts of his poems, and they had black people in it that he took out in the final drafts. So he was describing scenes that included neighborhoods that were mixed. But when he published the final poems, those things were gone.
Freeman: Was this in for [Life Studies and for] the Union Dead?
Rankine: Yeah. And so, he was in the back of my mind as I was writing that section, I was like, "Join me in the nowhere and maybe we can start again." Of course not. And, he took pieces of people's letters. So that idea of epistolary on truth, he was criticized for using personal letters in his poems.
Freeman: I want to ask you, because you just did laugh, and laughter is a part of this book, but especially of Just Us.
It's force that draws people together in a moment where they're playing roles that are absurd. And sometimes the absurdity reaches such a peak, especially in Just Us, when the speaker, you are at an airport and a man cuts in front of you boldly, brazenly, and you have to laugh, because it's such an extreme demonstration of white male privilege.
But can you talk about using laughter as a literary device within works like these, which are trying to destabilize really, really broken, but intensely persistent narratives?
Rankine: Well, they function in part as release, but there's also a level of absurdity, as you mentioned, inside these moments that the true reaction, and as far as I'm concerned is laughter.
Because, I think, the comic relief of it is the recognition of the absurdity of it. And yet, the power of it. So the two things coexist.
I mean, that guy for example, he is doing what comes naturally to him, because he has been allowed to do it all his life. And, there is something very... I'm writing now about collapsing. That's my new thing. And, the reason I got there was because of Corey Booker, when he was talking to Justice Jackson now, but at the time Judge Jackson, during the confirmation hearings. And he said to her, "I can't stop any of this. This behavior that's going on. But I can talk to you." And then he laughs and he says, "Because I'm so happy that you were here."
Freeman: That was a great moment.
Rankine: Yeah, wasn't that an amazing moment? And I think that laughter he does in that incredible speech, talk he gives, it's a way of both recognizing the absurdity and the power that is coexisting.
And that she has to take for her to get what is next.
And so, I think for me, humor functions like that. It doesn't take away the reality of the power, but it shows the absurdity.
Freeman: I'm very curious, the situation videos that are part of the book are sometimes absurd, sometimes very disturbing. And then I've seen some of them. And, I'm curious how many don't make it into your books, but become just part of a natural process of reaction, and how you differentiate the two.
What is a reaction to a spectacle? What is an artistic refraction of that spectacle? Is a reaction important to put within a work of art? I'm curious how you feel about those things.
Rankine: Well look, I mean, at the end of the day, the book has an arc.
It has everything that's in there is there, because it answers or performs something in my mind, in terms of the trajectory of the book. So, what doesn't make it in was noteworthy to me to respond to, and for John and I to respond to. But, maybe I'm not writing the book where it lives. And so, those still live only as themselves.
Freeman: Mm-hmm.
Rankine: But, were I to write a book where suddenly I think, "Oh..." Because I think as a maker you're constantly storing, but instead of being in closets and on shelves, it's either written down or it's up there in your visual or auditor menu.
Freeman: So, you must have an incredible visual memory for storing things as well as a sonic memory, as well as an eyesight memory. And that's an very unusual triple capacity, because most people seems like they remember in one way.
And I'm curious, if you could talk a little bit about designing this book. John Lucas designed this book. You've written the words and you've recorded some of the words and you've arranged them. And the paper, I assume is a very specific paper so that the images... And, as a artist, this is an incredible degree of control and production. It's hanging your own gallery show.
And, I wonder if this was the first time you ever had that much control over a certain work, and if there was any argument you had to make on its behalf in order to have that level of control. Or if Graywolf just said, "This is great, give us a file and we'll print it."
Rankine: Well, when I was at Grove for The End of the Alphabet and plot, we designed the covers, and they won awards for the covers, because we knew what we were doing I think. And so, they called and said, "John's cover has won an award." So they allowed us to do that.
And, when I moved to Graywolf, with Don't Let Me Be Lonely, they redesigned what we sent them. And, I called Jeff and I said, "Jeff, this won't work for me, because the choices I made in terms of the space on the page, and the font, and even the length of the book had to do with trying to mimic newspaper columns versus something else." And, once I explained why I need made the choices that I made, they very graciously reverted back to the original.
And then, after that conversation, then Citizen and Just Us, we sent them to files. And obviously, there was conversation about paper, and costs, and images, and rights, but ultimately there is not a thing in those books that didn't happen at our dining room table between John and me talking about what's possible.
Freeman: I'll bring Helga back in now who made the point that this device we call a container for stories hasn't changed a whole lot in many degrees. And, it seems like there's a small story about the evolution of technology and its representation of suffering across these three books. Am I getting that wrong or have you seen this or-
Rankine: I mean, yeah, in some ways you could say Don't Let Me Be Lonely now seems very dated, but it's television screens, and Just Us has a reliance on social media and the ability to have many different modes of information coming at you very quickly. So, you're right, the receivership capacity informed each book.
Freeman: ... And your attempt in Just Us is to have a very old-fashioned former media, which is a conversation. And, Helga, I'll pass it to you as a curator of conversations to see if there's something you would like to come back to or take forward that we've been talking about, or a new question of your own.
Davis: I don't think I have a new question, but I do think another element of all of Claudia's work, which mimics the work that I do with my podcast and as a performer is this heightened sense too of listening.
And listening with the body, listening with the eyes, listening with the ears. It's such an important thing that could should be facel for all of us, that we should... That's a hard word too, that it would benefit us as citizens to develop these abilities and know that in doing so, we might change our minds about something.
We might be able to intervene in a situation with our ability to listen. I think it's a big part of all of Claudia's work.
Rankine: No, I agree. I mean, the white space, in the books, was meant to allow for both thinking, and time, and hearing, and seeing within one's own body.
My mother, when she read the book, she's like, "Why is so much white space there?" I'm like, "If you can't use it, you can't know." Yeah.
Freeman: There's a comment from the audience. Christie Kirano says, "Love the white spaces. And after recently rereading House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, I realized the power of the pause."
And, that is something also that you enact and ways that you retell the story of listening, or the story of an interaction is allowing for different forms of pauses, moments where the conversation could go one way, or in some of the interactions in Just Us, you and the person you're speaking with realize what's just happened and live with that interaction, and then go a different way.
And, it's almost like you're enacting poetic meter in-person as a listener, as a speaker.
And, do you ever feel when you're in interactions that are you just out as a person out in the world that this aspect of your artistic life where you've narrated these experiences means that you have unfortunately accumulated more self-consciousness about how to be you, or how to listen, or does that fall away pretty quickly as soon as the Zoom screens go down?
Rankine: No, I think, I live in a world of vigilance. I came out of a very... I'm trying to think of the right word, but a childhood that was filled with erratic people, let's put it that way.
And so, as a child, I learned that for my own welfare, I really needed to pay attention to what was happening and who was at what point in their erratic behavior. And how to modulate that for my own safety.
So, I think that, that has controlled the way I am in the world going forward. It was trial by fire. But now I find it very restful to watch. Sometimes I have to remind myself to go forward.
Sometimes I'm in my head thinking, "Why is that person doing that? Do they realize they've just driven by our turn?" And then, they'll say to me, "Why didn't you tell me I was supposed to turn back there?" But I'm fascinated with what they're doing. I'm like, "What are they doing?" But in fact, they're just spaced out, but whatever.
So, it sometimes works not in a good way. But I just read this great book by Claire Keegan called, Small Things Like These. And, in it, I've learned that what I value when I'm reading is a writer's ability to stay in real-time with me.
And, there's this lovely passage, I'm not going to spoil the narrative, but there's a way in which the protagonist, he ends up doing something but you don't know when he decided to do it.
And that is something I've been thinking about a long time. How she managed to get him there without me knowing he was going there.
And so, I went back and reread it, because I wanted to see where the turn was. I'm still looking for it, but that thing fascinates me.
Freeman: Will you ever write narrative fiction? I mean, I know parts of plot fall a little bit into narrative. Parts of all of your books operate stories in some ways.
But I guess what I'm asking is, because the novel used to mean new and sometimes it doesn't look very new anymore, what would a Claudia Rankine novel look like were you to write one, and have you ever contemplated?
Rankine: I don't know if I could write fiction, but I do know that I love the fiction that I think is poetry. So, I love, for example, As I Lay Dying, I think that is stunning.
I mean, if I were ever to be able to create something like that, I would be very pleased with myself.
I love Virginia Woolf's, To the Lighthouse. There are sections of Tony Morrison's work that Sula or parts of Beloved, where you are reading unlineated poetry.
And some of the best writers, my favorite writers, started out as poets. Coetzee wrote poetry before he wrote Prose. And you see it in a book like the Life & Times of Michael K.
I mean, if that's not poetry, I don't know what is. So, the answer is, if I could just take one of those books and put my name on it, I would be very happy. Or Claire Keegan and Small Things Like These actually.
Freeman: Are you still making more situation videos?
Rankine: We haven't made one in a while. And I don't know why that is, because one of the things I liked about working with John as two people who lived in the same household with different skills is that we could come together and make these things that weren't due.
Nobody was waiting for them, we just made them.
But of late, I don't know. We've both been busy on other projects. He's been working on a lot of policing. He was in Europe at different prisons looking at the Norwegian prisons versus the American prisons, things like that. And so, we haven't really been on the same trajectory of late.
Freeman: When you collaborate together, does it always end up with you doing the same different parts of the project? Because it seems like in Citizen you're often writing the scripts and the words, and he's doing the filming. But have you ever chipped in to bring in film clips yourself to say, "Hey, what if we use these?" I guess what I'm asking is how the collaboration actually breaks down.
Rankine: I mean, there is constant talking in terms of, "No." "Yes." "Maybe. Later." "I don't know." And, even though we haven't made any situation videos, there's certain moments that get stored.
So, I'll say to John, "Let's keep that." Something will happen. I'll see it and I'll say, "Let's hold on to that. You never know when..." And, at some point, I will need it. It will come back. It has started a conversation in my head. And, we'll pull it when we need it.
So we have a storehouse of things. And I would've thought that during the pandemic, since we were both home, we would've done, but we didn't.
Freeman: Helga, you've worked in theater and are a performer. And, a lot of times, tonight and whenever I've heard you speak about your work, Claudia, it's so clear that you have a background in and have written for theater. And, you think in terms of the three dimensionality of the stage.
And Helga, I'm curious, if in your conversation for that hour long podcast, which everyone can go and hear at Helga, if talking to Claudia feels like talking to a director, or if there's a different interaction that happens, not just because she's not your director, but because there's these other elements as of her as a poet, and her as an anthologist, or as a professor, as a public intellectual.
Davis: What has happened with me inside of Claudia's work is that it all feels like it belongs to me. All this language feels like it belongs to me. So, anytime that I've read it in public, or I've read it to myself out loud in my apartment, that language belongs to a pace, a rhythm, a tone that belongs to me as a person and also belongs to me as a performer.
And, it's the language that I can imagine a person just on a stage speaking back to an audience. I think it is that immediate and approachable, but it also requires something of you that maybe isn't spoken or written that has to do with how we sit as citizens, how we watch and how we gaze.
And, I hope that we will write something for me for the stage eventually. Why don't I just say that?
Rankine: Could be true. I mean, we worked together. We wrote a piece together that held Helga performed magnificently, actually. And, we have plans for the future.
Freeman: This is a really tantalizing place to end, and to encourage everyone to go to Helga and listen to their conversation there. I hate quoting Whitman here, but the idea that a person can contain multitudes has in your work achieved a whole new, and I think beautiful and complex meaning with this book that's made of many voices and many registers, and all of them, yours and others.
Thank you for this incredible gift. A book of a decade I think, if not more. And I think we will be living in its possibilities and its enlargements probably for the rest of our lives.
And so, it's just an immense honor to talk to you, and to spend this hour with you, and for everyone who's come, and asked questions, and cheered from the sidelines, thank you. Claudia Rankine, it was a real pleasure. Helga Davis, a pleasure as well.
Rankine: Thank you so much. Thank you, John.
Freeman: Thank you.
Rankine: It's been a pleasure. Helga, as always.
Davis: As always.
Freeman: I think David Ulin comes back now and walks us out.
Ulin: I am here. Thanks to all three of you for a remarkable conversation, John, Claudia, Helga, really. Wonderful. Lots to think about.
I do want to remind everybody that this interview has been recorded and will be available at californiabookclub.com. I'd like to also remind everybody about next month's book, I almost said next week's book, but next month's book. On May 18th, Percival Everett will be here to discuss his novel, Telephone.
I'd like to let everyone who's in LA know, or anyone who's going to be at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, please come by the Alta booth, booth 111. We have contributors, California Book Club writers, and other authors signing books. There's all kinds of stuff happening. So please come by. We would love to see you all in-person.
Reminder about the sale on the Alta membership for California Book Club members at altaonline.com/join for the $3 digital membership.
Please participate in the two-minute survey that will pop up as soon as this event ends. And, stay safe everybody, and see you all next month. Take it easy. Goodnight.•
