First Person Plural: Part IV

I’m thinking again about Camille Rankine’s poetry and the first person plural—the more-than-singular self. In an earlier post, I spent time with Rankine’s poem “We,”a poem that invokes a collective self without explicitly defining that self, prompting the reader to ask big questions about the context and history of her “we” (and situate themself in relation to that “we”) while exploring lyrical terrain. Rankine’s use of a “we” varies from poem to poem, with a range of significant effects.

In her poem “Matter in Retreat,” which first appeared alongside “We” in the Boston Review in 2014, the “we” is not a collective “people,” but rather the two-person plural of a relationship. The poem begins as follows:

The stars drift
away from one another

tonight as every moment you
& I breathing so thoughtless a living

we make as we are made to
as I make another promise

to myself to try to mean more
to you to call out across

a great distance . . .

The poem heightens its questions of interpersonal connection and disconnection through its formal decisions; lines breaks subvert syntactic certainty, while a lack of punctuation creates multiple possibilities even within individual lines. The speaker seems to want to believe in this unit of “we,” while the poem’s imagery undermines that possibility:

& what are we

to one another but a means
to a meaning we haven’t yet

discovered two points of light
on the inky dark

sky two paper boats
on a black lake floating further

Here, we watch and feel a “we” drifting back into two separate selves.

Throughout her work, Rankine’s “we” often does triple-duty, inviting the reader to consider how a poem might change depending on our reading of this pronoun as the “royal” we of the poet’s capacious imagination, or as a socio-political we of collective identity (race, nation, generation, and so on), or as the intimate we of a relationship. At the beginning of Incorrect Merciful Impulses, “Tender” begins:

Dear patriot

Dear catastrophe

None of this means what we thought it did.

And in yet one more take on this pronoun, there is the “we” that is never articulated, but is very much at the heart of Rankine’s poem “Genealogy,” which Matthew Zapruder featured in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. In “Genealogy,” Rankine repeatedly embeds an implicit “we,” contrasting the collective with the self through both parallel structure and repetition. Twice here, a sentence begins with “All my people” as its subject, an echo of Moses’s biblical imperative, the possessive “my” leading a reader to assume the speaker’s identification with and inclusion in that subject. Twice, the speaker’s people perish (“All my people died / in the fire”; “All my people / rode their horses off / the edge of the world”). The syntactic parallelism and repetition continues, as each sentence concludes with the speaker’s individual abandonment, followed by a naming. There is a ritual and mythical quality to this progression:

All my people died
in the fire and left me
with the gods. They called me dust.

. . . All my people
rode their horses off
the edge of the word and left me
on your doorstep. They called me
sorrow.

Though the poem does not actually contain the word “we,” the poem seems to function as an exploration of what (and who) is behind the origins of an individual self, with a lost “we” like a ghost in the text.