CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC - CLAUDIA RANKINE

It’s always interesting when art becomes the victim of its own success and the things that made it original and worthwhile are so digested and redone by the world at large that when you finally encounter it, it’s no longer original. I can remember hearing people doing parodies and impressions and homages to John Wayne’s distinct voice and mannerism years before I saw a John Wayne film and how this pre-exposure really made it impossible to really encounter his movies. Or if you watch dozens of sports movies before seeing Rocky or grow up listening to rap and then going back and checking out Rakim. It’s hard to appreciate the originality when you live in the world that these pieces created. This book is like that, but with Microaggressions. Elsewhere on this site, as well in person, if you know me, you can see feelings about microaggressions and the man who invented the concept (Chester Pierce, a man who help arch-demon Jolly West kill an elephant with LSD), but this book came out in 2014 at a time before the concept was in the broader culture. Rankine weaves personal microaggression that she experienced, from within her life as an ivy league professor, with high-profile incidents like those that Serena Williams experienced, with macro/hyper violent aggressions that are in the news, like the killing of Trayvon Martin. It’s so interesting to see how the concerns and ideas that animated this period, the Ferguson, BLM v.1 era, came back in 2020 but much stronger since there wasn’t a Black president to run interference. We feel beyond this now, the book succeeded in its goal of introducing these ideas into the mainstream. Unfortunately, this understanding didn’t actually move the material realities all that much, the sort of microagression-focused, White Fragility, we-all-need-to-do-the-work style approach is a dead-end because it’s focused on individuals and doesn’t really posit a solution beyond, “you need to be aware of and unpack this.” But back to the book. It is an interesting form, it calls itself poetry, and who am I to disagree, but it includes the text from videos, lots of pictures, things that read closer to essay (at least to me). I appreciated the hybridity of the form, though I think it does itself a disservice calling itself poetry since the language never really grabbed me. The ideas are interesting, if cliche’d now, but the writing is pretty straightforward. I really think this would have hit much harder in 2014, now it feels like old news.