Rankine assembles Citizen like a current contemporary life; it reads like the experience of being alive as a black woman over the past twenty-five to thirty years. Almost like a museum curator, Rankine leads us through an exhibition of everything that has ‘turned [her] flesh into its own cupboard’. Except, that phrase is written in full as:
‘You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.’ (Rankine, Citizen, pp.63)
And it is the use of second person that both generalises and specifies; it identifies its audience as a universal, whilst separating those who sympathise in theory from those who truly empathise. After reading Citizen (once several months ago and once again this week), I explored blog posts and newspaper articles written by other people attempting to marshal their thoughts about Rankine’s work into some sort of coherency, and I discovered something of a theme: people appear to focus either on the content of the poem (what Rankine appears to say about racism) or on its form (e.g her inclusion of pictures, video stills, and world news quotations), but rarely both. I can see why. Both form and content are so evocatively arresting that it is difficult to process anything else once either an image or an anecdote has struck you; you are drawn along their path at least for your first reading.
Form and content are not starkly separate, however. Rankine employs the second person ‘you’ throughout Citizen, effectively shattering the fourth wall between writer and reader. One memorable instance of this occurs as Rankine addresses the reader directly during section II of Citizen with ‘though you felt outrage for Serena after that 2004 US Open…’. This could be taken as a general ‘you’, but I felt the effect much more strongly, and much more personally. It felt to me almost like an appeal, like an outstretched hand that I did not have the right to take, because I don’t remember the 2004 US Open. Despite knowing that I was barely ten years old when the event took place, I felt sharply ashamed of my lack of awareness, I think particularly because the writing felt as though Rankine was looking directly at me. Here, her choice of address form and textual angle sharpened the boundary between the reader and the narrative of the anecdote to a razor’s edge, nigh on physically biting into my skin.
In terms of my lack of memory of the 2004 US Open, this also made me think about Rankine’s potential assumption of a common cultural experience within her audience. Thinking of Citizen purely as an exhibition of her life is potentially quite reductive, and despite it feeling that way to me, I wonder if that is in fact part of Rankine’s masterful artistry. By forcing the reader to feel as though they are being personally spoken to, even invited, almost, to step into a life alongside a Virgil-esque guide, any unrecognised names, events, videos, or artworks take on a higher priority for research so as to be able to fully engage with the conversation between reader and text. It is also worth noting that there are a swathe of references to both current contemporary examples of pop culture and historical artefacts. Rankine references things like Turner and Millet paintings, stringing together a picture of pop culture and contemporary art through time that has both profited from and erased blackness. Often coming to historically define an age, in academic settings we use texts that were pieces of ‘popular culture’ to inform us about the state and shape of the time in which it was written. Therefore, the consistent erasure of people of colour in any position other than subservience perpetuates the colonialist narratives that have served white people since the time of overt slavery. When pop culture now is white-washed, white people often view it as a one-off thing that is not worthy of the outrage it receives because we don’t see that it has occurred throughout history: we don’t automatically see anything as missing when we look back through history and see our own faces reflected back at us. ‘This is right’, we think, ‘These people look like the kind of people I imagine when someone asks me to think about a group of people’. And so we continue, serving ourselves. Rankine is calling our attention to injustice far more politely than we deserve.
With this in mind, I think there is a certain validity to her assumption that her particular readership will be aware of references like Hennessy Youngman’s YouTube videos; she does risk alienating unaware readers with these references, but I think it is a valid hope that anyone who does not recognise her references will take the time to explore them in order to be able to connect with her argument. It is a form of interactive education, and it is emotionally charged, as any account of trauma is. I also feel that perhaps she is trying to isolate you; she is trying to show you what you don’t remember because you don’t recognise it. Because you don’t have to. She is showing you all the things that you are able to move past and forget and unsee because they don’t speak to your existence. She is exposing the nerves that are constantly touched when the white skin that covers them on your body isn’t there for someone else.
Links to blog posts and other pages I visited over the course of the week in relation to Rankine’s Citizen, some referenced within the post above:
(CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE/ PHYSICAL ABUSE. This link leads to the full video of police brutality against Rodney King/ ‘the Rodney King video’.) https://www.youtube.com/embed/sb1WywIpUtY
(CONTENT WARNING: RACIST LANGUAGE AND GRAPHIC IMAGES OF VIOLENCE/ ABUSE. This link leads to Hennessy Youngman’s video entitled ‘Art Thoughtz: How To Be A Successful Black Artist’.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_NnX8oj-g
http://www.theotherblog.org/on-little-girl-citizen-and-racism/
http://wordchoicesoprfhs.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/little-girl.html
(CONTENT WARNING: DESCRIPTION AND IMAGE OF ABUSE. This link leads to a Wikipedia page about Emmett Till.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws
Guardian article referenced within the above post: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-review
Millennialisms 