This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. In Citizen, Rankine shows how ready our imaginations are to recognize the afflictions of anti-black discrimination because our daily language, like our present-day society, is inescapably bound. While Rankine recognizes that sighing is natural and almost inevitable, it is not the iteration of a free being [for] what else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind? (60). RANKINE, 2016. Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetryrepetition, metaphor . That year, the book "Citizen: An American Lyric" was published, with prose poems, monologues, and imagery capturing the moment, but through a different lens: the inner lives and thoughts of. We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. This juxtaposition between black space and white space, body and no body, presence and absence, conveys the erasure of Black people on a visual level. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor." (Citizen, 1) - Section I In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting, and imprisonment of African-Americans in the white hegemonic society of America. It's the thing that opens out to something else. The artwork which is featured on the coverDavid Hammons In the Hood depicts a black hood floating in a white space. The decision to place Clarks image right after Rankines recount of a microaggression, where Rankine is yelled off the deer grass (Skillman 429) of a white therapist like some unwanted wild animal, shows us how white America views Black people: as pests and prey. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Here, the form and figuration of the text, which emphasizes white space, works to illustrate this key theme of erasure through visual metaphor. It was a lesson., Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. "Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. The visual motifs of frames and cells illustrate the way racist ideology, which endorsed slavery, continues to keep Black people in chains in modern-day America. To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. As the photographs show Zidane register what Materazzi has said, turn around, and approach him, Rankine provides excerpts from the previously mentioned thinkers, including Frantz Fanons thoughts about the history of discrimination against Algerian people in France. The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. In this poem, which is the only poem inCitizen to have no commas, Rankine begins in the school yard and ends with life imprisoned (101). In a way, Citizen becomes a modern manifestation of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the United States from a French perspective in 1835 in Democracy in America. At one point, she attends a reading by a humorist who implies that its common for white people to laugh at racist jokes in private, adding that most people wouldnt laugh at this kind of joke if they were out in public where black people might overhear them. This narrator, who seems to be a version of Rankine herself at this moment, remembers a different time with a different racial make-up than the one in which she currently resides. "Citizen" begins by recounting, in the second person, a string of racist incidents experienced by Rankine and friends of hers, the kind of insidious did-that-really-just-happen affronts that. It is part of a 3-part PBS documentary series called "RACE - The Power of an Illusion. Whereas Citizen focuses on the minute-to-minute racism of everyday life, this documentary series focuses on systematized racial inequalities. But then again I suppose it's a really strong point that her consciousness is so occupied by overt racism that she sees subtle racism everywhere -- "because white men cant police their imaginations, black men are dying," particularly -- even where it likely may not exist. Its rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many. To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Citizen by Claudia Rankine Themes Acceptance Identity Rankine argues that African Americans have had to sweep aside these microagressions and to accept how they are treated in order to be a good citizen, to survive, to not be the targets of law enforcement. The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. The highly formalised and constructed aesthetic of Rankines work is purposeful, for the almost heightened awareness of the form draws our attention to the function of form and the constructed nature of racism. Continuing to detail the experiences of this unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates an instance later in the young womans life, when her friend frequently calls her by the name of her own housekeeper. The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. Struggling with distance learning? Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a multidimensional work that examines racism in terms of daily microaggressions (comments or actions that subtly express prejudice) and their larger implications. Sharma, Meara. In an interview, Rankine remarks that upon looking at Clarks sculpture, [she] was transfixed by the memory that [her] historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal. By choosing to give space to the white space on the page, Rankine forces us to pause and sit with these moments of everyday racism. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. Male II & I. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. The narrator hopes to be "bucking the trend" of the physical tolls racism imposes by "sitting in silence" and refusing to engage with racists (p.13). Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. 134, no. An even more pronouncedly racist moment occurs when the protagonist is in line at Starbucks and the white man standing in front of her calls a group of black teenagers the n-word. The repetition of the same image highlights the racial profiling of Black men: 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 (Rankine 105, 106, 108, 109). Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Yes, and it's raining. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. Rankine challenges this norm in more than one way. While Rankine did not create these photos, the inclusion of them in her work highlights the way that her creation of her own poetic structure works with the content. What did he say? By utilizing form, visual imagery, and poetry, Rankine enables us to see the systemic oppression of Black people by the state. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Refine any search. Interview with Claudia Rankine. The White Review, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-claudia-rankine/. The childhood memories are particularly interesting because they give the reader a sense of otherness right from the start. The repetition of this visual motif highlights the existing structures of racism which has allowed for slavery to be born again in the sprawling carceral state of America (Coates 79). It just often makes that friendship painful. Johanning, Cameron. No one else is seeking. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. This direct reference to systemic oppression illustrates how [Black] men [and women] are a prioriimprisoned in and by a history of racism that structures American life (Adams 69). Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great the exam room speaking aloud in all of its blatant metaphorsthe huge clock above where my patients sit implacably measuring lifetimes; the space itself narrow and compressed as a sonnetand immediately I'm back to thinking . Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. C laudia Rankine's book may or may not be poetry - the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. The fact that only the hood of the hoodie exists, with the seam rips still evident and the strings still hanging, alludes to the historical lynching of Black people in America, which has erased and dismembered the black body. When he says this, the protagonist realizes that the humorist has effectively excluded her from the rest of the audience by exclusively addressing the white people in the crowd, focusing only on their perspective while failing to recognize (or care about) how racist his remark really is. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. The placement of the photograph at the bottom of the page is deliberate, as it makes the empty black space seem even smaller in comparison to the white figures and white space that surrounds it. Even though it will be obvious that the girl behind her is cheating, the protagonist obliges by leaning over, wondering all the while why her teacher hasnt noticed. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Nick Laird. In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner's murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric.Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. Magnificent. The erratum to the chapter is available at 10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_14. Rankine seems to ask this question again in a later poem, when she says: Have you seen their faces? Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/732928.Sdf, The Dissolving Blues of Metaphor: Rankines Reconstruction of Racism as Metaphor in Citizen: An American Lyric, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. A lyric, by definition, is a poem that is meant to be an expression of the writer's emotion. Sometimes you sigh. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine's Citizen Reading Between Lines of Citizen Download chapter PDF. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. Rankine will answer . Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. featured health poetry Post navigation. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. 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