Claudia Rankine and The Power of Art

Today’s post focuses on Citizen: An American Lyric (“Citizen“) and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (“Lonely”), both by American writer and poet Claudia Rankine. I chose these books after reading an article in Elle UK interviewing British writer Natasha Brown (the author of last month’s book Assembly) about her writing process and inspiration. Brown told reporters that her book was greatly inspired by Rankine’s Lonely and French philosopher and literary theorist Roland Barthes’s essay Myth Today. After reading Lonely and Citizen myself (the first two books in Rankine’s “An American Lyric” trilogy), I can certainly see the similarities between those novels and Brown’s novel, with all three books written in a lyrical, poetic, and somewhat abstract (though highly nuanced, symbolic, and emotive) style.

Rankine and Brown: An Introduction

Like Brown’s Assembly, both Citizen and Lonely are written in poetic and oftentimes abstract sentence structures. As one critic at The Guardian wrote with respect to Citizen, the book “…may or may not be poetry.” In this respect, the writing style is very similar to Assembly. Rankine’s two works, though, in contrast to Assembly, also present a series of photographs and works of art alongside their text, resulting in two fascinating, multimedia works.

Lonely was first published in 2004 and has been described as “hauntingly prescient.”[1] Citizen was published a decade later in 2014 and builds on Lonely, furthering the “conversation” initiated by Lonely ten years earlier. In 2020, Rankine also published Just Us: An American Conversation, which is Rankine’s third book in this series. Citizen is the most famous of these three books, having won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry, and the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry Best Collection. Citizen was also a National Book Award finalist, and ranked as a New York Times bestseller in 2015.

In 2024, Rankine republished a new edition of Lonely with an added preface, reflecting on the trilogy collectively. Rankine writes, “Following Lonely, Citizen and Just Us attempt to both reflect and forge conversations in light of our daily struggles with the power structures limiting our possibilities and framing our realities. Many readers came to the trilogy through the door opened by Citizen’s publication. The reissue of Lonely is a look back at where the concept of the “American Lyric” actually began.” Essentially, this reissue invites readers to reconsider and return to Lonely, the origins of this trilogy, lest it be overshadowed by Citizen’s later popular success.

In both Citizen and Lonely, Rankine describes numerous instances of every-day racism, further building on our earlier themes of implicit bias and microaggressions. In one early scene in Lonely, I’m instantly reminded of Brown’s Assembly. The narrator tells of a close friend who passed away from breast cancer after a misdiagnosis: “The lump was misdiagnosed a year earlier. Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes – when does her death actually occur?”. The text is accompanied by two images, one of a mammogram, and one of a photograph of a healthcare worker holding “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate) lettered blocks.

In the preceding and subsequent texts of Lonely, Rankine discusses themes of untimely death (including deaths from police brutality), and the existential meaning of life and death. Similarly, in Assembly, we saw how Brown wove together these two known milieus of extreme racial bias – the highly disproportionate killings of Black men by police in the U.S., and the intense gaslighting and underservice of Black women in healthcare. These two themes run prevalent throughout both Lonely and Citizen.

Rankine, Brown and Barthes: Literary Theory and Philosophy

Myth Today is an essay found in the larger collection of essays title Mythologies by French philosopher Roland Barthes. In Myth Today, which also inspired Brown’s Assembly, Barthes discusses the relationship between language and power. Barthes writes: “Speech of this kind is a message. It is therefore by no means confined to oral speech. It can consist of modes of writing or of representations; not only written discourse, but also photographs, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, all these can serve as a support to mythical speech. Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning…” Rankine’s two multimedia works – touching on everything from mass media, politics, police brutality, and international relations, to sports, medicine, and public health – explore the myth and meaning of our society at large.

Barthes writes, “Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things.” On one hand, this quote captures the boundless nature of art and literature, where “there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things.” On the other hand, however, this quote, in the context of oppressive societal structures, conveys how everything, every “object in the world” is “open to appropriation by society”; nothing is immune from indoctrination, bias, or prejudice. Essentially, “myth” can simultaneously be boundless and empowering, or oppressive and constrictive, depending on its use and context.

These philosophical notions are reflected again at the start of Rankine’s Lonely with a quote by famed poet and former president of Martinique, Aimé Césaire: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear…” Here, Césaire’s quote reflects the duplicitous meaning that various symbols can hold; and embodies notions of the “White gaze,” as famously articulated by Toni Morrison.[2] Indeed, Césaire cautions against assuming the “sterile attitude of the spectator,” assuming that a spectator or viewer is neutral (“sterile”) and without significant bias or prejudice; and against the “White gaze” that might voyeuristically trivialize or degrade expressions of Black life or grief: “life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear.”

These ideas are also seen in Brown’s Assembly, when the protagonist’s White boss, Lou, becomes a casual spectator to a Black man’s tragic death: “I recall Lou, eating lunch at his desk while Philando Castile’s death played out between paragraphs on his screen. He held his burrito up above his mouth and caught falling beans with his tongue as he peeled the foil back from soft tortilla… Video, and burrito, finished. Lou’s sticky hand cupped the mouse and clicked away.” Lou bears witness to images of intense police brutality as though it were any old article, video or meme (“a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear”); and with the privilege to simply “[click] away.” While Lonely’s female subject learns of her cancer diagnosis and confronts her mortality through a grainy mammogram screen, Assembly’s Lou is desensitized to death and violence as he witnesses it through the removed and isolated position of his computer monitor.

Lonely is ultimately about the loneliness of modern society; the isolation that comes from mass media and technology; and the alienation of individuals from community, of language from its meaning. Gray Wolf Press describes it as a “crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness,” that “invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives.” Each mini chapter of Lonely is separated by two blank pages, one with a singular image of a television screen displaying static, again symbolizing the separation, fracturing and alienation perpetuated by modern technology; and then woven back together by poetry, prose and the power of art.

Lonely and Citizen: The Individual versus the Collective

Based on various clues in Lonely regarding the narrator’s profession (as professor and academic) and geographic location (living in New York City), the reader can recognize that the work, narrated from a first-person perspective, tells the story of Rankine herself, or a close version of herself. In the introduction to the 2024 edition, however, Rankine also explains her intention to have the “I” reflect a collective experience as well, beyond her own individual experience: “The use of the first person throughout Lonely is a strategy I came to in an attempt to maintain a form of intimacy and agility within the prose poems themselves… “I” was there to signal a disembodied speaker in the sense that it could inhabit multiple bodies experiencing or looking on or being alongside… Anybody could embody the first person and be our guide through the text.”

Citizen, written ten years later, presents a second-person “you” perspective, essentially responding to and dialoguing with the “conversation” initiated by Lonely ten years earlier. These narrative distinctions – between the first person and the second person – are even visible in the titles of the two works, with Lonely conveying the isolation, loneliness and individuality of “I,” and Citizen evoking the communal, shared experiences between “you” and “I,” as “citizens” of a larger society. Later, this dialogue is furthered with Just Us: An American Conversation, the third book in the trilogy, that I have yet to read, but that seems to solidify the “you” and “I’ of the preceding works with “just us,” bringing the two “American Lyrics” into an “American Conversation,” and also creating an outsider or “them” from the “just us.”

While, according to Rankine, Lonely was meant to capture a collective experience beyond her own individual experience, Citizen seems even more generalized, without the specific identity markers present in Lonely. Indeed, Citizen recounts numerous instances of racial aggression, generalized through a collective experience: “When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, so what, who cares? She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.” Here, the narration refers to a common microaggression of confusing employees of the same race; a microaggression that we may very well see raised in complaints involving allegations of racial bias or discrimination. The “fifty-fifty chance of getting it right” also tells us that the subject (“you“) in this scene is one of only two people of the same race in her/his office. As we saw in earlier posts on implicit bias, the prevalence of implicit bias increases in environments with less diversity and representation.

The text continues: “Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to ‘our mistake.’ Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning./ What did you say?” Under the final stanza – “What did you say?” – is the rest of the blank page, indicating that she said nothing in response. Here, we see the use of “we” as a way of minimizing and deflecting individual accountability; and the way that racism begets gaslighting, internalization, and further racism: “This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.” In this sense, Citizen is more focused on the aggregated, collective experience of racism, focusing on common microaggressions, and the perpetuation or multiplication of racism throughout society.

The theme of the individual experience versus the collective experience runs through many of the books that I will be featuring on this blog, and has already been visible in earlier posts. Indeed, the study of implicit bias is, on the one hand, the study of an individual’s experience in society; and, on the other hand, the aggregation of widespread data that narrates a collective experience.

As we also saw in earlier posts on implicit bias, current employment law does not view aggregated implicit bias data (alone) as sufficient in holding employers liable for discrimination. Implicit bias evidence can, however, be used in pre-litigation workplace and school investigations, that operate under a lower evidentiary standard, which is why it is important for us investigators to be aware of implicit bias research, and familiar with common forms of microaggressions.

Indeed, literature opens our minds to different perspectives and the experiences of different people. When evaluating claims for “objective reasonableness,” this standard should include a diversity of thought and perspective, informed by a variety of worldviews and life experiences; a standard that can be achieved, in part, through the consumption and appreciation of art and literature.

About the Author

Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican American poet, playwright, essayist and editor. Her works have won and been nominated for numerous literary awards, and she is widely considered to be a great author of our time. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Rankine immigrated to the U.S. as a child and grew up in New York City. After living in teaching in various states for many years (including teaching at California’s Pomona College for about a decade), Rankine returned to New York City, where she currently lives. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII), and interdisciplinary collective and think tank for artists and writers who study race; and in 2021, she joined the NYU Creative Writing Program.

[1] Gray Wolf Press refers to Lonely as “a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature.”

[2] Morrison’s concept of the “White gaze” was articulated by her primarily in response to numerous questions by reporters and interviewers, and critiques by literary critics that she received throughout her career, asking her when she will start writing about White people, when she will stop “limiting” herself to the lives of Black people, and when she will “face up to the real responsibilities, and get mature, and write about the real confrontation for Black people, which is White people.” Morrison has explained numerous times to interviewers that these questions are profoundly racist; and they assume the centrality of White people, that Black lives have no depth or meaning without the “White gaze”: “As though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the white gaze, and I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” (See Toni Morrison: The Pieces I am by PBS; 1998 interview of Toni Morrison by Charlie Rose; 1998 Interview of Toni Morrison by Australian reporter Jana Wendt).