During the webinar interview with Claudia Rankine. I learned many interesting things about her. She is a very strong, creative and determined woman. I was also proud to know she’s a fellow Jamaican. Like many successful individuals Rankine had her share of negative critiques. However, she was most grateful for the  surprising mentors she came across on her journey. Persons who have aided in her success. She notes that  in her success she never knew who would have helped her in life. Therefore, she was always open and respectful to people regardless of race or gender . When  Rankine said this it reflected back to how we are grown in the Caribbean. We are taught to always treat people we meet with respect. Based on the fact that we never know if that person might be the one to save our life.

When  Rankine wrote “Don’t  Let Me  be Lonely,” she was with Grove Press. Which at the time told her they would not be publishing her work . Due to the fact that they did  not see it as  poetry.  Rankine did not let this damper her efforts. She continued to believe in her work , even after having a friend also referring to the book as terrible. I admired the fact that she never took it to heart . Rankine’s book was Later on  published and became a  major influence in people’s life. Which attest to the fact that you never know what lies a head of you on your journey to self development. In addition, how important  it is to always believe in yourself.

In September, Rankine received a letter from a publisher who also rejected her work. Stating how much he regretted not reading it. Along with the fact that he didn’t realize how wonderful it was. Rankine expressed her book was directed  towards cultural  whiteness.  Stating that everyone is a participant . However, she speaks mostly to her white audience,“Someone who’s interested in building something new.”  In addition,  her book was also a response to  moments. Based  on the fact  that history did happened and the questions that exist in society. She targeted the concept of sociology and what it really looks like.

During the process of creating her novel, Rankine interjected her most meaningful conversations . After having  them professionally analyzed by a hired psychiatrist. Rankine also took great efforts in making sure she had information from creditable sources. She did many research and use statistics along with fact checks. Which all aided as  support for her essays. Her final statement was that essays open more platform for close reading and to be taken a part.

The overall interview with Claudia Rankine was very insightful. It gave an opportunity to know more about her as an author and what really takes place in her mind when writing her books. In addition, the process in which she goes through to ensure her work is of a profound quality.

BIBLOGRAPHY

Chang, Juliana. “‘I Cannot Find Her’: The Oriental Feminine, Racial Melancholia, and Kimiko Hahn’s ‘The Unbearable Heart.’” Meridians, vol. 4, no. 2, 2004, pp. 239–260. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40338902. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020. Since 2001 Juliana Chang has had the title of Assistant Professor with Santa Clara. Chang  attended UC Berkeley where she received her Ph.D and along with teaching at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at Boston College. Her interest includes Asian American literature,Critical race studies,poetry and Psychoanalysis. Chang published a total of five journals and one book.

Chang in her text  I cannot find her:  The Oriental Feminine and Racial Melancholia . She addresses the inhabitants of the Asian American female in the U.S  national unconscious. Which Chang labels as the oriental feminine. In addition addressing the issues of race, and transnationalism. Referencing Kimiko Hahn’s book of Poetry The Unbearable Heart. Which speaks about a repressed American born Asian woman  “who is a legitimate citizen-subject of the U.S. nation-state, a legible subject of modernity. Upon reading the text it is understood that this subject of modernity and nation remains haunted and stands in places as the“other”:the oriental feminine, which remains outside of modern history and modern subjectivity. “We see how racial difference forms and deforms the inhabitation of a presumably abstract and universal national citizenship.”  Which reflects the same deconstruction in Rankine’s text Citizen An American Lyric.  In her text she addresses the issues of the racial differences and the deterioration of the  metaphorical body. Focusing on the subject of alienation and invisibility.  

Chang opens her argument by criticizing individualism using psychoanalysis to theorize the racial subject. She addresses the imaginary and the symbolic self . As she examines the oriental feminine  proving that it is not only of the  imaginary and symbolic fantasy, but also the site of the traumatic real. This “real” refer to residue, blockage, or excess of the symbolic. The real has to be dismissed from our symbolic universe so that we can maintain a solid sense of reality. Along with the displacement of the traditional subject in order to cope . This is the result of a traumatic experience . Thus making the traumatized subject unable to place herself into a symbolic narrative such as history. In “Citizen “  this sense of displacement is present as we see the use of  pronouns such as “You” instead of the first person “I” . Which perhaps the subject has actually placed herself in the title “ Citizen” rather than in the text herself. As a way to become a symbol of the present. Creating that disillusion of the “self self” not existing  within the text itself. 

Costello, Bonnie. “Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address by Natalie Pollard (review).” Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.), vol. 20, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 149–51, doi:10.1353/mod.2013.0003. Costello Bonnie is a well renowned English professor at the Boston University . She is also an American literary scholar. In addition she has published several literary works such as her book on Marianme Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. In addition, academic books and articles,  and published literary essays on art.

Bonnie reviews the text “ Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public . In the text she addresses the  intimacy of lyric poetry . This is often the poet having a private conversation  with his or herself. With the aim to inform ,persuade or to teach an audience. She argues that there is a shift from lyric subjectivity to lyric address. Supporting this  with references of other literary analysis such as Barbara Johnson, Will Waters, Helen Vendler,and others that have looked at the paradoxes, intimacies, and ambiguities of speaking to “you.” Along with Natalie Pollard  who studies the subject in connection with the second person plural and public address. Which she identifies in this “study is that “you,” is not a quiet, receptive projection of the poet’s desire, but often a complex and resistant imagined other, conscious of real others.”Pollard  argues  that the “civic role” of poetry  has been neglected and overemphasized . Along with the isolation of the lyric speaker and the fictional nature of the addressed other. “She reminds us, contemporary Poetry attempts to reclaim poetic language, not as primarily set-apart speech, but as a predominantly public act” (6). These poets often specify their addressees, and they do not shy away from topical address or even from politics taken in local, historical, or broader ideological terms.” Pollard according to Bonnie argues that language  is a platform that poet’s use as  subjective control. “Yous” are in turn used as a symbol  to address invading figures, and readers  that it is not a peaceful negotiation. “ Itinvolves a great deal of echoing and crossing, misbehaving and appropriating, not with the aim of jouissance, but in the search for some kind of communal real.” Which explains why Rankine in her text “Citizen “ displaced the first person. She was trying to convey a message that could only be received by her being radical.

Rankine, Claudia. “Toyin Ojih Odutola.” Aperture, no. 223, 2016, pp. 66–69., www.jstor.org/stable/43825325. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.Claudia Rankine  was born in  Jamaica in 1963 . She attended College where she earned her BA in English and then she attended Columbia University where she obtained her MFA in Poerty. Rankine is the author of several collections, such as  Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press, 2020); Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry. She has edited several anthologies, such as  The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015), American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics(Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language . In 2013, Rankine given the position of  Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has also went to  achieve many awards and honors. A few of these  honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National 2016, Rankine was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and named a United States Artists Zell fellow in literature. In 2017, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute, a “a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race.” She is currently a Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s drawings engage, destroy, highlight, and ultimately privilege a new grammar for blackness. Using black ballpoint, graphite, pastel, and charcoal, Odutola is the  representation of an open-ended image construction, before  one’s identity is formed. It focuses on the uniqueness and individuality for example, its shapes, tonality, and line . Whose particular face we are traveling toward rarely is the point. What is important is not the specific identity of the subject but the cumulative buildup of line that brings weight, complexity, and mobility to her images. It is here—in the line—thatc Odutola’s genius lives. dark line and its repetition reimagines terrain—marking and thereby making blackness unfamiliar as it accumulates into flesh to be read as racially significant or not.

“Odutola’s portraits explore how to desegregate blackness from a fixed racial position and open it out to all the mythology, missteps, racism, beauty, and life that is held by the term, while still landing it within the free space of bodies. She engages blackness as a field of tonality. Her system of layering tones moves not toward the real but toward an alternative privileging of fluidity within the line.” Which Claudia Rankine seems to aim for in her novel “Citizen”. Rankine separates  her subjects from the black body in aid to dismiss the idea of blackness. Thus, the dismissal of the representation of the first person “I”. Instead, she wishes to be seen for her humanity. Not for the color of her skin but for who she is as a person. Moreover,  who her brothers and sisters are. Instead they should be seen for their talents, ambition, kindness etc. The  issues of labels has been the problem throughout history. It continues to form division and justification  for the dehumanization of a race.  The best way to coexist is to remove the boarders that divides us as human beings.

Sastri, Reena. “Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2012, pp. 90–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41698770. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020. Dove  an African American poet , who founded passion in poetry and music at a tender age. Dove studied in Germany after gaining a Full bright Scholarship. After studying in Germany she went Arizona State University where she taught creative writing. She won several awards for her work, such as 1987 Pulitzer Prize for the book of poetry Thomas and Beulah. Dove also taught at the University of Virginia and became a award winning poet. After which she published chapbooks early in her career . Thus  earning a role with collections like The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) . In  May of 1993, Dove was named the poet laureate of the United States, at the age of 41.

Rita Dove believes its ass-backwards to think that there is a Black way of writing and a white”. In her opinion  there should be no limitations  of  the primary illustration of themes , idioms or stance. In her poems she uses  “I”  not only as a rift between social boundaries, but has a way to expand it’s context. Identifying that the lyric self is not bound to one set structure. This “I” is unsettled further by the ghosts of the poetic past, a haunting revealed both as willed by the poet adopting literary lineages, and as received by the writer open to the otherness of the creative process. Gesturing by these means outward from the embodied sociohistorical self, she anticipates recent work on the way the poetic “I,” in its resistance to stable self-definition, can offer a politically salutary alternative to politicized identity.”Rankine in her text “Citizen”  shifts  from the use of “I” to demonstrate the the self is no longer stable. Due the the trauma of the historical self. She avoids the use of I to also avoid a specific identification. To show equality rather than division. Based on her protest against racial in justice, discrimination , micro aggressions. The dismissal of the first person “I” is to reflect that we all are apart of the same body.

SLEIGH, TOM. “Self as Self-Impersonation in American Poetry.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006, pp. 174–189. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26443930. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.Tom Sleigh is the author of  Self as Self impersonation in American Poetry .  He is an  essayist and american poet,  and resides in New York City. Sleigh is the publisher of nine poetry pieces and two essay books. Some of his recent work entails House of Fact, House of Ruin . Sleigh has also obtained many awards, such as 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Academy Award, and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America to name a few. Tom Sleigh obtains a position as Hunter College’s director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing.

The Self as Self impersonation in American poetry  speaks about the fallen consciousness is brought to God’s light by the fire of faith, and the self that suffers the flames is all the better for the scorching. As he relays a story of his older brother hitting a reverend in the back of his head with a water balloon. This had the reverend in rage and his quest was to punish the “little sinner” as  stated by the novel . Sleigh then went ahead to compare this situation with that of Saul the Christian prosecutor and how God knocked him off his horse. He was reborn as Paul the apostle. In the whole situation Sleigh’s biggest concern was the horse and  if the horse also suffered from the blow. In addition he asked the question of whether Paul was a better master than Saul. In which he then questioned identity, how it’s created , and what factors play in its existence as it regards to poetry .

Sleigh speaks about the different types of poets such as a language poet, autobiographical poet and narrative poet and the controversy surrounding the issue. In his opinion he doesn’t see why a poet can not take on all three identities. Without dealing with the issues of cultural debate and the world of poetry. He speaks about the “cultural and critical theory in which “I” is both a grammatical project and projection of systems of power, and the almost pre-literate hostility that some poetic scribblers feel toward any attempt to call the authority of “I”into  question. Sleigh then goes into the history of American imaginative writing. Which  was all started byAnne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Sleigh speaks about the Burning house  written by Anne Bradstreet’s . As she aimed to use her own persona as a vehicle to proselytize and self-admonishments . Along with her use of the second and third person pronouns to address the “mighty Architect” and keep him at a slight grammatical remove. Which she does in a way to address her house and the issues within her house. In this poem her use of the second and third person was a way of  cutting loose from her physical body . This made Bradstreet more able to explore her subconscious and bring her deep feelings and desires to surface . As illustrated in the text “She splits off from the sorrowing self in order to admonish that self, and in the process the “I” sanctioned by the divine principle has begun to split along the grain.”  A  similarity can be placed with Citizen An American lyric  by Claudia Rankine. In this novel Rankine also uses the same second and third person pronouns. Almost making the self in existence as she talks about the issues of micro aggression and racism in America. For Rankine to be able to truly speak from an unbiased self she had to step within herself. Thus becoming an objective source speaking for those around her rather than herself

Reading of a literature text can be somewhat complex . It may take a lot for the reader to effectively come to the conclusion of what the author is trying to convey. Which often contributes to a slower processing of information and also leading to misunderstandings. When images and other forms of videos are combined with a text. It then adds more room for a deeper grasp of the message conveyed. Along with allowing the reader to become more engaged with the text.

As you know, humans first response to learning is through sight and all the senses there after. Claudia Rankine “situation 5“ script, produced by herself and john Lucas  appealed to both the visual and auditory processing . With  the use of moving images ,sound and narrative. It brought more depth to Rankine text exhibiting each situation as they would be in real life.

While reading the text the themes of oppression, imprisonment both of self and body was reflected . In addition, the themes of sadness, pain , hope, pride ,slavery, death, racism, and micro-aggression. It  took a  while to really visualize and analyze each Situation. However, the visual representation of the text through moving images had a different effect. Strength, and determination was what I saw at first glance on the black man looking through the window . Secondly, the smile he had on his face along with a look that suggested great anticipation.  Which made me look back  to the text  where it’s states “ my brothers are notorious (pg89).” While reading these first few lines I did  not  see the image of a strong man. However, the video gave a different perspective. The sound of the birds brought calmness to scene.  Yet there was still sadness beneath the surface as the reflection of the man bore a sadness. As the flim goes on there’s a sense of internal turmoil, and defeat. Awaiting a freedom that seems so close yet far from reach.  I also noticed the colors of grey, blue, and red . As it leads into a scene of two white police officers beating a black man on the ground. Which brought a vivid description of what Rankine ment by “don’t hang up. My brother hangs up though he is there (pg90).” This image in the flim provoked the issue of police brutality and the imprisonment of black men . Both physically and mentally. Demonstrating the fight to hold on to hope and what fragments of life they have. It’s almost as if they have no life and death is the shadow which follows them.

Though, reading the novel brought a sense of familiarity to each situation. I felt a deeper connection seeing the  images of historical moments and landmarks ; such as the plantation , slave trade , Dr Martin Luther King , and Malcom X. All these  monumental moments in history for black men and women. Moreover, these notorious black  activists who fought for the liberation of the black society . In addition , a reminder of the power the black society have as a united front. Most  importantly highlighting the depressing fact that the black community still fights until this day. These  moving images were able to place my mind within that time and space. Allowing me to feel each word as Claudia spoke and grieved at each moment.  I felt anger , sadness and pride as if it was me. I believe this is the reason behind Rankine reproducing her printed text in this way. To give her readers a sense of reality. Allowing them to see what she sees in this world. Along with sharing the emotions that exist within these situations. She’s giving her audience a broader platform to expand and explore her concept of citizen’s . In addition , appealing  to a wider group of all age, race and learning capabilities. I say this because if they can not read they will be able to listen and see. Thus, supplementing her text in this manner makes it universal.

                          BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chang, Juliana. “‘I Cannot Find Her’: The Oriental       Feminine, Racial Melancholia, and Kimiko Hahn’s ‘The Unbearable Heart.’” Meridians, vol. 4, no. 2, 2004, pp. 239–260. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40338902. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Costello, Bonnie. “Speaking to You: Contemporary Poetry and Public Address by Natalie Pollard (review).” Modernism/modernity (Baltimore, Md.), vol. 20, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, pp. 149–51, doi:10.1353/mod.2013.0003.

Rankine, Claudia. “Toyin Ojih Odutola.” Aperture, no. 223, 2016, pp. 66–69., www.jstor.org/stable/43825325. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Sastri, Reena. “Rita Dove’s Poetic Expeditions.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2012, pp. 90–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41698770. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Sleigh, Tom. “Self as Self-Impersonation in American Poetry.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 82, no. 1, 2006, pp. 174–189. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26443930. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

JSTOR from the Hunter College library database was the main source for these Academic Journals. In addition,Google Scholar, along with the help of Hunter College Librarian Mrs/Miss Jennifer Newman and professor Jeff Allred . Special thanks goes out to these credible sources for the completion and success of this research.

“is there a ‘self self’ at all in Rankine’s work, or does this prove to be a fantasy?”