Reflect on anything of your choice, as generally or specifically as you wish, either text or image or both.
16 Responses to Citizen Response
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Reflect on anything of your choice, as generally or specifically as you wish, either text or image or both.
Filed under Uncategorized
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Rankine’s use of perspective had me rereading sentences various times as her writing style elicited various points of view on singular topics. She repeatedly uses the phrase “What did you just say ” to draw attention to the speaker’s words and the reader, making us think about our own words. Rankine’s work is a constant call for self-reflection.
I enjoyed Rankine’s vivid description of Serena Williams in her various wins and losses and “outbursts” and calm demeanor. There are always people who will place constantly moving and unfair standards on minorities about how they should act and who makes a “good minority,” what is appropriate behavior. Serena’s scenes do not use “we” and “us” but “she” and the contrast between perspectives seems to tell us that for an individual like Serena Williams, we cannot force our expectations on her because we have no experiences being put against a white background like she has been. Her changing perspective really calls out the importance of not just first-hand experience but of listening to the struggles of minorities without forcing unfair standards.
I haven’t read anything similar to this ever. Citizen was a very unique read and I am glad to have the pleasure to read it. It was very digestible in length, but the content itself and the structure of the novel requires the reader to take many pauses. The large gaps of open space convey so much, they are unspoken words themselves. There is also something so poetic about the dark text and colorful images against such a sterile and white sheet, a design choice that highlights a significant piece throughout the novel. Some of the images seemed out of place or confused, which intrigues me on what I might not be seeing in them or the beauty that I missed in my first read of Citizen. The second chapter was also not my favorite because it just felt like a long form newspaper article and the tennis metaphor carried throughout did not intrigue or entice me. despite this, the rest of the book was wonderful. Rankine does something so truly special with her use of second person that I have never experienced before. It leaves a non-black reader feeling very uncomfortable and truly sad, which is a gift on Rankine’s part. I am so excited to lend this book out to my friends.
I found Rankine’s emphasis on the bodily experience of being Black in America particularly poignant throughout Citizen. On page 8, Rankine describes “an unsettled feeling that keeps the body front and center,” referring to the emotional anguish “you” feel at being lumped into a mass of people. This physical manifestation of hurt is brought up again on page 10, where Rankine states that “confrontation is headache-producing.” Citizen is littered with physiological responses such as this one that make the Black experience so much more tangible and vivid, particularly when addressed to “you,” the reader. Even athletes as great as Serena Williams cannot escape being perceived more for their black bodies as they stand out against white backgrounds. Moments like these, Rankine says “send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown out in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the larynx. Cough.” Violent depictions of what it feels like to be on the other side of microaggressions such as this permeate Citizen and draw out the tone of urgency and austerity which is central to the work as a whole.
I’m not sure how I feel about some of the images used in this book: they seem to be added in for clarification, or to give more ways to connect with the text emotionally, but I think that different instances of image in this book work to really different degrees. I think the images in Citizen work best when they’re used to give new perspective, or to give a different perspective on the the topics that Rankine is discussing, like the images on pages 52-53, 19, and 74. Other images, though, feel like a background for the narration that the text provides: they don’t give anything but a specific visual for the things being described by the text. Here, I mean that the images don’t add much, like on pages 37, 23, 87, and the frames on 122-128. They make the text feel like it should be spoken aloud, like the entire book could be better done as a film.
Throughout reading and listening to Citizen, I found myself continually drawn to and fascinated by Rankine’s use of perspective and the second person, particularly in how it functions within the narrative and interacts with the theme of identity.
At least for me, when I approach a work and it is from the second person, it serves as a tool to connect with the reader, making whatever message the author is trying to convey more impactful by sort of forcing us to empathize with the situation as if we were experiencing it. While Rankine does this at times, her use of “you” strikes me as progressively alienating as the text develops.
At various times the “you” seems to shift across different people, allowing the reader to approach Rankine’s ideas from varying perspectives, “you” are not one person, it seems. But the section starting at page 139, where Rankine focuses in on the self, the “you”, after drawing the reader in and immersing them in the various perspectives and voices of the book, she slowly destroys the “you” over the course of a few pages. Whatever perspective “you” are reading from, it almost doesn’t matter because you are reminded that you are unimportant, injured, you are nothing and no one. This called me to other questions of identity throughout the novel: What defines the border between your identities and another? Is it memories? Experiences? Is it being seen, acknowledged? If it is, would that mean other people’s perspectives of you, including all their biases, determine your identity? And if they simply do not see you (like page 77), are you denied identity in that moment?
Overall, I found Rankine’s use of “you”, and it’s shifting and morphing identity throughout the text very interesting and effective.
Claudia Rankine’s use of fragmentation in Citizen is the most effective I’ve ever read. The most notable example for me was in Chapter IV, where Rankine describes the heavy and suffocating feeling of being a Black woman in America, not having anywhere to put your pain or fear. While she could fit more than one of her paragraphs on each page, she chooses to spread them out, to emphasize that each part of her experience deserves its own space. She explains so effectively the trauma of having to hear racist comments daily and being forced to make the choice to either let it go or speak up. Either way, it will eat away at her. Either way, it reminds her that this country was not built for her and that there will always be people who hate her. When she repeats “Did she just say that? Who said that?” she highlights both the constant racism heard in her life but also the feeling of destabilization from reality. Her short sentences and half-formed thoughts depict her internal struggle to understand her place in a world that fundamentally disagrees with her existence.
The part I found the most interesting in Citizen was the one about Serena Williams and the refs perceiving her black body during games more critically than anybody deemed necessary. Her reactions to the unjust reffing, whether emotional or subdued, were put under a magnifying glass and no matter what, her reactions were always judged to be wrong in some way. Instead of rising to the top of her game with the tennis world’s support, Williams became the best despite the lack thereof. The picture on page 37 of Dane Caroline Wozniacki having towels stuffed in her clothes to imitate Williams especially rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know if it was supposed to be in good fun or not, but it seems so racially charged. It opens up a broader discussion of how microaggressions often slide by easily because there are no clear terms defining them or means by which to punish the acts. And it makes me think what if it had been Williams imitating the white, blonde player? The public reception to that probably would have been vastly different, which adds a layer of dimension to the discussion.
What I found to be compelling about the book Citizen was how short some of the passages were yet they were filled with important messages and deep-cutting truths. She separates the book into parts and sometimes leaves pages blank so the reader can take in what she has said previously. My favorite part was section IV about the sigh. “The sigh is a pathway to breath; it allows breathing. That’s just self-preservation.”(60). To use the sigh as a metaphor for freedom is very intriguing to me. Rankine explores the experience of racism and how freedom isn’t a luxury and only the small things like letting out a sigh can be freeing.
I really enjoyed reading Citizen and I’m excited to analyze it in our discussion after break. I was drawn in by the conversational style because it was easy to follow, yet the dense imagery and serious subject matter forced me to slow down. I appreciated the images throughout the book and I found them to be really powerful.
I was really interested by the cover, because I think the image of a black hood against a white background is powerful and is also related to the quote about being thrown against a white background my peers have already mentioned in their responses. A hood is a common reason that black people, specifically black men, are seen as “threatening” on the streets; it’s a frequent phrase in relation to police action. I think making this the cover is making a comment on that, and the subtitle of Citizen being “An American Lyric” is in conversation with the image of the hood. I really love how the cover speaks to the rest of the work in a direct way.
I think the multi-media aspect of this book is absolutely fascinating. It gives the book such a place in time, puts it right in the middle of events, which I feel like authors often shy away from. To make your book a “timeless classic” you don’t mention new and easily outdated technology like cell phones or the platform of youtube. You write a romanticized version of the past or ignore it entirely. But Rankine flips that idea on its head, proving that you can write timeless literature that does not ignore the present.
The inclusions of different types of media also adds such grounding to the book. The writing is so creative that it makes sense that photos of youtube videos or art are incorporated. It keeps the reader engaged, because not all people are engaged by words alone.
I look forward to discussing this book after break!
The passage on page 69 of Citizen stood out to me. Connecting language to the body, it seems to be a concentration of many of Rankine’s themes in Citizen. Words can be used to open up respectful, necessary conversations; yet often they are closed, instead being manipulated to exclude, insult, or render others invisible. But to Rankine, words are more than just their traditional definition as combinations of letters and sounds; she writes that they “encode” our bodies. Our veins, hands, and eyes are just as symbolic of language; they hold the ability to speak, to withhold, and to disguise. In this way, our bodies can be just as manipulated as words—by ourselves and by others.
I really loved Citizen, and found Rankine’s work very engaging. There are so many aspects of this book that I want to analyze. One phrase in this book that really stood out to me was “sharp white”. Especially how Serena was “thrown against a sharp white background”. Looking at the etymology of the word “sharp”, rooted from the words “cutting edge” give a bit of insight on the weight of the phrase. Viewing white people as “cutting edge”; piercing, and unforgiving gives depth of how systemically corrupt the game was from the start.
I really enjoyed reading Citizen, and finished it in a single sitting. While the topics were quite heavy at points, I found the overall balance between writing styles and photographs to be quite compelling and digestible. A specific line that stuck out to me, and continued to be a large focal point of the book, was Hurston’s quote: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background” (25). Through different anecdotes, such as Serena Williams, personal poems, and scripts, the presence of race/racism and micro aggressions are shared across and through these mediums.
Claudia Rankine’s short yet emotionally-impactful pieces were my favorite of the collection; her ability to create such a hard-hitting, “mic-dropping” paragraph/lines left the severity of the scenes to be processed by readers only with the remainder of that blank page. An example of this is on page 78, when the speaker told a man that his wife was beautiful, and he replied “beautiful and black, like you.” The separation of “beautiful” and “black” is essential to understanding the message that Rankine intends, even if this detail may seem minuscule or unimportant. The man, by stating that being beautiful and being Black are two separate things, enforces the idea that beauty and Blackness live in a vacuum in the white-dominated Patriarchy: the two cannot and do not exist as one. Being Black is the “other”; it must be specified that it is different from beauty, according to the male’s perspective. This small, yet key detail, highlights the precise craft of Rankine.
This is a reread of the book for me as I read it my senior year of high school, and something I remember discussing in depth was the use of imagery throughout the book. Even without discussing each individual image, there is a poignancy in the use of them in relation to the idea of “feel[ing] most colored when [I am] thrown against a sharp white background.” By creating a book that has a large amount of negative space, or just simple black text on white paper, the insertion of a colored image is jarring, and is an example of the way the experiences being shown in the pictures often lead to polarization. The images generally portray or are taken of an incident of racism, and placing them against this background, accentuates the idea of being thrown against this background simply for one’s skin color.
An aspect about this book I particularly appreciated was the attention paid to formatting. Because Citizen is made up of so many distinct anecdotes about blackness in America, it would be easy to let them pile up/flow together. By using large text and having page breaks between larger paragraphs, Rankine forces the reader to sit with and internalize each individual event, especially in Part I.
Even as she continues into multi-page passages, Rankine frequently uses enjambment and line breaks to extend this feeling of pausing.
I found the second person narration presented throughout Citizen to be extremely compelling. Throughout the book, the focus scenes shift from a classroom to a sports stadium, but the story remains the same: race, and in particular, racially charged assumptions. The consistent “you” also draws connections between the different segments of the book; whether the “you” is a student or a parent or an unspecified observer of an event, the narration feels consistent. It might be addressing different people with related experiences or the same person in different stages of their life. Either way, the “you” makes the narration both more specific and more universal somehow. Additionally, the “you” imparts emotions directly to the reader, asserting a description of events around the reader. Both in the paragraphs of prose and in the more free-form segments, the second person is striking, beautiful, and effective.