by Madhu Kaza
“Before it happened, it had happened and happened.” Anyone paying attention to recent events, specifically the failure of two grand juries to bring indictments for the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner will readily make sense of this line from Claudia Rankine's new book Citizen. In moments of crisis when we as a nation are explicitly confronted with the state-sanctioned, legal & cultural violence inflicted against black people in America, we recognize a long chain of such violence reaching back to the very foundational chains of this nation.
In Citizen Claudia Rankine not only memorializes key eruptions of racial violence in recent American life, she also documents the ongoing, ordinary, subtle (& seemingly innocuous) experiences that characterize the racism of everyday life; Rankine suggests that the racialized violence of daily life is also what happened before it (the moment of social crisis) happened.
Although Citizen is Rankine's fifth book, in many ways it is a follow up to her 2004 collection Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Both books are subtitled An American Lyric and both use language in innovative ways to convey deeply subjective experience while also documenting larger cultural and political situations. While Citizen might focus on black bodies, Rankine suggests that the positioning of the black body in our culture has to do with all of us, with the very construction of the culture itself. Rankine refers to artist Glenn Ligon's work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background), who appropriated the line from Zora Neale Hurston, to show how the psychological, affective experience of race is always already in relation to the sharp, white background of American racism. This, too, is the American lyric.