Citizen: An American Lyric

“What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.”

Rankine describes the inner struggle between every Americans’ “historical self” and their “self self.” That is, given America’s history of slavery and racial injustice, every person has a connection to— either profiting from or being hindered by—this legacy. This concept is important to understanding many of the larger themes of the book.

“For years you attribute to Serena Williams a kind of resilience appropriate only for those who exist in celluloid. Neither her father nor her mother nor her sister nor Jehovah her God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world. From the start many made it clear Serena would have done better struggling to survive in the two-dimensionality of a Millet painting, rather than on their tennis court—better to put all that strength to work in their fantasy of her working the land, rather than be caught up in the turbulence of our ancient dramas, like a ship fighting a storm in a Turner seascape.”

Rankine references painting and the visual arts, driving home the importance of visual elements to this text and to life at large. This section brings up the idea of black bodies existing in a two-dimensional space.

“Though no one was saying anything explicitly about Serena’s black body, you are not the only viewer who thought it was getting in the way of Alves’s sight line.”

The unique second-person narration of Citizen imbues the reader with knowledge and experience that they do not necessarily have. It is an intimate experience. For example, in this passage, the reader watches the tennis match as an informed viewer, as someone who thinks about things like “sight lines,” in the way the umpire—who has the potential to greatly affect the match—must consider “sight lines.”

“As offensive as her outburst is, it is difficult not to applaud her for reacting immediately to being thrown against a sharp white background. It is difficult not to applaud her for existing in the moment, for fighting crazily against the so-called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line.”

“Thrown against a sharp white background”— this is echoed throughout the text and references the original line by African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, best known as the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the work of Glen Ligon, a visual artist, who used the quotation in his work “Untitled: I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background.” The quote helps highlight the multidisciplinary nature of Rankine’s work.

“In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief—code for being black in America—is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules.”

Rankine notes that though Serena Williams is regarded as one of the greatest athletes of all time, she has been subject to a unique set of rules and constraints as a black woman in America. Any anger she displays is interpreted by some through the lens of a racial stereotype, the “angry black woman,” which portrays black women’s anger as uniquely domineering, irrational, and threatening (Prasad, Ritu. “Serena Williams and the Trope of the 'Angry Black Woman'.” BBC News, BBC, 11 Sept. 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45476500).

“Watching this newly contained Serena, you begin to wonder if she finally has given up wanting better from her peers or if she too has come across Hennessy’s Art Thoughtz and is channeling his assertion that the less that is communicated the better. Be ambiguous.” 

Rankine blends pop culture references throughout the book; the references talk and interact with one another, and inform each other. Here, the YouTuber personality Hennessy Youngman is used as a lens to examine Serena Williams. Further, ambiguity—a hallmark of postmodern literature—is explicitly referenced here. 

“The sole action is to turn on tennis matches without the sound. Yes, and though watching tennis isn’t a cure for feeling, it is a clean displacement of effort, will, and disappointment.”

In this quotation, the activity of watching televised tennis is a way of tuning out—from work life, from systemic racism, from everything. The reader, however, knows that this space is not protected from the specter of racism, as illustrated through what Serena Williams is forced to endure.

“Appetite won’t attach you to anything no matter how depleted you feel.”

Blackness, as explored in Citizen, involves the paradox of being rendered hyper visible and invisible at the same time. Black bodies are everywhere and nowhere. Here, bodily function (hunger) does not ground the narrator to reality. 

“Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. The sky is the silence of brothers all the days leading up to my call […] ”

The shared history of violence meted out against blacks by whites is shown here in the imagery of a body that has been lynched; it’s telling that Rankine does not feel the need to include the actual word “lynch”; instead, the second-person plural pronouns creates a sense of collectivity and humanization of victims of racial violence.

“I say good-bye before anyone can hang up, don’t hang up. Wait with me. Wait with me though the waiting might be the call of good-byes […]”

Another element of the black experience, as Rankine points out here, is a constant feeling of loss. In this passage, the narrator is involved in a continuous act of saying goodbye, illustrating that violence carried out against blacks in America seems ceaseless and endless.

“Boys will be boys being boys feeling their capacity heaving butting heads righting their wrongs in the violence of aggravated adolescence charging forward…”

In the subsection on the Jena Six, Rankine uses a run-on sentence to capture the breathless feeling of being young; she uses that same breathless ease to describe the ease with which young black men are imprisoned.

“Grief comes out of relationships to subjects over time and not to any subject in theory, you tell the English sky, to give him an out. The distance between you and him is thrown into relief: bodies moving through the same life differently” 

The narrator tries to give a white man the benefit of the doubt, attempting to understand why the white man does not feel the same grief as the subject (a woman of color) about the Hackney race riots in 2011. However, the distance between these two individuals is made evident in this exchange.

“Perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word”

This is a reference to an Italian soccer playing using the n-word, hurling it at another player on the French team, during the 2006 World Cup. The incredible power of language is especially poignant in this example in that it leads to a physical response which in turn changes the outcome of the match, and, in turn, a small bit of history.  

“This is because, in order save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted to hear the meaning behind the words. / We hear, then we remember. / The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.”

A racial slur is not just a word. The meaning behind the word invokes an entire history of racial injustice. Here, the narrator focuses on embracing that history in order to bring about change, noting that an “emergency” can also lead to “emergence,” as the two words are the same until their final letter.

“You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.”

Solidarity among African Americans takes on a frantic urgency in the way Rankine lists the prepositional phrases (“proximity to,” “adjacent to,”) in this line.

“It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family […]”

The man on the train is not related to the subject, but in the larger sense, the subject is; the subject, as a black woman, is in a kind of solidarity with other African Americans, due to the common ground from trials of everyday racism and the legacy of slavery. 

“because white men can’t / police their imagination / black people are dying”

This statement is particularly profound in its placement immediately after the list of deceased victims of racial violence. Further, making “police” into a verb here shows the connection between law enforcement officers and instances of racialized violence.

“And still a world begins its furious erasure— / Who do you think you are, saying I to me? / You nothing. / You nobody. / You.” 

Themes of erasure and the paradox of existing when so many want you obliterated, both unstated features of racism, are themes throughout the book.

“Don’t say I if it means so little / holds the little forming no one"

There is no one particular idea of self—the conception of “I”— in the subject of Citizen, who is often assumed to be a person of color. This lack of self is Rankine pointing to the fact that, with systemic racism, blackness is on par with an erosion of self. 

“I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to know whatever was done could also be done, was also done, was never done—/The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much/to you—”

The disorienting (and painful) feeling of not having ownership over one’s self, which is a common experience for any disenfranchised person, is emphasized here. The litany of pronouns again emphasizes hypervisibility and invisibility, and the notion of “they” as pointedly racist has been well-documented by many authors and filmmakers.

“Trayvon Martin’s name sounds from the car radio a dozen times each half hour. You pull your love back into the seat because though no one seems to be chasing you, the justice system has other plans”

The narrative of Citizen either exists at a precise historical moment or in an abstraction outside the normal confines of time. Here, the scene is set at an exact moment in history: it is the summer of 2013, and the narrator learns that the Trayvon Martin’s assailant, George Zimmerman, has been found not guilty by a jury of his peers in Sanford, Florida.

“Despite the air-conditioning you pull the button back and the window slides down into its door-sleeve. A breeze touches your cheek. As something should”

In this intimate moment, the narrator learns the troubling news that George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin, was found not guilty. At that moment, the narrator is in need of comfort, which is nowhere to be found except in the breeze.

“Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce— / a truce with the patience of a stethoscope”

Simply to exist (“to breathe”) as a black person in America is to participate in a tradition of racism borne from slavery. The subject contends that for blacks to simply exist in a way where sanity in the face of constant racism can be achieved, it means making peace with the consistent microaggressions shown by whites. Here, these microaggressions are symbolized by the stethoscope, a device designed to search out irregularities and make sure the insides of a person (which are separate from external differences) are sound.