Double Lives: Ambiguity, Pronouns, and the Lyric “I” in Citizen

Double Lives: Ambiguity, Pronouns, and the Lyric “I” in Citizen

 Originally written for Lyn Hejinian, for English 165.

            In late 2015 a video circulated the internet of a young woman, Johari Osayi Idusuyi, reading at a Donald Trump rally, her face partially obscured by a cover of a black hood. Noticing her indifference, a white man besides her accosts her to stop and pay attention. She promptly ignores him and continues in silent protest. Naturally, the video attained instant viral fame and notoriety, with people lauding Idusuyi for her simple act of resistance, launching her into the spotlight—a rare moment where pop culture, politics, and literature auspiciously collide. Yet aside from the symbolic nature of her action, her chosen reading material also proved serendipitously apt. The book that quite literally became the face of this gesture of defiance is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, which, by the time of the video’s surge in popularity, was certainly not in want of recognition. Having accumulated several literary awards, and a finalist for several more, Citizen almost instantly achieved what most in the literary world work decades toward—cultural and critical clout, becoming the centerpiece in the conversation about race in our own contemporary American moment. Published in 2014, Citizen is a genre-smashing work that features everything from prose poetry, cultural criticism, and visual art. It is an unapologetic peek into the black experience, blackness in contemporary culture, and a relentless examination of racism and its effects on language. Rankine takes apart racist language both overt and in cases of so-called “micro-aggressions,” as well as the language of the state, to expose its permeability, its fears, its power, and its lies. With focus on the beginning of Section V and the ending of Section VI, a survey of the poem’s use of silence and ambiguity, on the poem’s insisted status as “lyric,” its use of pronouns, and its existence as an ongoing, unfinished project, will examine its relation as a commentary on contemporary manifestations of institutionalized racism.

Section V begins with a prose poem that starts “Words work as release—well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture.” This is one of the main projects Citizen undertakes: the close examination of words and the fine line between intention and gesture that is often blurred in quotidian manifestations of racism. “The conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing,” the stanza continues. Rankine plays with the “intention” and “gesture” of words by signaling a back and forth between the interior experience and the exterior performance—eyes being “windows to the soul” that verge on revealing this held back interiority. The stanza continues, “What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid—what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words encoding the bodies they cover.” The notion of translation, redaction, alteration, etc. reveal the mediation that is ever-present in the black experience. The constant negotiation between interiority and exteriority suggest W.E.B. DuBois’ theory of double consciousness, in which black experience inheres a heightened awareness of the self as perceived by others, namely whites, under institutional racism. This “double” recognition of the self is what Rankine represents in the non-stop mediation between what is experienced in black interiority, and the performance of the self. There is a constant anxiety about the perception and performance, a need to hold back one’s inner thoughts and emotions in fear of, among other things, being called paranoid, dramatic, or being dismissed under the racist stereotype of an angry black person. It is also interesting to consider “words encoding the bodies they cover,”—it is unclear exactly whose words are “encoding,” being either the words of a white micro-aggressor, who encodes the black body in dehumanizing language, or the words of black individuals, who are forced to hold back their words, and encode their own body by playing into “respectability politics.”

The stanza ends on “And despite everything the body remains.” The ambiguity of the line before it lends two possible readings: firstly, that despite all that is done on the part of black individuals to “encode” their own body through their words, they are still tied to the body, that they ultimately cannot escape their being perceived as the racialized body. However, a second reading also suggests that despite all that has been to the racialized body not just figuratively through language, but corporeally over the centuries, in which the racialized body and the black community has endured tremendous suffering, they have survived—the body remains, continues to be vital. The page ends in two aposiospetic lines: “Occasionally it is interesting to think about the outburst if you would just cry out—” and “To know what you’ll sound like is worth noting—.” This inability to even complete the line as it happens is indicative of the constant self-policing that racialized individuals endure. These lines also greatly distance themselves from the emotion of speaking out, adopting a scholarly tone. Rankine cuts off and silences these lines, suggesting perhaps that the policing of one’s own thoughts and words is pervasive as well as invasive, invading the space of the poem and forcing itself to distance, silence the potential outburst of emotion. These moments of aposiopesis also suggest that one cannot represent the “crying out”, the outburst, that it isn’t even possible to represent what that would look or sound like, that it isn’t within the realm of imagination. “Doubleness,” that is, the ambiguity of language that allows for multiple readings, as well as the ambiguity of its opposite, silence, is mimetic of the experience of double consciousness, in which the self and seeing is split multi-perspectivally. Similarly, the ambiguity of silence considers the blurred line between the silencing of the self and the self being silenced.

Examining this poem in light of the book’s self-proclaimed status as an “American Lyric,” it is also interesting to consider historical and contemporary notions of the Lyric. Published only a few days apart from each other, Gillian White’s Lyric Shame is a book that discusses the embarrassment that surrounds the lyric form in contemporary academia. White calls to mind an ideal of poetry outlined by John Stuart Mill, whose “figure for lyric poetry from his 1833 ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ [is that] poetry is ‘feeling confessing itself to itself,’ that is yet ‘overheard’ by an uncountenanced listener”—traits that have been credited to the shame of,  as well as epitomizing, the lyric form (White, 32). The shame that the lyric encounters is from the author’s seeming shamelessness of talking about personal feelings. That Rankine insists that this entire work is a lyric, suggests an opposition to or at the very least an investigation of the idea that personal experience is somehow shameful or not valuable—indeed, the way which personal experience is shamed seems to be another way the experience of marginalized peoples, particularly black experience, is silenced. If personal experience is not valued and in fact, considered shameful, then racism and micro-aggressions seem to be incapable of being confronted in any viable way without being dismissed as mere sentimentality. That Rankine insists upon this work as an American lyric is also a way in which the work occupies a larger framework about the country and its relationship to race and anti-black racism. In subtitling her book “An American Lyric,” Rankine puts black personal experience at the forefront of the conversation in politics as well as in poetry.

On the following page, the poem continues after a page break with another aposiopesis. “In the darkened moment a body given blue light, a flashlight, enters with levity, with or without assumptions, doubts, with desire, the beating heart, disappointment, with desires—” is another moment in which emotion is being expressed but cut off or silenced. “With desire” is also transformed into “with desires” by the end of the stanza, suggesting that this emotion, this want or demand for something is multiplying, before promptly being cut off again—another moment of silenced, policed language. This stanza is followed by the single line “Stand where you are.” Again, the ambiguity produces two readings; firstly, that this imperative is given by the author to stand your ground, to continue to desire or demand, to take a stance against micro-aggressive language, and racism at large. The line can also be read as an extension of state language, of something that the police might demand. This doubled meaning calls back to the way in which the racialization of the body causes the split perception of the self and the self as perceived by others, manifested here first as a positive personal imperative, contrasted secondly by a reference to being hailed down by a police officer, a more often than not traumatic experience for the black community. The use of the pronoun “you” recalls the concept of interpellation as observed by philosopher Louis Althusser, in which being hailed as a “you” by an expression of the state’s authority or repressive state apparatuses (i.e. the police), in a sense, means becoming implicit in a system in which “you” is always subordinate to the state. Rankine extends this concept to institutionalized racism as it manifests itself in police and police language. The ambiguities Rankine presents in these passages lends itself for different readings influenced by the reader’s own positionality. “Stand where you are,” while possibly being a moment of empowerment, is simultaneously a moment of the invasive language of the police and the invasive self-policing that follows from being viewed as a suspect body, a criminal body (and indeed, a racialized black body is criminal under white supremacy). Silence, ambiguity, and confusion both function similarly in Citizen, as mimetic expressions of the repressive and reflexive silencing and confusion of identity that occurs beneath the white supremacist police state.

The poem continues a few stanzas later: “You could build a world out of need or you could hold everything black and see. You back the lack.” Rankine plays with the idea of holding back as it appeared earlier on when discussing the self-policing effect of language and performance that white supremacy and double consciousness forces. Holding back in the earlier part of the poem, however, has now transformed into “hold[ing] everything black,” which is largely ambiguous, but suggests among other things, to own every aspect of black identity. Rankine also writes “hold everything black and see” which suggests that to do so allows for sight, for opening one’s eyes to a larger understanding of the world. “You give back the lack,” the stanza continues, where what is “lack[ed]”, possibly being any number of things, including opportunities or rights in a system that seeks to subordinate this “you.”

Rankine then goes on to directly discuss the use of pronouns on the following page: “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it” the poem continues. This discourse about first person borders between poem and essay, with perhaps its poetic status maintained only by that Rankine refuses to fully explicate. “This makes the first person a symbol for something,” Rankine write. For what, is never made clear; something that is inarticulable, or  perhaps, unimaginable. This followed by another singlet “The pronoun barely holding the first person together.” Rankine suggests that “I” is a placeholder for the self, the black self, that “comes apart” the more closely it is examined, perhaps because it is not a self that necessarily exists under institutionalized racism. “I,” then, is the ultimate status of recognized selfhood: “You said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane.” This section also plays off the idea of the lyric “I,” the first person speaker in traditional lyric poetry, empowered to speak their thoughts and emotions, forming the reality of their and the poem’s environment. Rankine’s use of the “American” lyric form to express the value of black experience, the specific use of the lyric “I” in the context disenfranchised and marginalized peoples, becomes the form of entitlement and empowerment that this speaker does not feel entitled to. That “you” is the pronoun of currency that Citizen employs only underscores the futility of achieving such a state in this current system. In Rankine’s lyric, “I” is replaced with “you,” the you that can function to reflexively refer to the self or others, but simultaneously as the hailed “you,” constantly subject to a system, to a dynamic of power and submission.

“And you would look past me,” the poem continues, with the first person finally appearing but only in object form, still removing the first person from any agency. “The first person can’t pull you together,” the stanza ends, suggesting that using “I” doesn’t necessarily mean that if one were to employ the first person, it still remains that it is a selfhood that is not recognized as having any power. Another reading might also be extracted in that a single person is not capable of pulling you together after the dissonance of experiencing racism, perhaps pointing towards the ameliorative capabilities of community. “Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me,” the poem follows, continuing to employ the object form of the first person, lacking its own agency. The empowerment of first person selfhood is still “beyond,” out of reach. Rankine goes on to write, “Drag that first person out of the social death of history, then we’re kin,” suggesting that the use of the entitled first person position has been tainted by its inaccessibility to marginalized groups, to those who have been excluded from it. Only by dragging it out of history can there be a “we,” a collective relationship, a community, a family.

Yet the first person is suddenly utilized on the following page: “Listen, you, I was creating a life study of a monumental first person, a Brahmin first person.” Rankine’s invocation of a Brahmin, being a sort of Hindu priest or intermediary for the divine, suggests that the use of the first person is a moment of divinity and holiness. Yet this first person was only creating a “life study,” and is situated in the past (is this first person not still creating this life study?). Again, the first person is divorced from any real agency or achievement. In the moment of the poem, this speaker is “nowhere”: “Join me down here in nowhere,” Rankine writes. Even the appearance of the first person in the poem does not create any moment of freedom or selfhood; in fact, this first person does not seem to exist at all, at least in a physical sense. After all the time Rankine builds up the importance of achieving first person selfhood, it arrives disappointingly and without power. Where one expects divine utopia, one is asked to join “nowhere,” a play perhaps on the fact that “utopia” comes from Sir Thomas More’s fictional paradise ironically derived from the Greek, meaning “no place.” “It’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in the excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads,” ends the page. Rankine ends this section by placing the reader in a scene of immense violence, the Atlantic Slave Trade, returning to the idea of expression and emotion, of having an individual’s voice drowned out by self-policing, due to the threat of being silenced. Rankine also suggests the threat of being forcibly reminded of the violent history that underlies every instance of racist micro-aggression—being reminded that you are a racialized body recalls the long history of violence done upon racialized bodies, i.e. isolated incidents are not at all isolated, they are systemic and constant, just as the waves “breaking,” on the shore, upon their heads.

Section VI ends with a list of names of black individuals murdered recently by racists, including Michael Brown and Sandra Bland, who were killed by the police, as well as the many people killed in the Charleston church shooting. While the list of names eventually stops, “In Memory,” which precedes all their names, continues down the page until the ink fades to white. Death is the ultimate silence, a matter that this section is hyper-aware of. The continuation of “In Memory” down the page suggests that the poem is self-aware of its incompleteness, that the list could have any number of names of past and present victims. That the ink starts to fade as it goes on suggests the looming threat that they will be forgotten once the news cycles has refreshed, that anti-black extrajudicial and terrorist murders are only topical, and not the everyday reality that the black community faces—another way in which the struggle of the black community is silenced. However, including the full names of the men, women and children who have been killed due to racism not only memorializes them, but is a moment in which individuality is celebrated and recognized, after the entire book has overwhelmingly been written in second person in ambiguous scenarios. The accumulation of names is also a testament to ongoing racism and racist violence. Since publication, Rankine has released multiple versions of this book in which more names have been added—an ongoing project of lamentation and documentation. It is a living document, one that continues to be re-written and added to, to honor these people, but perhaps it is also an attempt to combat all the violence and death that it contains. It speaks, where some can no longer.

The section ends on a more traditionally lineated poem: “because white men can’t/police their imagination/black men are dying.” After many sections of prose poetry, Rankine offers a familiarly styled poem that has enjambment, creating partial syntax. The first line, “because white men can’t,” is an interesting inversion of power dynamics. “White men,” who represent the most privileged class, and thus hold the most power, now “can’t,” they are rendered impotent, they lack agency and power, and suddenly the “lack” that Rankine says to “give back” earlier on, is finally manifested here. “police their imagination” is another reversal of power dynamics. Earlier on the presence of police manifested itself in the language of being hailed, as well as the invasive self-policing of double consciousness. Even on the previous page, the presence of police brutality is felt with the mention of individuals such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and more. Now, the act of policing, or the gaze of being policed, is turned onto “white men.” The partial syntax also allows Rankine to present an imperative for white men to police themselves, specifically the racist imaginary of white supremacy. Rankine presents an inversion and assumption of authority not previously capable, yet the poem does not succumb to the fantasy of this reversal, ending with the sobering fact that “black men are [still] dying.” This moment also exemplifies the dialectic of power that Rankine’s language, particularly, ambiguity (and thus, multiplicity of interpretation), re-enacts. The drama of the poem’s language often lays in its ability to oscillate between and to simultaneously be empowering and devastating, though often relenting to the reality of death that entails existence under racism.

Holly Bass for her book review in the New York Times writes “this seems to be part of Rankine’s conceit: What passes as news for some (white) readers is simply quotidian lived experience for (black) others (Bass). Claudia Rankine’s Citizen exploded past the literary world into a conversation with popular culture. Perhaps it’s popularity is in part, because it is a new perspective in the mainstream, something that hasn’t been taken to task so masterfully before. With numerous accolades and unanimous critical acclaim, it is difficult not to wonder if the attention her work is receiving from the mainstream, is in large part because of the timing. The growing tensions concerning race in this country heightens anxiety, and Rankine’s incisive work sheds light on it. Yet exposing isn’t necessarily what this work does: the racism has always been there, it’s just that nobody was looking. The work is timely, but it is also timeless. One of Rankine’s concerns, particularly represented in the fading ink of “In Memory,” is that this is a conversation doomed to fade into obscurity, doomed to become just another story in the news cycle. Yet like that poem, Rankine’s Citizen is a living document, not just in the constant updating of itself, but also in that it is restless and relentless in critique. It looks not only at black history, but its present and its future.

Works Cited

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014. Print.

“Citizen.” Graywolf Press. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.

White, Gillian C. Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. N.p.: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.

Bass, Holly. “Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 27 Dec. 2014 Web. 29 Apr. 2016.