Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a book-length poem about race and the imagination. Rankine has called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities.” Those realities include the acts of everyday racism—remarks, glances, implied judgments—that are allowed to flourish in an environment where more explicit acts of discrimination are outre.
In responding to these microaggressions, Rankine writes,
“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 stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he 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?”
Rankine has made the poem into a play, which I would love to see staged. Read more from a symposium on the book, from LA Review of Books.
Photo of an unidentified woman by Leighann Blackwood on Unsplash