Photo by Ayla Safran ’18
Claudia Rankine reads from her book “Citizen: An American Lyric” to an audience of engaged students.
BY SARAH CAVAR ’19
Mount Holyoke College welcomed Claudia Rankine, author of “Citizen: An American Lyric” to campus on Sept. 5. Amidst the lingering buzz of excitement from the day’s convocation festivities, Rankine received a warm welcome from attendees in a packed Chapin Auditorium.
Prior to Rankine’s entrance, Marcella Runell Hall gave remarks on the importance of “Citizen” as a common read, reflecting upon the present sociopolitical climate, and upon the increasing diversity of Mount Holyoke’s student body: “When we select a common read, it reflects what we want our community to be.”
Upon taking the stage, Claudia Rankine made similar remarks on the repeal of DACA, which had occurred earlier that same day. A Jamaican immigrant herself, Rankine stated her unequivocal support for these “DREAMers.” She praised Mount Holyoke’s collective impulse toward activism and social change, as she noted “there’s a hard road ahead, folks.”
Rankine carefully highlighted the contributions that other artists and writers made to “Citizen,” beginning with its iconic cover: a detached black hood from a sweatshirt, thrown against a stark white background. David Hammons created the piece, named “In the Hood,” in 1993, in the wake of the Rodney King riots. Readers, Rankine said, often assume that the piece was done more recently in honor of Trayvon Martin.
Racial terror in the United States is perennially relevant; said terror rises again and again to accompany Rankine’s poetry and prose.
During the slideshow Rankine used to discuss the pieces featured in “Citizen,” she also highlighted the sheer banality of racial terror: identical white suburban houses on a road named Jim Crow. A group of white people photographed under a tree; in the original, two black men have been lynched above them. In the other image, the two black men have been photoshopped out, and whiteness becomes invisible once more. “‘How did this happen?’ is a bad question!” Rankine repeated several times. Her work compiles experiences of everyday racism, the “this” that is happening. It is a system that “has been ingrained in us from day one.”
Along with reading selections of the work aloud (in a gentle, measured tone), Rankine was able to provide insight into the texts and experiences that informed “Citizen.” Her prose placed academic works, popular media and the lived experiences of black people on equal terrain, each informing facets of the experience described in “Citizen.” The inclusion of all of these sources in a narrative that is all her own illustrates Rankine’s focus on coalition-building and empathy as means of liberation. This concept is embedded into her most basic writing decisions: in employing the second-person-pronoun “you,” Rankine “[made] a problem-solving decision...’you’ becomes a space, rather than just a pronoun.” The word “you” becomes a space for empathy, a space for relationships to emerge, and a place to question what, exactly, “you” is.
Moreover, the book’s very structure, Rankine notes, reflects the slow and painful buildup of racist microaggressions that become the amalgam of pain “Citizen” illustrates. These “small acts of racism” are “stockpiled in the body.”
In response to one question posed by a student during the Q&A section of her talk, Rankine likened the book’s division into small sections that become a whole to the way that small microaggressions become a part of a larger system of racism. One student noted that, although some of her experiences were ambiguous in regard to racism, the other contents of the book “left [them] wondering...was that racism?” Smiling, Rankine replied that that was her intention –– such microaggressions leave herself and others wondering the same thing after uncomfortable encounters with white people.
As she finished writing “Citizen,” Rankine quickly realized that a work like this had no ending. In response to the question, “How did writing ‘Citizen’ change you?” Rankine shared that writing it helped her in “changing [her] own habits of complicity [in racism]” and has driven her to call out racism more often than she did prior to its publication.
Before receiving a long standing ovation, Rankine reflected that the germ of an idea that became “Citizen” began growing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The pain of 2005 became a work essential in 2014, the year of its publication. In the age of emboldened white supremacy, and given the increasing push for a united resistance to institutional racism, Rankine’s voice is a necessary loudspeaker for voices too often ignored.