Helen Murray | 2021
The very first time I heard Claudia Rankine’s words was in my final year of high school, when Citizen: An American Lyric was first published Black Lives Matter movement was surging. A poet whose name I can’t remember came to visit my English class, and he read from page 105, “Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew. And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.” My political and social consciousness was still a work in progress the first time I read Citizen, as was the case for many Americans at the time, but I remember feeling moved by the way Rankine wrote and saw the world. I felt an anger that pushed me to learn more about how we got here, and think about where we can go now.
Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a book-length work of poetry that weaves together prose, photographs, and references to current events in order to paint a picture of race relations and invite a larger conversation about the way we see and talk about racism. It is split into multiple sections, alternating between short vignettes about every day microaggressions that black people in America face, and longer, more reflective works of poetry that serve as a meditation and reflection on the vignettes. Within these sections Rankine utilizes photographs and other works of art to contrast or supplement her words.
In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine teaches her readers about microaggressions. “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.” She proves something I had suspected, and gives me words to describe something I had seen and been going through for years. Racism is alive and well, it just looks a little bit different. It’s a slippage unacknowledged. It’s the space between words said aloud. Racism is a verb, not a noun.
The narrative techniques Rankine uses force the reader to face the ugly reality of racism in America today, while allowing readers who haven’t experienced it to do so through second person narrative vignettes. As readers we experience invisibility, an unsettled feeling in the belly, and the confusion that comes with microaggressions. They range from the insinuation that there are not great writers of color, the lack of understanding of affirmative action, multiple cases of mistaken identity, and many others. We are presented with these instances in the form of an onslaught, with little time to unpack, and just as we find ourselves fatigued we are given a reprieve in the form of a short reflection. “Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that?” Moments of self awareness pepper the vivid scenes Rankine sets for us.
Rankine acknowledges moments of racism that met the public eye, allowing them to stand on their own and breathe as poetry. She holds space for Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, those who suffered through Hurricane Katrina, and a few others. By doing so after bombarding the reader with so many short vignettes depicting moments of racism, we are primed to notice each detail, every emotion, and the injustice of it all.
Rankine’s words are not just educational. They are poetic, too. At every read I chew on single lines until I can figure out exactly what I am tasting. Near the end, Rankine sets a familiar scene: a train, and a familiar dilemma: where to sit. There is one man who no one wishes to sit next to, and she tells us, “You sit next to the man on the rain, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within… the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.” Rankine’s choice to use multiple words to describe a single idea, such as the intense empathy she invites us to feel for this man, gives the work more texture and complexity. As I read Citizen: An American Lyric again in 2021, I am reminded how important this book is for everyone and anyone to read. For those who see their experiences mirrored in its pages and for those who don’t, it’s a worthy read. Whether one feels seen or implicated by the second person narration and prose style, it will stoke the fire in your belly. We could all use a little bit more of that fire.