The second image in Rankine’s Citizen is fascinating as much for its layered meaning as its viscerally disturbing nature. The best way to describe it, superficially, is a human face mapped onto a deer or other small animal. The deer is in a vulnerable position, matching the face’s confused, troubled expression. The image is contextualized directly by the text that precedes it; Rankine discusses an ironically traumatic experience at the office of a therapist who “specializes in trauma counseling” (22). A reference to “deer grass,” specifically in her description of the moments before the screaming begins, implies a connection between the narrator and animal. This is furthered by the description of the startled therapist as “a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd,” which creates a predator-prey relationship where there should be one of openness and vulnerability; the mention of “rosemary” alongside deer grass becomes sinister, bringing to mind its food connotations (22). These elements are all combined into the form of the image on the next page, the uncanny animal becoming the image of a human victimized. The humanity of the animal is, of course, accentuated by its human face. The face is not a normal skin color, but the features seem to suggest that this is an African-American face mapped onto the animal. The racial implications of the interaction between the narrator and the therapist, if they were at all unclear before, become fully textual. The combination of animal and human can now be understood as an expression of the inhumanity to which African-Americans are often subjected. The narrator’s final words in the preceding passage, “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry,” feed into both this societal subservience and the nearly-wounded positioning of the deer (22).
The unsettling nature of the deer’s face is another site rich with multiple meanings. The unsettling nature of the artificial, Photoshopped face brings to mind the concept of the uncanny valley, the capacity for computer-generated images which look close to humans without fully achieving the effect look much more upsetting than more perfect or less precise representations. The dots on the face, the weird cropping, and the unnatural color make the face on the animal seem wrong, almost damaged or disfigured. Given the preceding text, it seems that Rankine is making a strong statement on the capacity for white people to perceive the humanity of Black people. The human-faced deer is unquestionably similar to the average human, but with enough visible alterations that a feeling of wrongness is created. It is as if someone made a clumsy attempt at hybridizing a deer and a human in Photoshop, which again stands as a good metaphor for the manner in which people such as the trauma therapist make attempts at helping others without unraveling their own fear and prejudice. A strange line, that “the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly,” is finally recontextualized from an odd description to an alien experience on the narrator’s end (22). She is so far removed from her environment that she can not even recognize a doorbell button, both herself and the therapist experiencing distressing strangeness, but with one of them able to retreat into the comfort of whiteness while the other must be constantly seen as an animal.
