In a recent article on Grantland, staff writer Rembert Browne dialogues his impromptu visit to Ferguson, Missouri in mid-August. In opening the essay, he admits: “I don’t know what made me buy a plane ticket to St. Louis at 1:15 a.m. on Tuesday. Maybe it was remembering that feeling of helplessness and guilt after learning of the Trayvon Martin verdict while embarking on a carefree cross-country road trip.”
Claudia Rankine’s new book, Citizen, effects a similar experience. Citizen requires the reader to enter that realm: the realm of being privileged in an otherwise deprived society; of relaxing while watching others work; this antiquated idea of modern civilization. Of an encounter as eyewitness to the experience of victimization. Of pure helplessness while knowing you have an aid to offer. In Rankine’s world, we, as audience, are both the spectacle and the representation. We are both the protagonist and the antagonist. We …show more content…
What she leaves instead is a resonation with images, and her uncanny use of the second person to torrent the reader through them, rather than flipping to Rankine’s edification thereof. And here again she imbues her audience in the question, rather than the answer: what does it mean to be citizen?
claudia-rankineToward the end of the book, Rankine interrupts herself with dates unattached from events—such as the one upon which we end: February 15, 2013. We still, though, as readers, are isolated from the authoritative meaning of this last date’s suggestion, which we then connect to race, to gunfire, to maltreatment, to our own embedded guilt as citizens with an appetite for connection, reason, understanding. The you is no longer a we. We, here, are alone. The you can be
Claudia Rankine’s new book, Citizen, effects a similar experience. Citizen requires the reader to enter that realm: the realm of being privileged in an otherwise deprived society; of relaxing while watching others work; this antiquated idea of modern civilization. Of an encounter as eyewitness to the experience of victimization. Of pure helplessness while knowing you have an aid to offer. In Rankine’s world, we, as audience, are both the spectacle and the representation. We are both the protagonist and the antagonist. We …show more content…
What she leaves instead is a resonation with images, and her uncanny use of the second person to torrent the reader through them, rather than flipping to Rankine’s edification thereof. And here again she imbues her audience in the question, rather than the answer: what does it mean to be citizen?
claudia-rankineToward the end of the book, Rankine interrupts herself with dates unattached from events—such as the one upon which we end: February 15, 2013. We still, though, as readers, are isolated from the authoritative meaning of this last date’s suggestion, which we then connect to race, to gunfire, to maltreatment, to our own embedded guilt as citizens with an appetite for connection, reason, understanding. The you is no longer a we. We, here, are alone. The you can be