![\"RANKINE,](\"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Claudia-Rankine.jpg\")
<\/a>RANKINE, 2016. \u201cIN CITIZEN, I TRIED TO PICK SITUATIONS AND MOMENTS THAT MANY PEOPLE SHARE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC OCCURRENCE THAT MIGHT ONLY HAPPEN TO ME.\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. She attende\u00ad\u00add Williams College and received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. Since early in her career, she has crossed the lines of genre, creating books as unified projects rather than loose collections, peeling back the surface of the moment to get at the complexities underneath. She is the author of five books\u2014Nothing in Nature Is Private<\/em> (1995), The End of the Alphabet<\/em> (1998), Plot<\/em> (2001), Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em> (2004), and Citizen<\/em> (2014)\u2014and has collaborated on a series of videos with her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas, some of which infiltrate her writing in the form of transcriptions and images.<\/span><\/p>\nI met Rankine over three Fridays in July at her home in Claremont, California. It was a tumultuous period: our first conversation took place the week of the police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in the suburbs of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the ambush killing of five police officers during a rally in Dallas, Texas; the third, the afternoon after Donald Trump\u2019s speech accepting the Republican nomination for president. These public topics wove through our discussions, explicitly and implicitly, as they often do in Rankine\u2019s work. Long a professor at Pomona College, Rankine was preparing to move across the country for a new job, at Yale University; in her dining room, the sideboard was covered with piles of books on race and whiteness, for a course she was developing.<\/span><\/p>\nRankine has won numerous prizes, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Citizen<\/em>, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Just a few months after we spoke, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, which she plans to use to found the Racial Imaginary Institute. (The name comes from a book of essays she coedited last year.) In conversation, she is thoughtful and focused, speaking softly, with an edge of urgency. \u201cHow do you get the work to hold the resonance of its history?\u201d she wonders. It\u2019s a question that occupies the heart of all her books. That the history to which she refers is both personal and collective is, of course, the point.<\/span><\/p>\n\u2014David L. Ulin<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYou\u2019ve spent the past two years on an extended speaking tour for Citizen<\/em>. The book came out in 2014, during the protests in Ferguson. Recently, we\u2019ve seen police shootings of African American men in Baton Rouge and suburban Saint Paul and five police officers killed during a rally in Dallas. What\u2019s your sense of where we are?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nIf we go back to the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, there was a feeling, at least for white people, that suddenly they were seeing into black lives and how these lives played out in encounters with the police and the justice system. People were shocked. Then we saw the lack of indictment. In a number of other deaths, we saw that videotaping doesn\u2019t affect the course of justice, which we knew from the beating of Rodney King. Then we saw what happened in Baton Rouge, we saw what happened in Minnesota. Now you get to Dallas, and we have created somebody like a Timothy McVeigh, a veteran who is clearly triggered by what he\u2019s been seeing in the news. In McVeigh\u2019s case, it was Waco, Texas, and with Micah Johnson, it was the killings of African Americans, the videos of these deaths. He\u2019s not interested in Black Lives Matter protests. He\u2019s interested in retaliation.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nCitizen<\/em> addresses these issues directly. It is literature as an act of public \u00adengagement. And yet, poetry\u2014all writing\u2014begins as a private act between the writer and her material. What is the relationship, for you, between these two modes?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThe relationship between public engagement and private thought are inseparable for me. I worked on Citizen<\/em> on and off for almost ten years. I wrote the first piece in response to Hurricane Katrina. I was profoundly moved by the events in New Orleans as they unfolded. John and I taped the CNN coverage of the storm without any real sense of what we intended to do with the material. I didn\u2019t think, obviously, that I was working on Citizen<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBut for me, there is no push and pull. There\u2019s no private world that doesn\u2019t include the dynamics of my political and social world. When I am working privately, my process includes a sense of what is happening in the world. Today, for example, I feel incredibly drained. And probably you do, too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYou make work in private, but once it goes public, readers make it their own. They define the work\u2014and, by extension, you\u2014in terms of who they are, what they want or believe.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nIn the case of Citizen<\/em>, I willingly moved toward that engagement. It felt like the first time I could actively be involved in a public discussion about race, in a discussion that, to me, is essential to our well-being as a country. It wasn\u2019t simply about publicizing the book, it was about having a conversation. It was also an opportunity for me to learn what others really thought and felt. The responses were various. One man said he was moved by a reading I gave and wanted to do something to help me. I said I personally had a privileged life, which I do, and that I didn\u2019t need his help. What I needed was for him\u2014this was a white gentleman\u2014to understand the urgency of the situation for him<\/em> and to help himself in an America that was so racially divided. It wasn\u2019t about him coming from his own position of privilege\u2014of white privilege\u2014to take black people on as a burden, but rather to understand that we are all part of the same broken structures. He said, I can take what you\u2019re saying, but you\u2019re going to shut down everybody else in this audience. And all of a sudden I was like, What? I thought you wanted to help me! To remove him from the role of \u201cwhite savior\u201d was to attack him in his own imagination. A white woman, a professor, told me that what I was calling racism was really bias against overweight black women. You might think they were just a defensive man and a crazy professor, but again and again I was coming up against what was being framed as understanding and realizing that it was not that.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nAnd yet, both of those people would likely describe themselves as well-\u00adintentioned, even allies of yours.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThey came and they engaged. I have a lot more patience and curiosity than I used to for following those arguments, for seeing where they will go. Often somebody will be interrupted by another member of the audience, who will jump in to shut that person down. This either comes out of an \u00adintent to protect me or else they\u2019re just impatient with a line of thinking they don\u2019t agree with. I don\u2019t know. But one of the things I do know is that you\u2019re not going to change anybody\u2019s mind by shutting them down.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYou talked about some of this in your keynote speech at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, especially the expectation that poetry should be relatable to a white audience. That\u2019s a fallacy, and it starts with the audience, not with the poets or the poetry. It renders our relationship with language defensive\u2014\u201cI\u2019m putting up a shield of language as a way of protecting you<\/em> from all the things I<\/em> don\u2019t want to engage with.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s what makes writing challenging and interesting. How do you get the work to arrive at readers in a way that allows them to stay with it and not immediately dismiss it? It\u2019s something I think about, because I know I\u2019m also writing for people who don\u2019t always hold my positions. It\u2019s not that I think white people are my only audience. It\u2019s that I think of America as my audience, and inside that space are white people as well as people of color. Some white people still believe that white privilege and white mobility are the universal position. If a writer has a different experience of the world, the work is no longer seen as transcendent or universal. So as I\u2019m moving around in a piece, I am hearing all those voices in opposition.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOne of the things I do know is that you\u2019re not going to change anybody\u2019s mind by shutting them down.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe voices of the audience?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nVoices I have encountered, yes. For me, working on a piece is like playing chess. You\u2019re moving the language around to say to somebody, Yes, I know you\u2019re possibly thinking this, I know this is a possible move for you. I\u2019m going to include it here so you don\u2019t think that I haven\u2019t been listening. An example would be the Serena Williams essay in Citizen<\/em>. That essay was dependent on the fact that a reader could go to YouTube and look up the moments I referred to in her life. I didn\u2019t want anyone who disagreed with my take on events or remembered them differently not to have a chance to access the moments for themselves. It happened, in an interview in Boston, that a gentleman said to me, I am a real tennis fan and I don\u2019t remember any of these things happening. The actual footage was easily obtainable by searching YouTube. I could have talked about the stress of racism on a body differently, but I needed examples that were available to the reader as raw data. I didn\u2019t want anyone to take my word for anything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0\u201cIf you don\u2019t believe me, look it up.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s not a bad way to work, or to be in the work. I spend a lot of time looking things up, doing research. I am always curious what I missed because I was looking right when I should have been looking left. I think it\u2019s important for Citizen<\/em> that many of the moments in it are researchable. Without that, its credibility as a mirroring text would be lost. It took longer to collect \u00adincidents of microaggressions from friends and colleagues than it would have to simply use my own experiences, but it was essential to me that it be a collective and researchable document.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nYou call the Williams piece an essay. How did it develop?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nIn Citizen<\/em>, there are episodic pieces structured around microaggressions, which are set in conversation with more scandalous and murderous accounts, such as the pieces addressing Hurricane Katrina, Trayvon Martin, or stop-and-frisk in New York. But my challenge as a writer in the Williams essay was, How do you show the effect of all this injustice on a human body? On an actual somebody? And how is that somebody read by the public? I didn\u2019t want it to be a traditional lyric because I wasn\u2019t trying to create an internalized consciousness for Serena Williams. I was talking about an \u00adinvisible \u00adaccumulation of stress in the body, so I had to show how it worked over time. I needed a form that would allow me to do that, and so I ended up with the essay.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThat said, it\u2019s a lyric essay, not an essay essay, because it was written to fit into Citizen<\/em>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nA lyric essay in the sense that it can abandon the strict logic of argument for something more intuitive or emotional?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nYes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetry\u2014repetition, metaphor, elision, for example. I love finding the lyric in nontraditional spaces. Often when I teach my poetry workshop, I will take essays or passages from fiction or a scene from a film and list them among the poems to study. The \u201cTime Passes\u201d section in the middle of To the Lighthouse<\/em> is an example of a lyric impulse. Others might be a passage from James Baldwin or Homi Bhabha or an image by Glenn Ligon or a song by Coltrane.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nLet\u2019s talk about how this works in Citizen<\/em>. On the one hand, we\u2019ve got Serena in a lyric essay. Then there are the passages at the beginning, those short pieces written in the second person\u2014the girl who doesn\u2019t want to sit next to the woman on the plane because she\u2019s African American, the coworker who mistakes her for someone else and then refers to it as \u201cour<\/em> mistake.\u201d Those, too, are lyric moments. Traditionally, we associate the lyric with autobiography, but here the second person opens up the writing so that it becomes a collective experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I first sit down to write, these movements are all intuitive. Just this morning, for example, I was listening to the recording of the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota, and the little girl, the four-year-old in the backseat of the car, says, \u201cIt\u2019s okay, Mommy, I\u2019m right here with you.\u201d I wrote it down. That will be the beginning of something. Every time I watch that video, my eyes tear up, my throat closes. I hear that little girl, and I am transported to a place beyond my intellect. I\u2019m no longer thinking about the policemen\u2014I\u2019m experiencing that child and her utterance. When a moment enters me that profoundly, I know I can wait to write because I\u2019ll forever be in dialogue with the moment. That part of the process I don\u2019t interfere with. I will be surprised and ready to begin when her voice makes its way into a piece.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nAnd you might sit on that line for\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nMonths. Or a week. Or a day more. Or years. Once it\u2019s on the page, I feel like that\u2019s <\/em>when the writer shows up. Right now her voice just accompanies me. In terms of Citizen<\/em>, the initial drafts were in the first person. But I didn\u2019t think it was effective, nor did I think it was structurally honest, because many of the accounts were not actually my experiences. Even though I employed the first person in Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em> to weave together disparate situations, in this book I wanted the opposite. I wanted the disparate moments in Citizen<\/em> to open out to everyone rather than narrowing inside a single point of view. Only when I employed the second person did the text become a field activated by the reader, whoever that reader is. That\u2019s what you want\u2014for the text to be as alive and mutable as possible.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nMuch of Citizen <\/em>is about the black body. This is part of what Serena represents, and something similar plays out across the other narratives. There\u2019s the man, for instance, who knows he is going to be pulled over, so he opens his briefcase on the passenger seat. That anxiety builds up in the body.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThe key is that the anxiety, the stress, isn\u2019t a narrative. It\u2019s what interrupts the narrative, what stalls mobility. It\u2019s an invisible sensation that requires adjustment by the body, beyond the space of words. As a poet, I want to use language to enter that space of feeling. I\u2019m less interested in stories. That\u2019s one reason I write poetry. Often when people are speaking with me, I feel what they are saying is the journey to how they are feeling. I mean, it\u2019s not that I\u2019m not <\/em>interested in what they\u2019re saying, but I feel like what they\u2019re saying is a performance. In many conversations I realize that the thing that\u2019s being said is really not the point at all, there\u2019s this subterranean exchange of contexts, emotions, and unspoken signals. I think a lot about how white dominance is part of this invisible and unmarked dynamic.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nSometimes, what is being said is at a perpendicular angle to what is really going on.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nExactly. The question is, How do you get to an authentic emotional place? I\u2019m often listening not for what is being told to me but for what resides behind the narrative. What is the feeling for the thing that\u2019s being told to me? One of the reasons I work in book-length projects, instead of individual poems, is because I don\u2019t trust the authenticity of any given moment by itself.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe individual poem falls prey to the same narrative contrivance\u2014<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nOf the novel, yes. Its trajectory is on an arc of time. Instead, I feel that what happens formally in Citizen<\/em>, Don\u2019t Let Me Be Lonely<\/em>, and Plot<\/em> is an obsessive circling of the subject. Many positions are inhabited relative to a line of inquiry. It\u2019s like one of those mirrored rooms where the spectator sees the same thing repeated in different variations and from different angles.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nSo in Citizen<\/em>, those second-person vignettes form a series of slightly different but similar interactions. And part of the effect is that we feel it in the body.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nDidn\u2019t feel it the first time? Here it is again. We don\u2019t get there by saying it once. It\u2019s not about telling the story, it\u2019s about creating the feeling of knowing<\/em> the story through the accumulation of the recurring moment.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nImmersion as opposed to narrative.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s why, in this case, narrative is irrelevant in a certain sense. It could be these ten stories or it could be ten other stories. I tried to pick situations and moments that many people share, as opposed to some idiosyncratic occurrence that might have happened only to me. For example, many black people have been in a situation where they\u2019ve been called by the name of the other black person\u2014at the office, at the party, in the room. The stories are many and the emotion is one.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nThe one that sticks with me is when the second-person narrator is jokingly called a \u201cnappy-headed ho\u201d by a friend, because it\u2019s a failed attempt at intimacy. The speaker is reaching for connection in some way.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\nRANKINE<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I heard that story, I found it fascinating. It\u2019s a matter of perception, of course, but as my friend was speaking, I thought that person wished to belittle her because they felt ignored. It could be because she was late, simply that. Some people go ballistic about being kept waiting. I also thought the \u201cnappy-headed\u201d utterance could be an attempt to say, I was anxious to see you. Why were you not anxious to see me? But because whiteness sees itself in a place of dominance, suddenly the racial dynamic comes into play. One benefit of white privilege is that whiteness has an arsenal of racialized insults at the ready. Like, I<\/em> was anxious to see you and I\u2019m white<\/em> so I will put you in your black <\/em>place. I didn\u2019t say any of this when my friend was telling me the story, but it struck me that maybe this woman liked her. You know, liked<\/em> her. When I listen to people, I\u2019m constantly thinking, Why do you remember this moment over everything else? And what exactly was the moment trying to say to you? As people of color, we can hear, we can feel, when the language is weaponized against us.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs people of color, we can hear, we can feel, when the language is weaponized against us.<\/span><\/p>\nINTERVIEWER<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n
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