The protagonist insists that the man is her friend, reminding the neighbor that he has even met this person, but the neighbor refuses to believe this, saying that he has already called the police. A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives. At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. . The purposeful omission of the black bodies highlights yet again the erasure of Black people, while also showing us that this erasure goes beyond daily acts of microaggressions or the systemic forgetting of Black communities (Rankine 6, 32, 82). 1, 2008, pp. In an article discussing the Black Lives/White Backgrounds of Rankines Citizen, Bella Adams states: the blank and typically white backgrounds on which Rankines words and images appear (69) is representative of the hierarchical racial formation that is rendered nearly invisible by its colour (white) and positioning (background) in the contemporary, so-called colour-blind or post-racial United States (55). Sharma, Meara. African-Americans are still experiencing hardships every day that stem from slavery such as racial profiling, and stereotyping. Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people addressable, opening them up to verbal attack by others. It wasnt a match, she replies. 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. What is most striking about the visual image is the omission of a human subject. We often say Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Claudia Rankine gives us an act of creativity and illumination that combats the mirror world of unseeing and unseen-ness that is imprinted onto the American psyche.I can't fix it or even root it out of myself but Rankine gives me, a white reader, (are there other readers - the mirror keeps reflecting), a moment when I can walk through the glass. This structure which seems to keep African-Americans in chains harkens all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (59), where Black people were subjected to the most dehumanizing of white supremacys injuries, chattel slavery (Javadizadeh 487). This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are, Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs At a glance, the interactions seem to be simple misunderstandings - friends mistaken for strangers, frustrations incorrectly categorized as racial, or just honest mistakes. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book. (143). This book is necessary and timely. 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. The iconic image of American fear. Both this series and Citizen combine intentional and unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives. Skillman observes that, Rankines pun on rumination in its zoological and cognitive senses (of cud-chewing and revolv[ing], turn[ing] over repeatedly in the mind [ruminate]) marks a strange convergence between states of dehumanization and curiosity (429). Johanning, Cameron. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. This disrupts the historically white lyric form even further because she is adapting and changing the lyric form to include her Black identity and perspective. And this is why I read books. A cough launches another memory into your consciousness. This odd and disturbing choice of imagery, which blends a human face with a deer, acts as a visual representation for the dehumanization that Black people are subjected to in America. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. She joined me at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City. Rankine stays with the unnamed protagonist, who in response to racist comments constantly asks herself things like, What did he just say? and Did I hear what I think I heard? The problem, she realizes, is that racism is hard to cope with because before people of color can process instances of bigotry, they have to experience them. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. The picture of a deer first appears in Kate Clarks Little Girl (Rankine, 19), a sculpture that grafts the modeled human face of a young girl onto the soft, brown, taxidermied body of an infant caribou (Skillman 428). Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. Sometimes you sigh. Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on ones self-conception. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric [Yes, and] When I was a little girl in Birmingham, Alabama, wracked with shame over some transgression I can no longer remember, I asked my father how, when faced with a choice, to know which decision is the right one. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . The way the content is organized, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in. A picture appears on the next page interrupting Rankine's poem, something that the reader will get used to as the text progresses. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. The structure, which breaks up the poetics with white space and visual imagery, uses space and mixed media to convey these themes. The disembodied heads of the Black subject does not only allude to lynching and captivity, as the 16 sections of the cupboard look like 16 prison cells, but it also represents the way bodies are stacked on top of one another in slave ships (Skillman 447). Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. What did he say? Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). The way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. The rain begins to fall. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). They have not been to prison. 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). The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. This has many meanings. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. 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. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. As Michelle Alexander writes in. Black people are facing a triple erasure: first through microaggresions and racist language that renders them second-class citizens; then through lynching and other forms of violence that murders the black body; and lastly, through forgetting. Rankine writes, [T]he first person [is] a symbol for something. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. I Am Invested in Keeping Present the Forgotten Bodies.. Believer Magazine, 28 June 2020, believermag.com/logger/2014-12-10-i-am-invested-in-keeping-present-the-forgotten/. Claudia Rankin's novel Citizen explores what it means to be at home in one's country, to feel accepted as an equal in status when surrounded by others. "IN CITIZEN, I TRIED TO PICK SITUATIONS AND MOMENTS THAT MANY PEOPLE SHARE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC OCCURRENCE THAT MIGHT ONLY HAPPEN TO ME." Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. High-grade paper, a unique/large sans-serif font, and significant images. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. The emptinessthe lack of a corpse or a live body or faceis a literal representation of the erasure of African-Americans. It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. Racist language, however, erase[s] you as a person (49), and this furious erasure (142) of Black people strips them of their individuality and the rights that come with an I that are given during citizenship. It was a thing hunted and the hunting continues on a certain level (Skillman 429). Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. A neighbor calls while you are watching the film The House We Live In to say that "a menacing black guy" (20) is walking around your house. For Rankine, there is no escaping the path from school to prison. [White Americans] have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a centruy, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them thier suburbs. Each word is a lyrical tribute to Black Americans and all that isn't shouted out on a daily basis. I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. . Ratik, Asokan. It's a moment like any other. This parallel between erasure and lynching can be seen more clearly when we look at Hulton Archives Public Lynchingphotograph, whose image had been altered by John Lucas (Rankine, 91) (Figure 1). The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. InCitizen, Rankine does more than illustrate the erasure and lynching of Black people, for the image of a deer is also used as a metaphor to symbolize the dehumanization of Black people in America. I can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why. 137163., doi:10.1017/S0021875817000457. Citizen: An American Lyric. Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. Rankine writes, You cant put the past behind you. Political performance art. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the . Rankine does a brilliant job taking an in-depth look at life being black. 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 narrator assures her: "The world is wrong. Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. By talking about her experiences in second-person, Rankine creates a kind of separation between herself and her experiences. Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an . 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. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. Figure 1. In the final sections of the book, the second-person protagonist notices that nobody is willing to sit next to a certain black man on the train, so she takes the seat. Her repetition of this question beckons us to ask ourselves these questions, and the way the question transitions from a focus on the lingering impact of the event (haveyou seen their faces) to a question of historicity (didyou see their faces) emphasizes the ways these black bodies disappear from life (presence) to death (absence). The route is often . The heads in Cerebral Caverns become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, connecting the slavery of the past to modern-day incarceration. A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives. Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". Brilliant, deeply troubling, beautiful. Rankine sees this type of ambiguity [that] could be diagnosed as dissociation in Serena Williams, whose claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae (Rankine 36) speaks to the kind of psychological disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. 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). Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Nick Laird is a poet and novelist who teaches at NYU and Queen's University, Belfast, where he is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry. It's more than a book. View Citizen - Claudia Rankine (Full Text PDF, searchable).pdf from ENGLISH SL Y2 at Quabbin Regional High School. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Although the man doesnt turn to look at her, she feels connected to him, understanding that its sometimes necessary to numb oneself to the many microaggressions and injustices hurled at black people. The wearer of the hood no longer exists, and the now empty hood has been cut off or detached from the rest of the body. C laudia Rankine's book may or may not be poetry - the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. In the beginning of this poem, Rankine asks you to recall a time when you felt absolutely nothing. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. Predictably, my finger hovers over sections that are more like prose than poetry ( that bit on Serena was a highlight). Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. On campus, another woman remarks that because of affirmative action her son couldn't go to the college that the narrator and the woman's father and grandfather had attended. Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen The 92nd Street Y, New York 261K subscribers Subscribe 409 Share 32K views 7 years ago Poet Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen=, her recent meditation. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. Download chapter PDF. You can't put the past behind you. Rankines use of the second-person you also illuminates another kind of erasure, where dissociation becomes another kind of disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. No one else is seeking. In the image (Figure 2), the deers body looks distortedits legs are oddly bent, its fourth leg is obscured, and one of its legs is cut off by the margin of the page. Skillman, Nikki. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. Figure 3. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. When you get back, apologies are exchanged and you tell your friend to use the backyard next time he needs to make a phone call. This is a poignant powerful work of art. She also calls upon the accounts lip readers gave of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane, revealing that Materazzi called him a Big Algerian shit, a dirty terrorist, and the n-word. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." This structure becomes physical in Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), which displays 32 plastered heads kept in a cupboard made of wood and glass (Rankine 165) (Figure 4). In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. Rankine speaks with NPR's Lynn Neary about where the national conversation about race stands today. ISBN: 978-1-55597-690-3CHAPTER 1 When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. This all culminates in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy(Rankine 102-103), which repeats the visual motif of bars or cells, by having the same Black boy in three separate boxes (Figure 3). She tells him she was killing time in the parking lot by the local tennis courts that day when a woman parked in the spot facing her car but, upon seeing the protagonist sitting across from her, put her car in reverse and parked elsewhere. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. With the sophistication of its dialectical movement, the gravitas of its ethical appeal, and the mercy of its psychological rigor, Claudia Rankine's Citizen combines traditional poetic strains in a new way and passes them on to the reader with replenished vitality. (including. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". Chan, Mary-Jean. Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be Rankine seems to ask this question again in a later poem, when she says: Have you seen their faces? In disjointed and figurative writing, Rankine creates a sense of desperation and inequity, depicting what it feels like to belong to one of the many black communities along the Gulf Coastcommunities that national relief organizations all but ignored and ultimately failed to properly serve after the hurricane devastated the area and left many people homeless. Interview with Claudia Rankine. The White Review, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-claudia-rankine/. This symbolism of the deer, which signifies the hunting and dehumanization of Black people, is emphasized throughout the work through the repetition of sighing, moaning, and allusions to injury: To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. The physiological costs are high. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. -Graham S. Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. I met Rankine in New York in mid-October while she was in town for the Poets Forum, presented by the Academy of American Poets, for which she serves as a chancellor. You raise your lids. She takes situations that happen on a daily basis, real life tragedies and acts in the media to analyze and bring awareness to the subtle and not so subtle forms of racism. Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. is so apt, especially for those of us living in multicultural environments. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as you. A child, this character is sitting in class one day when the white girl sitting behind her quietly asks her to lean over so she can copy her test answers. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. These are called microaggressions. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. Your neighbor has already called the police. Rankine, Claudia. Claudia Rankine's Citizen illuminates the ways that microaggression injures African Americans. 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. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as (That part surprised me.) She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. The collection opens with a reproduction of Kate Clark's 2008 sculpture, Little Girl. They have become a you: You nothing. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class., Requesting a new guide requires a free LitCharts account. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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. Rankines use of the lyric deeply complicates the trope of lyric presence (Skillman 436) because it goes against the literary trope [that is often] devoid of any social markings such as race (Chan 152). A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. Citizen by Claudia Rankine is an exceptional book which is much deserving of all the awards it has won. Yes, and leads to a narrow pathway with no forks in the road. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. 31 no. It's raining outside and the leaves on the trees are more vibrant because of it. The world says stop that. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. Its a quick listen at 1.5 hours. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of poetry and uses her gripping accounts of racism, through poetry to share a deep message. Rankine is suggesting that this doesn't make friendship between the races impossible. 9 likes. Eugene Jarecki, 2003) is about racial injustice. Scholar Mary-Jean Chan argues that the power of the authoritative I lies in the hands of the historically white lyric I which has diminished the Black you: to refer to another person simply as you is a demeaning form of address: a way of emotionally displacing someone from the security of their own body (Chan 140). 134, no. Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. 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 . 3, 2019, pp. 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. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. Its buried in you; its turned your flesh into its own cupboard (63). The route is . 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. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. Jenn Northington. Even the paper that the text is printed on speaks to the political nature of Rankines form, for the acid free, 80# matte coated paper (Rankine 174), which looks and feels expensive, holds within it so much Black pain and trauma. Rankines use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political. He told me to figure out which choice would take the most courage, and then do . These structures which imprison Black people are referenced in Rankines poetics and seen in the visual motifs of frames, or cells, referenced in the three photographs of Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), John Lucas Male II & I(96-97), and in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (102-103), which frame and imprison the black body: My brothers are notorious. Coates refers to these two institutions as arms of the same beastfear and violence were the weaponry of both (33). Caught in these moments of racism, the Black subject is forced to ruminate on these microaggressions, processing how they have become reduced to that of an animal. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. "Jim Crow Rd." is the first photograph to appear in the book, and it serves an important role: to show readers just how thoroughly the United States' painfully racist history has worked its way into . 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