The Omnivorous Reader
America’s Long Narrative
A poet examines our complicated natural story, laying bare the questions hidden by our answers
By Brian Lampkin
We are 239 years into the Ameri-
can experiment this July. Our time is brief compared to many other nations, but we have developed a story, a narrative, that adds chapters as each day unravels into the next. Poet Claudia Rankine’s book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014, $20), is concerned with how this narrative is both remembered and forgotten; she is particularly curious about the ways in which the stories we tell about race create private drama and national trauma.
The recent unravelings in Baltimore, Ferguson, New York, and Sanford, Florida (Citizen’s cover image of a detached hoodie is a reference to Trayvon Martin), have roots in how we view history — or at least in what histories we choose to emphasize. “Every look, every caomment . . . blossoms out of history,” Rankine writes. But she writes with full knowledge of the erasures and misinterpretations of history that complicate a national (or personal) discourse. In this month of Independence, I can think of no recent book that better addresses what it means to be American in this moment. Citizen was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, but much of the book reads more like an essay that refuses the usual rules of composition. I tend to get a little sleepy around poems that know exactly how they want to be poems, so Rankine’s paragraph forms and sentence structures The Art & Soul of Greensboro
are refreshing. The first part of the book uses, remarkably, tennis star Serena Williams as a way to look at how history impinges upon personal behavior, and how a response to Serena Williams’s behavior depends upon an individual’s “reading” of history. If there is no historical context of race in America, if you believe in the notion of a “post-racial America,” then Serena’s anger is judged one way, but if you know that we are all informed by a 300-year long narrative that includes slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights and ongoing police violence, then Serena’s response to a white umpire making bad calls is placed into a different context. Often Rankine focuses on the slips — the wardrobe malfunctions of polite conversation and behavior — slips that reveal the unspoken role of race. Over and over she shows us simple interactions that might — or might not — have a racial subtext. So much depends upon how a situation “feels.” What is the intent behind a white child’s refusal to sit next to a black woman on a plane? Has she been taught to mistrust and fear black people or is she simply uncomfortable around strangers? There are always a thousand different ways to read any situation, but the questions Rankine raises (and they are typically questions and rarely answers) become the central questions of black life in America. How much racism informs the white person’s pronouncement upon a first time meeting, “I didn’t know you were black”? If ever you were curious about what the overused phrase “white privilege” might mean, I think Rankine’s constant questioning exposes a possible meaning: white people are free from the constant need to read every interaction for the simmering role that race and racism might be playing. Serena Williams’ perceived “irrational” anger (this kind of anger also plays out in Rankine’s poetic examination of soccer star Zinedine Zidane’s infamous World Cup head-butt) becomes an entirely understandable boiling to the surface of a lifetime of paranoia, suppressed rage, uncertainty or certainty that is denied a July 2015
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