"Yes officer rolled around on my tongue, which grew out of a bell that could never ring because its emergency was a tolling I was meant to swallow."
—page 105, from "Stop-and-Frisk: Script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas" as found in Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.
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I'd been hearing a lot of buzz about Citizen by Claudia Rankine. Some of my favorite literary people (and organizations)—authors, bloggers, fellow readers, poets, lit journals—had been recommending it for some time. I knew that it was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry. I knew that Louise Glück won and that a lot in the literary community felt that Rankine was slighted. I didn't understand the hostility and lamentation. Upon reading Citizen, I realized that Rankine not winning the award could easily be another chapter in the book.
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I picked up Citizen this afternoon, sat down, and read it straight through. Now I don't know what to say or do.
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I'm paralyzed.
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I need to confess of my own culpability with racism. The moments that I've been less than generous to someone because of who they are and/or the color of their skin. The inappropriate comments that I've made here and there. The stereotypes that I've engaged. The times that I haven't spoken up and stood alongside someone who had to endure racist language or behavior in my presence.
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Is confession enough? Probably not.
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The concepts that jumped out at me when I read: Bodies. Invisibility. Erasure. Being passed over. Internalized rage. Actuated rage.
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The sections of the book that resonated most deeply with me: II, which focuses on Serena Williams and her experiences of racism in the world of professional tennis; V, for its explorations of not being seen as a black person in America; and four sub-sections of VI—"August 29, 2005 / Hurricane Katrina," "Stop-and-Frisk," "October 10, 2006 / World Cup," and "July 29–August 18, 2004 / Making Room."
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And then there are the other works I've read recently that echo in my mind as I read.
Pip, the Pequod's cabin boy, drifting in the ocean in "The Castaway," chapter 93 of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. The depictions of Babo and the other African slaves aboard the Spanish slaver, the San Dominick, in Benito Cereno by Herman Melville.
Joseph Conrad's depictions of the African natives in Heart of Darkness. Chinua Achebe's response to Conrad in Things Fall Apart, as a more representative (and complex) depiction of members of Igbo communities.
Joe Wenderoth's satire of the adoption of Martin Luther King, Jr. (as an "honorary" white person) by white people in "The Souls of White Folk."
C. L. R. James's post-colonial ruminations on Moby-Dick and race relations therein in Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In.
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I need to sit and ponder and let all of this sink in. The essays and poems that Claudia Rankine uses to expose the racism that is all around us. My own unwillingness, conscious or unconscious, to stand as witness and to speak out against racism. The echoes. The echoes. The echoes.
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I need to go back and read again. Slower. With less urgency, but not with less intensity.
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My words and thoughts don't provide this book the justice it deserves. It needs to be read. You need to read it. (Then we can talk.)
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"This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful."
—page 128, from "October 10, 2006 / World Cup" as found in Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.
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