Claudia Rankine’s book may or may not be poetry – the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose. She eavesdrops on America and a racism that has never gone away. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle poetry award in the US in recognition, partly, of the shocking truth it tells. Through brief encounters and troubling retellings of recent news, Rankine puts one, as a white reader, on constant alert for any unconscious racism in oneself.
Even the way the book has been published is bracingly correct. Rankine’s Jamaican origins are withheld – no mention of her roots on the cover. Similarly, when she describes meeting a novelist in London, she does not reveal his provenance. She sees to it we take ourselves to task: why should we want to know? Is it invariably a reflex likely to lead to hasty stereotyping? I always want to know where a person comes from – a journalist’s weakness. But Rankine reminds us there is nothing black and white about black and white.
And there is nothing slight about the slights described here. They have the force of body blows. A scene on an aeroplane is a particular shocker. It involves no noisy spoken insults but the sickening, faux tact of a whispering mother who spares her daughter from having to sit next to a black passenger. If she is going to be racist, the mother knows she must be what she believes to be discreet. Perhaps the scene never happened (though I’ll bet it did). Or perhaps it never happened to Rankine herself? There is no first person here, just a “you” to keep things free. Once again, I am conscious of the friction between my wish to pin things down and Rankine’s to pull towards universality.
But a need for specificity is satisfied in the horrific stories she tells of the racism suffered by tennis champion Serena Williams: “Neither… God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world.” She gives a powerful account of what Williams suffered at the hands of unsound umpires and a bigoted press. The question about whether – and how – to speak out persists. There is an equally shocking piece about hurricane Katrina in which the emergency services are less than urgent. She reports that the lives of black people in the disaster were less valued than those of the rescuers: “What I am hearing… is they all want to stay in Texas.”
There is so much anger and anguish here that you wonder how it can be contained. But what is wonderful about Rankine’s writing is that it works like an out-of-body experience: she encounters her subject full-on and rises above it. And she never loses her wide-angle reach. Above all, she shows how racism itself gets relegated. In a piece about Mark Duggan, killed by police in Tottenham in 2011, she describes meeting a novelist (the one mentioned earlier) in a house in Hackney. He has “the face of the English sky – full of weather, always in response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear”. But they have the following exchange. He asks: “Will you write about Duggan?” She throws the question back: “Why don’t you?” He says: “Me?” and looks “slightly irritated”. She could not make it plainer: racism is everyone’s problem. Until this is understood, she will be forced to keep writing as she does here: “I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.”
Citizen: An American Lyric (extract)
Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible – I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.
Citizen: An American Lyric is published by Penguin (£9.99). Click here to order a copy for £7.99
