Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is a book deeply embedded in the body, in the body before race, as in the body unable to escape either itself or its color. Race ignites lies about flesh and bone that claim some bodies should lose heart beats, bus seats, birthrights, in an ongoing list of how, possibly? In scene after scene of injustice recalled, from her own existence passed over while in line at the pharmacy, to the murder of a black child, shot to death by police, while touching candy, touching toys, the reader feels acutely her own body, and what comes along, as citizen of the world, with her own body’s color.
It should be as simple and easy to say, and of course it is anything but, that we are united by virtue of having bodies. “But I felt you are an I,” Elizabeth Bishop’s white, New England child mouths in her poem “In the Waiting Room,” shocked to realize, for the first time, that the world is full of many I’s, including “black, naked women,” “babies with pointed heads / wound round and round with string,” and many other beings whose skin color and customs are not like her own. Regardless, she feels, deeply, “…you are one of them. Why should you be one, too?” Sweeping all of the I’s and them’s onto a one-page universe that includes herself, the child is most incredulous to find that herself, like them, has been born. The strangeness of having a body is the thing, and there’s no difference, body to body, in this regard. It’s a fact, Citizen reminds us, that we have time and again forgotten.
Invoking another experience of I, Rankine writes, “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane.” Perhaps this is the epitome of the work, as it begs the question of who hasn’t the power, and who has. The answer is unbearably obvious. Rankine exposes the answer as travesty, addressing some of the more recent cases of injustice against black citizens, black bodies—James Craig Anderson, Jordan Russell Davis, Trayvon Martin…tragically, the list continues. Revisiting these stories in Rankine’s prose versus newspaper, we feel more deeply the reality of the bodies, stopped, though the voices of the victims haunt the air. In, “In Memory of Trayvon Martin,” for instance, Rankine writes from the perspective of the child murdered by a grown man, conjuring Martin’s literal last phone call:
“Good-bye, I say. I break the good-bye. I say good-bye before anyone can hang up, don’t hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though the waiting may be the call of good-byes.”
Beside this page is a photograph from 1930 called “Public Lynching,” featuring a cluster of white men and women, some laughing and smiling, some pointing, beneath a tree. They are horrifying to look at, cast in a glare of what they did and did not do. And they are as dumb and deaf in the image, then, as to the black child in 2012, pleading, that he not, in his young body, be about to say goodbye.
In Citizen, Rankine constantly challenges the reader to feel the weight of her own I and to question its power: do you have it? What is it used for? Do you feel like a softly dissolving column: “No, no, no, I really didn’t see you,” a man says to the speaker in one poem, during an everyday, domestic moment. From here, the questions to self only intensify: Do you have law, liberty and justice on your side? Why do some I’s. Why do some I’s not. The reality is overwhelming, and painful to feel, acknowledge, from inside the body where, we say, the gut feels what’s coming, the heart knows what’s right.
“…it’s a strange beach,” Rankine writes, “each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads.”
From that crashing, how does the body go into action, or simply even, go on?
Citizen is anything but a book of answers. In response to humanity’s worst imaginable, Rankine pursues a series of difficult questions laden so often with hopelessness that it seems in the end all we can do is not let the questions float away. Or maybe her very text offers another suggestion, which is to pass the question, body to body by speaking it, feeling it, until all together, these questions won’t let any of us sleep.