Book Analysis Essay on Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Introduction

Claudia Rankine's Citizen is among the recent works of poetry to explore the topic of racism in America. The book contains seven chapters that uncover the logic behind racial macroaggressions that people encounter in our daily lives. The author uses a series of pictures, YouTube videos, and poetry to reveal the racial prejudice that people face in their daily lives. According to Hume, the book draws on critical race, bio-political and environmental justice theories (Hume 79). The book features famous personalities such as professional tennis player Serena Williams and YouTube Character Hennessy Youngman. In the book, Rankine has displayed how mass media, politics and social interaction have fueled racism and diminished the concept of black identity to the extent of rendering it almost non-existent. In this reflection, I examine how Rankine has engaged with a variety of voices as both speaker and reader in an attempt to appeal to my emotions, logical thinking and use of poetics.

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The author successfully managed to connect with me by appealing to my emotions. In the fourth section, there is a passage that says, "To live through the days sometimes you moan like a deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter. Sighing upsets," (Rankine 148). The passage itself is about an early form of American entertainment in the 19th century that consisted of skits, music, variety, and dancing that lampooned people of African descent as dim-witted, buffoonish, lazy, happy-go-lucky, and superstitious (Saxton 3-5). These particular lines speak to me because of how people drew laughter from other people's pain and sorrow. The act of bringing pleasure from other people's grief is something that I have experienced on both sides. I have laughed at other people's misfortunes, but at the same time, I have had people laugh at my misfortune. I can say that the latter was much worse than the pleasure I experienced in the former. As a result, the way Ravine engaged an emotional voice in the text appealed to me and enabled me to connect to the topic. The author has successfully managed to appeal to my emotions by invoking the memory of a bad experience. Also, the passage demonstrates the urge to move away from the history of black ropes. The author also uses logical language to connect with the readers.

Rankine connects with her readers through the use of logic. For example, Rankine says, "In a landscape drawn from an ocean bed, you can't drive yourself sane," (Rankine 247). In the phrase, the author was able to connect with me by bringing to light the toughest issue I have faced with regards to racism. How should one act when they experience or witness an act of racism? The narrator has been pushed to insanity, running all over the place and even sighs. However, none of these actions seems to help. The logic of the phrase is that sanity holds the baseline for human life or human existence. However, when one realizes that they are black, that baseline seems to drop very fast. The phrase is part of a paragraph that describes the need to fit all black people within a single identity. They place all the people within a general profile. In that perspective, black people get to lose their identity. It becomes much more comfortable to discriminate against people of African descent if they all fit within a single character. The logic is that the baseline for human identity is at ocean level for the black people. It is almost impossible for them to pull the benchmark, which stands for sanity, out of the level in which it has been placed. However, as much as the passage appeals to me, I am not quite able to connect to other sections.

Ravine says, "'I' has so much power it's insane," (Rankine 170). The phrase is part of the author's attempt to create poetics of racial trauma (Jean-Chan 138). I particularly was not able to connect with the author's message because of the association between individuality and power. The entire book seems to border on the power of a group over an individual. Racism is essentially the act of one group perceiving themselves superior to another group. It also when a group of people decides to abandon their identity as humans in preference for individual races. It, therefore, makes it difficult for me to comprehend how 'I' could have power to levels of insanity. The phrase appears to be part of Ravine using poetics to meditate on the effects of racial injustice as it reveals in the bodies of those who have been traumatized by it. As a result, that particular part of the paper does not engage with me. That part of the paper is explainable using Jean-Chan's argument on Rankine's attempts to appeal to the readers. Jean-Chan argues, "Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury registers in the body leads her to adoption and adaptation of the lyric form, with Citizen aptly subtitled "An American Lyric," (Jean-Chan 138). Jean-Chan is convinced that Rankine's attempted appeal to readers is in the lyric form, something that I find to contradict how the book appeals to me. As much as Rankine utilizes poetic verse, and prose to weave reflections and stories together, that is not how the book connects with me. To me, the appeal lies in the use of emotions and logical thinking. The only relationship Jean-Chan's argument has to my understanding of Citizen is that it explains my failure to connect with the lyrical side of the book.

On the other hand, it was important for Citizen to be polyphonic. Polyphonic literature requires that the voices in the literary work remain independent. Such that if the author is talking about racism and macroaggressions as in the book, then it is essential for her to include several points of views and voices. Polyphony in literature serves to create a unique world of poetics without being contentious. An author runs the risk of coming out dialectical if they fail to integrate more than one voice in their literature. Polyphonic works of literature lack a universal ideology that would drive all the characters. Nevertheless, all characters remain equally independent. For works of literature such as this one, polyphony is crucial because it directly relates to the discussed topic, which is diversity. Polyphony would go straight into supporting the integration of a multilingual or multi-racial society that treats everyone independently and equals the same way the literary work handles its characters.

Although some people don't view Citizen as a poem, there is the value in appealing to readers using a long poem. The first one is that it allows readers to work on language development skills such as alliteration, rhyme and word families. It also enables readers to develop phonemic awareness and phonics. Also according to Simecek and Rumbold, the use of poem can serve to reconcile the readers to the world, such that they do not accept the things that are wrong but to appease the readers in a broader sense, to return them in love (Simecek and Rumbold 309).

Conclusion

Citizen served as a good work of literature because I was able to connect to it on an emotional level. The author also successfully managed to use a logical approach to communicate with her readers such as me. However, I was unable to relate its poetic form which tried to create poetics of racial trauma. However, I find Jean-Chan's argument on how the book appeals to me to contradictory of my experience. Either way, it was important for the author to include so many voices in the literary work to avoid coming out as dialectical. Also, using a long poem about race allowed the readers to develop their language skills.

Works Cited

Hume, Angela. "Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine." Contemporary Literature 57.1 (2016): 79-110.

BIBLIOGRAPHY \l 1033 Jean-Chan, Mary. "Towards Poetics of Racial Trauma." Journal of American Studies 52.1 (2017): 137-163. PDF.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. PDF.

Saxton, Alexander. "Blackface minstrelsy and Jacksonian ideology." American Quarterly 27.1 (1975): 3-28.

Simecek, Karen and Kate Rumbold. "The Uses of Poetry." Changing English 23.4 (2016): 309-313. PDF. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2016.1230300>.