{"id":1548,"date":"2025-10-07T10:51:17","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:51:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/?p=1548"},"modified":"2025-10-15T11:48:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T15:48:21","slug":"can-you-see-find-place-yourself-inside-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/smithwrites\/issue-6-fall-2025\/can-you-see-find-place-yourself-inside-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You [See Find Place] Yourself Inside Me? The Shifting Intrusions and Intimacies of Solidarity in Citizen"},"content":{"rendered":"

In their compelling analysis of Claudia Rankine\u2019s book-length poem <\/span><\/em>Citizen<\/span>, Moby Yang transforms the literary element of second-person address into a tool for reconstructing the identity of the reader. Examining the distance between white reader and Black subject, they argue that by placing \u201cyou\u201d in the uncomfortable and disorienting experiences of Blackness, Rankine forces readers to forfeit the separation of their individual self. Ultimately, Yang positions reading as a liminal experience where, in grappling with this uncomfortable intimacy, we might reimagine ourselves as members of a collective whole.–Kokwe Dadzie, \u201826<\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Can You [See Find Place] Yourself Inside Me? The Shifting Intrusions and Intimacies of Solidarity in Citizen<\/i><\/strong><\/h4>\n
Moby Yang ’28<\/strong><\/h5>\n

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Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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In subtitling <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i> as \u201cAn American <\/span>Lyric<\/span><\/i>,\u201d Claudia Rankine situates her text in a predominantly white canon of post-Romantic lyric poetry traditionally embodied by the first-person \u201cI,\u201d the individual subject\u2014the white subject\u2014who voices their private, interior experiences to an audience distinctly separate from themselves as a speaker. Indeed, the singularity of the lyric \u201cI\u201d is intertwined with the assumed normativity of whiteness. As Kamran Javadizadeh describes in his analysis of Rankine\u2019s reimagined lyric subject, the white writer and the white lyric subject\u2019s \u201cimplicit claims to universality and unmediated identity\u201d have fueled the \u201chistorical consolidation of a normative lyric,\u201d an \u201call-encompassing\u201d white \u201cI\u201d that, in actuality, is only built by and for white bodies (476). Thus, against this racially homogenized historical backdrop of the lyric genre, what role does the speaker of Rankine\u2019s <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i> fulfill? Who is the \u201cAmerican citizen\u201d her poem is written through? The expectation is the white citizen, the white lyric subject who\u2014secure in a world that grants them agency to choose when and when not to share themselves with the public, or in other words protects their privacy and interiority\u2014confesses their inner thoughts, emotions, and ideas while retaining a bounded distance from the audience. With Rankine\u2019s subversive second-person address, however, <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i> disrupts the white lyric tradition by uprooting \u201cyou\u201d from individual privacy and relocating \u201cyou\u201d in a collective public\u2014one where we belong not just to ourselves, but to each other. By blurring the bounds of our identities as readers and citizens, subjects of the lyric and nation, Rankine speculates a future where we might join hands in ever-shifting solidarity\u2014if only we open ourselves to our inevitable intrusions upon and intimacies with one another; if only we embrace the necessary vulnerability of such a shared world.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the canon of lyric poetry\u2014and indeed the history of the American nation\u2014supports the protected privacy of the white subject, then it is important to understand the conversely unstable privacy of the Black subject. Rankine, quoted in Javadizadeh\u2019s article, notes how difficult it is for her to see herself in sole isolation: \u201cAs a black person, it\u2019s difficult <\/span>not<\/span><\/i> to understand that you are part of a larger political and social dynamic\u201d (476). Being a Black poet, Rankine isn\u2019t afforded the same easy autobiographical freedom and singularity that a white poet like Robert Lowell enjoyed in his poetry, which has long been acknowledged as representative of both confessional poetics and the (white male) lyric tradition (Javadizadeh 476). Javadizadeh argues that it is \u201cHarder, after all, to \u2018say what happened\u2019 when the sovereignty of the subject (the <\/span>whom<\/span><\/i> that \u2018what happened\u2019 had happened <\/span>to<\/span><\/i>) had been called into question, when the poet\u2019s self was thought of not as\u2026 internally coherent\u2026 but instead as a linguistically\u2014and therefore in Rankine\u2019s view, socially and politically\u2014contingent and shifting site\u201d (476). Without the \u201csovereignty of the self\u201d of the white subject, the Black body bears a disproportionate burden of placelessness and disorientation in a world built only for <\/span>white<\/span><\/i> stability and coherence. In order to introduce the isolated white reader into this collective world that the Black subject must already navigate, Rankine therefore embodies the lived disorientation of Black and marginalized bodies into a literary, imagined disorientation for a predominantly white audience through her destabilizing second-person address.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Engin_Akyurt. \u201cTrain, Wagon, People Image.\u201d June 6, 2017. Pixabay. Open source.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In order to understand Rankine\u2019s linguistic break-down of the bounds of her reader\u2019s identity, it might be helpful to consider Sara Ahmed\u2019s analysis of \u201cdisorientation\u201d in <\/span>Queer Phenomenology<\/span><\/i>. Of particular interest to <\/span>Citizen\u2019s<\/span><\/i> second-person \u201cyou\u201d is Ahmed\u2019s illustration of the \u201cordinary\u201d disorientation of someone calling out your name:<\/span><\/p>\n

You look up, you even turn around to face what is behind you\u2026 you move out of the world, without simply falling into a new one. Such moments when you \u2018switch\u2019 dimensions can be deeply disorientating. (Ahmed 157-8)<\/span><\/p>\n

Paralleling someone \u201c[calling] out your name,\u201d Rankine\u2019s second-person address to \u201cyou\u201d also emulates a disorienting \u201cswitch\u201d of dimensions. When she calls out \u201cyou,\u201d she sweeps you off the stable ground of your privacy as a white reader\u2014she \u201cmoves you out of your world,\u201d and rather than let you \u201csimply fall into a new one,\u201d she \u201cswitches\u201d you into racially \u201cforeign\u201d bodies and experiences, uncomfortable worlds for which you must forsake your individuality in order to orient yourself in, worlds that\u2014in a turn of events\u2014are now neglectful of your <\/span>whiteness<\/span><\/i>. Given the imperative nature of the second-person address, <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i> opens with commands over your imagined body: \u201cWhen you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger\u2026 You smell good. You are twelve\u2026 You can\u2019t remember\u2026\u201d (Rankine 5). Notably, it is not just your actions that Rankine commands, but your identity, too; she soon makes it clear that \u201cyou\u201d are Black, and in this first section she narrates \u201cyour\u201d recollection of several distinct memories of racist microaggressions\u2014from a girl at Catholic school telling you \u201cyou smell good and have features more like a white person\u201d to your new therapist screaming at you to get away from her house (Rankine 5, 18). Thus, from the very beginning of <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i>, Rankine dislocates you from your own body and relocates you into a racially distinct \u201cother.\u201d You find, suddenly, that \u201cyou\u201d do not belong to yourself anymore. Though you might enter <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i> under the assumption that you as a white reader will keep a safe distance from the Black subject of the text, Rankine quite literally calls \u201cyou\u201d out and collapses that very distance. By addressing you directly as the subject, she breaches your isolation; by disorientingly \u201cswitching\u201d you into a racially foreign body, she destabilizes your solid sense of self and your hold of privacy. In order to <\/span>reorient<\/span><\/i> yourself, Rankine invites you to attempt a kind of strange intimacy\u2014to navigate a new \u201cyou,\u201d to place yourself inside of someone else. Reorientation, then, goes hand-in-hand with attempting to locate within a foreign body\u2014the Black body, the \u201cnon-citizen\u201d\u2014something to connect with, to latch yourself onto. Though this strange intimacy is limited only to imagination, Rankine\u2019s second-person address takes the first step in de-individualizing \u201cyou,\u201d the reader, by pulling you out of your isolated position as an external spectator and bringing you directly into the subject position of the \u201cother.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Once Rankine sways you to dissolve your guarded interiority as a reader, she is then able to reconfigure \u201cyou\u201d as a constantly shifting figure. By asking you to imagine yourself in all kinds of foreign bodies\u2014not just \u201cother\u201d in race, but also \u201cother\u201d in guilt\u2014she implicates your body as a collective rather than individualist actor intertwined with the historical memory and legacy of racism. In a sharp departure from the \u201cyou\u201d of <\/span>Citizen\u2019s<\/span><\/i> opening section, Rankine directs her second-person address in the script for the \u201cSituation\u201d video made in memory of James Craig Anderson to Anderson\u2019s killer, Deryl Dedmon. In this section, when Rankine addresses you as someone you are not, and as someone who is guilty\u2014\u201cDo you recognize yourself, Dedmon?\u201d\u2014when she voices your apology, your anger\u2014\u201cYou are so sorry. You are angry, an explosive anger\u201d\u2014and detonates that anger inside you\u2014\u201cSo angry, an imploding anger\u201d\u2014the experience is inherently disorienting (94-5). You are, of course, not Dedmon. But Rankine seems to be asking, can you imagine yourself in his body? Can you see\u2014even if for just a moment, this moment where you occupy Rankine\u2019s \u201cyou\u201d\u2014that you are part of something more than yourself? That you too might share the responsibility of his violence? As Javadizadeh succinctly observes, by \u201cdistributing\u201d her second-person address \u201cacross\u2026 a wide range of anecdotes,\u201d Rankine configures a constantly shifting \u201cyou\u201d that blurs the solid borders of \u201cyour\u201d identity (482). Rather than deflect collective responsibility by positioning yourself as an individual actor, she urges you to locate yourself in a jarringly disparate body; she transposes you into the burden of someone else\u2019s violence, a violence that\u2014given the racism built into our nation\u2019s past and present\u2014you share. Just as the racially marginalized body is constantly denied interiority and must recognize themselves as \u201cpart of a larger political and social dynamic,\u201d so too does the white reader now grapple with the dislocation of themselves from their previously respected boundaries; they too are relocated into a disorientingly shared world, and in particular, a world whose violence they play an active role in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even so, this public into which Rankine places herself, \u201cyou\u201d the reader, and all the figures of <\/span>Citizen<\/span><\/i>\u2014is shaped not just by the risk of violence, but also the potential for understanding. In this liminal space where true privacy is perhaps impossible, Rankine suggests that we all belong to some extent to each other; we exist, and therefore must navigate ourselves and one another, in a collective where intrusion and intimacy are inevitable and intertwined. Rankine interrogates this interpersonal navigation in \u201cMaking Room,\u201d where she captures \u201cyour\u201d effort to understand the man sitting alone\u2014his character also a variable, shifting figure\u2014and imagine what he is thinking: \u201cYou 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\u201d (131). Notably, Rankine draws out the placelessness of both the man and \u201cyou,\u201d in the physical setting of your bodies, which could be \u201canywhere\u201d he is \u201cforsaken,\u201d as well as in the figurative map of your intimacy with each other as strangers. \u201cYou\u201d must figure out where to orient yourself to him in order to fill the space around him\u2014the physical unoccupied seat and his social isolation. Moreover, the placement of your attempted intimacy is itself uncertain, shifting not only <\/span>around<\/span><\/i> the man\u2014\u201cin proximity to, adjacent to, alongside\u201d\u2014but possibly stepping <\/span>\u201cwithin\u201d<\/span><\/i> him. That your well-intended empathy might cross the boundary of the man\u2019s private body, might become intrusive, or even violent, is brought into focus in yet another indeterminate exchange: \u201cDoes he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?\u201d (Rankine 132). These questions, which go unanswered, invite you to \u201cstruggle against the unoccupied seat\u201d around the man and intensely interrogate your wish for intimacy with him (Rankine 131). Just as your body does not exist in isolation, Rankine makes it clear that your attempt to connect with the stranger, to latch onto the marginalized Black body, also exists in a larger political context; given the history of Black surveillance, your \u201clooking at him,\u201d even if born out of a desire for connection, blurs the lines into \u201csuspicion,\u201d into what Chad Bennett calls a \u201cdemand for transparency,\u201d for access into the Black subject\u2019s interiority (395). In a world that has historically threatened Black people\u2019s autonomy over privacy and marginalized people\u2019s sovereignty over themselves, Rankine calls upon us to recognize how intimacy inevitably risks intrusion and to recognize the injury laden in our conflicting desires to both protect our interiorities and forge solidarities, to reach for each other in times of need.<\/span><\/p>\n

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