Claudia
Rankine

For Claudia Rankine, pronouns are the most vital words—pronouns, these stand-ins for names, names which are already a stand-in for the one to whom they refer.

The vitality of pronouns, for Rankine, lives in how they instantiate questions of being, becoming, and belonging.

Consider, for example, the pronoun “us,” the object case of the first-personal plural “we”—both pronouns announce constituency and kinship, but the force of saying “us” is directed inward rather than outward. The indirect pronoun generates a perspective of the one who are being spoken of, not the ones speaking. As such, the authority in “us” trembles a bit, unsteadied by its object location.

As in Just Us, Rankine’s most recent book showcases that the condition of saying “us” is a political instance—it matters in regard to the terms of state—as it is also human and literary. (The title, “just us,” is also an English homophonic play on the word “justice.”) Across her oeuvre, Rankine has energized pronouns to reform what the lyric form can do, how it can create not a speaker or audience but a reading condition full of the liveliness and trouble and unease and embrace of being invited to think about life in the modern world, (one’s) life in the complicated ordinary everyday of being on earth now.

Rankine animates words like “us”—or “you,” the direct address that is both a term of endearment and subjection, an intimacy. To say “you” is to create a poetics of address and knowing that ripples with intensity. The occasion of “you” is singular and plural, radiating engagement broadly; this quality makes it an apt syntax in Rankine’s lyric duet, Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. And as her writing asks us about us, Rankine shifts the focus away from what we might be inclined to say about “them.” There is nothing simplistic or presumptuous about the achievement of a collective name, nothing easy in any of this poetics, even if all of it is ordinary.

Claudia Rankine writes lyrics of the human now, though it might be more appropriate to say that she uses and revises—experiments with—the lyric form to refract sensibilities of the everyday. In the preface of Don’t Let me Be Lonely, Rankine notes:

I deliberately wrote from a position of incomplete knowing and understanding, not knowing exactly but feeling completely. I allowed hesitancy, worry, fear, apprehension, and need to be my subjects wherever I saw, heard, or felt any or all of these emotions. The pieces became a collection of movements in the historical present that I witnessed in my own life and in the lives of others in both very public and very private arenas. I went from thinking about the pieces as meditations on events to laments in real time. Eventually, I began to understand the writing as emotional expressions of moments in time and not so much records of a singular life. These were lyrics holding historical affect. Loneliness and violence were flooding our days, or so I felt. Fear was driving both our actions and statis. For some of us, the fear was an excuse for cruelty, and for others, fear was synonymous with terror. Loss was the same as it ever was. (ix)

In this way, her books become accounts of these hefty terms that define modern world experience—loneliness, citizenship—but that are hard to articulate in the normative language of politics.

We need a poetics of the everyday and the ordinary, and Rankine’s lines offer that. Her aesthetics approximates the thrall and encounter of a handshake, akin to her dialogue with the poet Paul Celan:

Or “Your truly lonely Paul Celan” said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem—is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that—Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.
Or one meaning of here is “In this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,” or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are. Here, he said to her. Here both recognizes and demands recognition. I see you, or here, he said to her. In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

Rankine’s writing arrives as the energy of ordinary speech and thought, channeling how one, thinking and grappling and feeling, might process experience and might find themselves caught in the complexity of knowing. In Rankine’s intelligence, it is not simply that we know because something happens to us; no, how we explore and narrate the something that happened—that becomes another iteration of the happening. Indeed, we know because we oscillate between those two conditions of experience. As Rankine notes, “the use of the first person [. . .] is a strategy I came to in an attempt to maintain a form of intimacy and agility within the prose poems themselves. The first person seemed more a rudder than an authentic self as I had been schooled to believe it should be by the traditional lyric” (Lonely xii).

Truth is at once precise, simple, and elusive. Beautiful and terrifying. Urgent and dull, sometimes barely registering, as in “Someone said this thing. Someone did this thing” (xiii). Powerful as that.

Her books are made-objects intended to reinforce the sense of what one holds in one’s hands—they emphasize the power of reading. Of course, the book, as an energized material object, is not a replacement for a person or people, not a glimpse into someone’s life. No, the book is a reading condition that makes demands on the reader, a room one enters with responsibility.

Notably, Rankine’s books are materially textured—the paper is often thick and weighty, unusual in shape and size; words are mixed with images and deployments of white space. These qualities reinforce the book as an object and as space for suspension.¹

And these elements of Rankine’s work highlight her unique identity as a poet and a critic, an artist whose poetry enacts criticism and whose criticism stretches into the creative inhabitance of the poetic. She troubles the border between poetry and prose. She heightens our attentiveness to imagination and the imaginary, how we create and experiment with idioms of ourselves and each other and our world(s). This is the genre of Rankine’s revised lyric form, an alphabet capable of approximating the rush of consciousness and feeling and hunger, the urgency of neediness, the quick of satiation and the flutter of dreaming. Again, the aesthetic is one of intimacy, where the word intimacy points as much to closeness as it does to distance.

“The word in language is half someone else’s,” Mikhail Bakhtin tells us. Rankine exploits this fact that we share language even as we want to claim it for ourselves.

One could introduce Claudia Rankine by noting that she has written five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric, published in 2014. Citizen is widely regarded as one of the most important books of the twenty-first century, and was winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. Rankine has also written three plays and the essay collection Just Us: An American Conversation, and has co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. She is an exemplary contemporary artist whose creativity extends to video and installation. And this breadth has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts.

That introduction is true but it also falls short. Better to say that Claudia Rankine makes art and has a severe and severely beautiful—and playful—intellect. Better, still, to say that Rankine, critic and poet, is a modern-day marvel who chronicles so finely and who invites us to try to bear the everyday grace of being and being together in the world.

Text: Kevin Qhashie

¹On this insight, I am indebted to a conversation with Rankine as well as Margo Crawford’s exploration of the black book in What Is African American Literature.