Tag Archives: Claudia Rankine

Unfreedoms

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In Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” there are different situations and those situations bring messages in different circumstances at a particular moment. The author tried to situate the readers in a certain position to reveal each situation of being justice and fairness. In the video Situation 5, Lucas and Rankine said “these are multi-genre responses to contemporary America. The videos exist around public experiences in individual lives. These experiences turn into situations that resonate with us not only as people but as citizens.” The author mentions that we as citizens trying to look into the specialized framework of specific events and also particularly trying to pay attention to how the media communicate to us. In the second poem about Trayvon Martin, the author Rankine continues to refer to “my brother, dear brother, my dearest brothers, dear heart.” When she uses the terms, she assumes to refer to her brothers as a narrative. The narrator is telling her memory with her brothers who used to call her name to wish on her birthday as “They do regular things, like wait. On my birthday they say my name. They will never forget that we are named. What is that memory?” (Kindle Edition. 458) When I see the term “dearest brothers” and I think she is referring to black people especially to those being treated differently. Rankine uses herself as the narrator to illustrate calling some fair facts by comparing it with calling out only one name on a normal birthday. She wants her readers to see past or present lives of African Americans are being discriminated against. The situation in this second poem is to allow readers to see the unfair reality and they are still being treated differently to this day. There is also a black and white photograph of many people were under the tree and also a man is pointing to the dark tree. In the photograph, there are two men also watch as a man pointed direction. (478) In this photograph, a black background represents a visual metaphor for the construction of blackness. The tree also can mean the decree that determines all life. The title of the fifth poem is also called ” Stop-and-Frisk.” This poem is about a police vehicle coming to a creaking stop, and the police force the narrator to get on the ground. The narrator thinks the stop is because of speeding but he didn’t. The narrator is told to do fingerprinting and stand naked after the charge of exhibiting speed is decided upon. At the end of the poem, there is a black and white photograph of black people. The photograph is not clear enough to see and it seems covered by black paint or something. The fifth poem’s situation tries to tell us that if hatred and resentment exist, no matter how right the speaker is, there is always guilty for something as “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description. This is all because he is only suitable for description and not criminals” (523). This is the message Rankine brings throughout her book, and that African Americans are expected to endure racism every day. There is a quote “Overcome in the moonlight” represents that they are conquering and discovering who they truly are.

Citizen and Normalized Dehumanization

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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.

Picture speaks louder than words

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Citizen: American lyric is monologues and images of poetry that capture racism and different inner life ideas. This book is about the experience of racism in the United States on a small and larger level, from daily racist events, from subways to police brutality and size issues. It includes race, ethnicity, and religion. The textual exploration is a lyric because Rankine’s writing takes the form of image or sentiment-based poetry and essay. Rankine’s work explores the question of what it means to be a black American, the meaning and responsibilities of being a part of citizenship, and American society. Rankine sees herself as a citizen walking around collecting stories and using those stories to reflect her life to poetry. There are various paintings, sculptures, images, and screenshots are edited in the book. Based on the content of this book, Claudia Rankine delves deeper into the relationship between humans and animals by a taxidermized deer, instead of the usual deer face on page 126, Kindle Edition. This image uses a human face in a completely strange way. The hair on the animal’s face was shaved without any real human faces in the picture. The image appears after the last act of the first chapter of the poem. In the last act of the first chapter, the speaker felt that she is being rejected when her therapist saw her at the front door. Rankine attempts to describe the existence of some people who are unseen at certain moments in their everyday lives by using the speaker was rejected to enter her therapist’s house as “At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?” (Rankine 117, Kindle Edition) Rankine also relates to blackness at the beginning of the poem by referring as “features more like a white person.” Moreover, in this image, a human character has evolved into a hairless face, revealing a series of generally understood expressions: anger, fear, compassion, and the most subtle emotions. Deer also play some significant roles to various people in the world legends such as the object of heroic pursuits and behavior. Evidently that Rankine tries to use an image to turn her attention by adding stories to help the reader better understand the emotion of writing the text from words and sounds related to the text. Rankine uses a taxidermized deer sculpture image to capture the reader’s thoughts as they read the novel and adds her emotions and images to help them better understand her story. It’s interesting to look at photos as a language in this citizen poem. The point is with a picture, we can convey so much more information than we can with words. In fact, it can take a thousand words just to describe what is in one picture. In this deer-like particular art piece, Rankine uses in Citizen is to attach her memory of being originally an indistinguishable historical animal on this continent. Rankine’s lyrical articles and images explore how racism may affect identity.

Whiteness, The Racial Imaginary, and American Dirt

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In “On Whiteness and the Racial Imaginary”, authors Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda discuss the tension between writers and their attempts to interact with race in their storytelling. In their opening paragraph, the writers jump into the conversation by listing examples of what ‘tropes’ one might find in writings about race, such as the exotification and othering of racialized characters. They also mention the spectrum of race that is often ignored in favor of a Black/white dichotomy. 

 

The authors go on to interrogate the white imagination, specifically as it is often a space considered to be free of race and yet qualified to conceive of racialized experiences outside of the creative’s mind. The authors clarify that the imagination is in fact informed by the real world, therefore a character of color cannot be written by an author without embodying the author’s own impressions of that character’s race or perceived experience. This place of imagination is not afforded to authors of color whose work cannot escape their real-world racializations; while an author of color’s race will always be tied to their work, a white author can speak from a place of universality.

 

The writers go on to address how it is difficult to write even of one’s own experience and that it can often be difficult to read about how a white author perceives you or someone of another race, and I think what this is getting at is that white voices are often seen as a sort of law, where their characters of color go on to influence the perceptions of that race, but then once perceived by real-world people of that experience they cause a sort of questioning of oneself.

 

The authors go on to give a hypothetical example of a white author getting upset and misunderstanding the ‘wounds’ that they are witnessing, and I think a real-world example of this would be Jeanine Cummin’s book ‘American Dirt’, which was widely talked about at the beginning of the year. In this novel, which Cummins claims to have researched for over 7 years, the fictionalized story of a Mexican woman and her son crossing over into the US is told. Historical and linguistic discrepancies aside, the book was particularly controversial because the author acknowledged in the text that she wishes someone “slightly browner” than she had told the story. Additionally, although the writer had previously considered herself white with no Latinx heritage, she began to identify herself as Latina by way of a Puerto Rican grandmother. As the controversy surrounding the book grew finally it was revealed, perhaps to gain sympathy, that her husband was an undocumented immigrant, therefore allowing her to write about the experience. Of course, it was later discovered that her husband is from Ireland, and although he may very well be undocumented, that experience is completely different from someone coming from Mexico.

I think it’s interesting to note how rather than defending her role as a writer to tell whatever story she wants, the author tried to establish points of relatability to the story that she published and I think with this example, it’s important again to note that the author herself acknowledges that there are opportunities to tell stories but they don’t go to people who are “slightly browner”, they go to people like Jeanine Cummins.  As Rankine and Loffreda state. perhaps it is not the question of “can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how.”

The Citizen With a Twinkle of Blue in Her Eye

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     Claudia Rankine makes a risky, but ultimately effective move, by employing the second-person in her “lyric” Citizen. The second-person point of view creates a dream-like quality in Rankine’s writing which works perfectly when Rankine describes moments from her childhood in part I of the lyric. Claudia Rankine presents her young self as an amalgam of Pecola and Claudia’s characters in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. 

     Rankine’s childhood memories, as recounted in Citizen, are reminiscent of The Bluest Eye’s portrait of black girlhood. Rankine writes:  

Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted, would you call you by the name of her black housekeeper… you never called her out on it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget…Do you feel hurt because It’s the “all black people look the same” moment, or because you are being confused with another after being so close to this other (Rankine 7)?   

 Rankine questions her actions when remembering this microaggression. The moment is reminiscent of Claudia MacTeer’s encounters with her community’s idealization of whiteness. When she destroys the white baby doll, she recalls, “all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured… what made people look at [little white girls] and say, ‘Awwwww,’ but not for me” (Morrison 20-22)? Both Rankine and MacTeer interrogate the ways they are rendered inhumane by the world as young black girls. For Rankine, her “friend” makes her replicable and indivisible from her race by calling Rankine the name of her black housekeeper. Rankine is simply “one of them.” For Claudia MacTeer, the world refuses to see her beauty, her specialness by viewing little white girls as the pinnacle of beauty. Claudia MacTeer does not accept the “white is right” mentality, as shown by how she questions little white girls’ beauty. Rankine tries to pin down precisely why her friend’s behavior bothered her. Both young Claudias subconsciously know that the societal behavior they encounter is wrong but can quite wrap their fingers around it. Neither is yet familiar with the history of white supremacy that might make the picture clearer for them. Both girls are constantly questioning, the passages scattered with question marks. However, neither girl receives answers in that moment. 

     Rankine also internalizes racism in a way that more closely mirrors Pecola’s character. Rankine writes that after incidents like the one quoted above:  

An unsettling feeling keeps the body front and center. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your back… Your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet (Rankine 8).  

 The racism Rankine encounters doesn’t just make  make her feel metaphorically sick but makes her feel that she as a person is sickening. The things Rankine endures (like the Freudian slip from her friend) damages her self image like how the things Pecola hears and sees feeds into her self hatred. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes and obsession with whiteness as the epitome of beauty proves the hatred she holds for her black self. Morrison illustrates throughout the novel how this self-hatred is produced by the Geraldines, Paulines, Shirley Temple cups, and overall societal obsession with Aryan looking little girls that Pecola encounters. Morrison also even writes, “The Breedloves… were poor and black and… believed they were ugly… it was as though some[one]… had given each one a cloak of ugliness, and they had each accepted it without question” (Morrison 38-39). The Breedlove, including Pecola, are all made to feel ugly (or sick, or disgusting, or wrong). Their ugliness is tied to their poverty, but more importantly their blackness. Their society rooted in white-supremacy – the magical creature with cloaks – cause them to feel this ugliness like the “wrong words” cause Rankine’s self-disgust.  

     Claudia Rankine’s childhood experiences mirror two divulging characters in The Bluest Eye: Claudia and Pecola. Rankine is interrogative at times like Claudia, but also susceptible to internalizing racism like Pecola. Rankine’s experiences exemplify how Morrison’s characters lie in real black women, and long past 1941 where Morrison’s novel takes place. Morrison’s novel shows that neither Pecola nor Claudia’s separate experiences define black girlhood, but that a little bit of each character can be found today in African-American women’s pasts.