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Complicated selves in Citizen

An article published on the Poetry Foundation, highlights that Claudia Rankine’s work

“often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of minds”. This remark is very

true as we can see various types of narratives in Citizen; we have scripts for situation videos (on

page 89, 99, 93 and so on), we have a moving poem, probably a free verse on p139-146, we have

photos on p 147, 119, 87, 74, 33 and so on), we have poems written in prose from p 5-18, we

have paintings on p160 and 161… I still don’t know how you qualify her writing on p 23-36…

Thus, Rankine’s Citizen is a collage of different types of narratives that make it “wild”, but also

“precise” when we try to decode its message. This book is “wild” in the measure that it

resembles the Jazz music. Citizen is as haphazardous as the jazz music in its use of different

forms of literature and art. It has the abstraction of the jazz moment. In The Black Female Body

in American Literature and Art, Professor Caroline Brown states that “The power of jazz-despite

its multiplicity-is rooted less in its connection to specific events, discourses, and models than in

its ability to create a mood and emotional context for its listeners (77). Rankine affirms in her

interview with Paul Legault for the Academy of American poets: “I don’t feel any commitment

to any external idea of truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own

truth”. Thus, her aim is to let her readers focus on the abstraction of racism and its effects on the

oppressed self in order to let them derive their own truth out of it. On the other hand, Rankine’s

Citizen is precise in depicting the impact of racism on the black person’s subjectivity. This is so

because the poet borrows her sources from real life events around her. In her interview, she says:

“I feel, like, surprised at my own surprise at some of the accounts. And then when you start
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paying attention, it’s amazing how many things occur in a single day or week or month” (in her

second interview 4). Therefore, Citizen is both precise and abstract in its portrayal of the

complicated selves in the presence of the Other.

Rankine makes it conspicuous that the Black person’s self is slave to its own

consciousness. In Models of the Self , Mait Edey writes that “You can distinguish yourself as

subject from any object whatsoever (physical or mental) any time you direct your attention to

that object and realize that it is not that object which is aware and paying attention, but you

(Gallagher and Shear 442). Edey also states that “Questions about the nature of the self are often

linked to questions about the nature of consciousness” (Gallagher and Shear 441). Rankine

avoids the use of titles to classify her poems in Citizen. Thus, she depicts the relationship

between the Black person’s self and its dependence on his consciousness. His consciousness is

his realization that it is in fact “the object which is aware and paying attention” (Edey 442) not

him. According to Edey, “The assumption that the self is something in the universe, or one part

of the universe distinguishable from the rest, is linked to the assumption that consciousness is a

state or property of some part of the universe, whether of an organism, a person, a brain, part of a

brain, or perhaps even a machine” (441). Rankine allows the interplay between the self and

consciousness to take place until the self is annihilated into consciousness. Thus, the black

person is unable to have control over racism in his daily life and his consciousness becomes part

of this universe. His helplessness lies in the fact that Rankine is unable to classify different forms

of racism by giving titles to her poems. Edey suggests to “focus on the meaning of ‘self’ here in

terms of such familiar distinctions as between, for instance, observer and observed, seer and

seen, hearer and heard, or thinker and thought where the role of consciousness is explicit” (441).

In Citizen, the Black person’s self turns into “you” instead of being “I” because it is erased by its
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consciousness. The wall between the observer and the observed collapses as the observer’s self

begins to identify itself only as the observed, the seen, the heard and the thought. There is no

room left for the self to observe, to see, to hear or to think as the self is conscious that it is owned

by the oppressor’s gaze. The black person’s consciousness becomes the perception of the Other,

the White American.

The self becomes the Other as it is addressed as “you” in several poems: “You are

visiting a campus (13, “When you are alone (5), You can’t put the past behind you (63)” and so

on. The “I” becomes the “you” as it views itself from the other’s eyes. The use of “you” also

shows that there is no individuality as the gaze of the other, namely the white person, snatches

the “self self” from the “black self” (14). Thus, the individual becomes part of the mass, the

black race. Rankine underlines it as the ‘ “all black people look the same” moment” (p 7). In The

Black Female Body in American Literature and Art, Professor Caroline Brown states that “the

function of the stereotype is to dispossess the self of subjectivity, to alter one’s bodily

parameters, his or her relationship with corporeal and psychic borders” (33). Thus, the black’s

subjectivity is defined through objectification: “Such a definition commits the fallacy of

objectification, which occurs any time we attempt to define ‘subject’ in terms of objects” (Edey

in Gallagher and Shear 442). Edey affirms that “The real nature of the object and the real nature

of the subject may be baffling mysteries, but these mysteries are no barrier whatever to knowing

which is obviously which” (in Gallagher and Shear 442). The black person is conscious about his

objectification as a subject. The black subject metamorphoses into an object when it is “being

thrown against a sharp white background” (29) like the tennis player Serena Williams. The “so-

called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line” (29) is the metaphor for her self’s

objectification in the white dominated society. Serena defines it as “the daily diminishment is a
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low flame” (32). Despite that she wants to prove that she wants to win for America, she becomes

racism’s victim in 2004 and is marginalized. In one of her interviews Rankine says that “There

are two worlds out there; two America’s out there. If you’re a white person, there’s one way of

being a citizen in our country; and if you’re a brown or a black body, there’s another way of

being a citizen” (5-6). The tennis match in 2004 depicts this situation through Serena. In The

Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois writes that “The Nation has not yet found peace from its

sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land” (4). This is true in Serena

Williams’s case because she is seen as an object because “her body didn’t belong” to the white

court (26). Thus, even in the present, white Americans see the black bodies as slaves,

commodities or objects that were sold and bought in the past.

Serena’s reaction to racism in the US open tennis match held in 2009 is “read as insane”

(30) as she abandons “all rules of civility” (30). Du Bois Shaw views Kara Walker’s persona

Negress as “a young and pretty black girl whose function is as receptacle-she’s a black hole, a

space defined by things sucked into her, ….She is simultaneously a sub-human and a super-

human” (quoted in Professor Brown 61). Serena Williams’s rebellion shows her inability to

continue to be a receptacle like Negress because of her black body. She is neither “sub-human”

nor “super-human”. She is being her true self; a normal human being identifying herself. In

Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, Linda Martin

Alcoff writes that “The Other, from Hegel to Foucault, is accorded the power to recognize, to

name, even to constitute one’s identity. This is why the look of the Other produces nausea and

even terror” (332). By not playing by the rules, Serena rejects her self as being her black body

which is only the outside of her true self. Her body image is only a representation of her self in

the White American society and “produces nausea and terror”. According to Professor Brown,
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“Through Negress, Walker creates a picaresque character who articulates the complex

subjectivity of the “oppressed” as both victimized and morally complicit” (61). Serena’s refusal

to accept the body image given to her is an act of liberation from the victimized self. Thus, she is

no more morally complicit in racism as silence and acceptance makes of her an accomplice in

racism. That’s the beginning of a meditation on her self. W.E.B DuBois highlights it as “In those

sombre forests of his striving, his own soul rose before him, and he saw himself- darkly as

through a veil; and yet he saw himself…. He began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place

in the world, he must be himself, and not another” (5). The black body image makes the tennis

player see herself as “another”. In the tennis match held in 2004, she does not discover her true

self as she did not dare to get rid of that another self sticking to the play’s rules. Professor Brown

states this condition as: “Psychically stateless, one haunts the larger body politic, a disembodied

trace” (Professor Brown 33). Serena insults the umpire in 2009 to reclaim both her body and her

true self.

The black person’s self is also a victim of the consciousness provided by history. History

is the beginning of the Black consciousness as it is there that racism has begun. In Black Looks:

Race and Representation, Bell Hooks quotes Baldwin: “people are trapped in history and history

is trapped in them” (172). The White man has already sealed the black body with the stamp of

slavery in the past. Rankine underscores this fact as “You can’t put the past behind you. It’s

buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard” (63). The consciousness of the self

remains soaked in the past: “Yesterday called to say we were together” ((Rankine 75). Kara

Walker writes in After the Deluge: “One theme in my artwork is the idea that a Black subject in

the present tense is a container for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing

and feeding off those maladies. Racist pathology is the muck” (in Professor Brown 58). Thus,
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racism victimizes the Black person’s self because it has its roots in the past. History captures the

black body in the present and does not allow it to make peace with its self as an American. The

white gaze traps the Black man’s consciousness into its perception. W.E.B Du Bois pinpoints

that “The history of the American Negro is the history of strife, - this longing to attain self-

conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” (3). Racism does not

allow the black man to attain this better and truer self. Rankine portrays the self and its

consciousness as two different entities in her poem on p14: “the “self self” and the “historical

self”” (14). There is always a conflict going on between consciousness and the self. The black

man remains fragmented in this measure and possesses double consciousness. He sees himself as

American, but is not permitted to believe in his self-perception. Alcoff describes this state as

“oneself as seen by others and of one’s own self-perception” (337). The confused self lives in the

past: “Memory is a tough place. You were there” (Rankine 64). Professor Brown highlights that

“After all, the past is never simply past; it is in a constant state of flux, altered by any number of

extenuating circumstances, including acts of historical revisionism and the contingencies of

individual perspective” (58). Thus, the past keeps haunting and chasing the present.

In the poem on page 23 Hennessy Youngman wants Black artists to cultivate “an angry

nigger exterior”. For him, rage acts as “the performance of blackness”. Thus, he wants the

representation of the Black self in art in this particular way. Rankine finds “actual anger” (24)

inherent in this performance. Youngman’s “commodified anger” (23) which “rests lightly on the

surface for spectacle’s sake” (23) is in fact at the core of Black people. The exterior, the public

identity and the interior, the true self are alike. Alcoff writes that “academic commodification of

identity is an increasing tendency to view identity as politically and metaphysically problematic”

(322). In this measure, the political anger and the metaphysical anger make the Black person’s
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self problematic. This is so because the Black man’s anger manifests both inside and outside his

body. Essence and existence become similar. Alcoff states that “One might think of identity as

one’s public self, based on publicly recognized categories, and of subjectivity as one’s lived self,

or true self, or thinking self, etc” (in the footnote 321). In this poem racism turns the public self

and the true self into anger’s preys. The public self and the true self are victimized as they are

coerced to react to oppression. Racism gives birth to this self and it is described as

“dehumanization” in people because of “skin color” (Rankine 24). Dehumanization causes loss

of true self because rage is inculcated from the society. It imposes itself on the Black person in

such a way that it destroys his subjectivity: “Some of the most difficult and contentious issues in

the philosophy of mind arise from the assumption that consciousness or subjectivity is to be

understood as a state or property of something” (Edey in Gallagher and Shear 442). The black

body is labelled as “nigger” in the white society where the black person’s anger becomes merely

“physical, behavioural, or functional” (Edey in Gallagher and Shear 442). Edey highlights that “I

may have a theory that I am this or that kind of a system, and I may have been let to assume that

consciousness is a property of the system, but that is not what I actually realize” (444). The self

is estranged from itself by watching itself in the society’s gaze. Thus, it is not given the chance to

attain self-realization.

Rendering the Blacks invisible is another way to efface their self. Bell Hooks writes in

Black Looks: Race and Representation that “Black slaves, and later manumitted servants, could

be brutally punished for looking, for appearing to observe the whites they were serving, as only a

subject can observe, or see” (168). In Rankine’s Citizen Whites reduce the Blacks to invisibility

by not looking at them. Thus, whites erase the Black’s self: “you want the child pushed to the

ground to be seen…, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him” (17). Hooks states that
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“The looking relations were reinforced as whites cultivated the practice of denying the

subjectivity of blacks (the better to dehumanize and oppress), of relegating them to the realm of

the invisible” (168). Not looking at Blacks has the same effect as looking at them anyway. When

the White ignores the Black body, racism still coerces “black folks to internalize negative

perceptions of blackness” (Hooks 166) and “to possess the reality of the Other” (166). This state

is also the death of the self. Rankine describes this as “another way of being a citizen and that

way is very close to death” (p6 of her interview). She portrays this death in her poem based on

James Craig Anderson (93). Hooks highlights that “Some white people may even imagine there

is no representation of whiteness in the black imagination” (168-169). According to Richard

Dyer’s essay ‘White’: “there are inevitable associations of white with light and therefore safety,

and black with dark and therefore danger” (in Hooks 169). This is not the case in the poem

written on Anderson who is killed by White teenagers. Rankine depicts the motion of Dedmon’s

pickup truck as “Its motion activates its darkness” (93). The pickup truck becomes a

representation of Dedmon’s white body moving in it. The white body represents darkness as it is

a condition of darkness in motion” ( Rankine 93). Dedmon’s hate crime depicts Hook’s

statement: “To name that whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror”

(172). Thus, Dedmon’s white body also becomes an image or representation while it kills

Anderson to shame him because of his black body. Whiteness becomes the negation of light or

security that Dyer discusses in his essay ‘White’.

Anderson’s self is defined by its body image not by its soul. A human being is treated as

an object, “You mean a black subject. No, a black object” (Rankine 93), despite that Baldwin

says that “skin color cannot be more important than the human being” (in Rankine 94). Alcoff

describes representations of the body as: “Shame is simply one of the effects, and symptoms, of
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this necessary dependence on elements outside the self” (338). In this measure, it is important to

treat Anderson as a human being instead of a Black body. Sartre disagrees on the perception of

bodies as identity: “Thus the profound meaning of my being is outside me, imprisoned in an

absence” (in Alcoff 331). Anderson is killed as Dedmon denies the former’s self residing in his

soul rather than his body. Hence, the self is murdered in its “imprisoned absence” as pinpointed

by Sartre(in Alcoff 331). The true self of Anderson remains absent during his murder as his

public identity of being a nigger is killed. However, by committing the hate crime, Dedmon also

becomes a mere body as he is described as “the pick up truck” (93- 95) throughout the poem.

Rankine takes away all the beauty of his soul by portraying him as “a pure product” (94). His

hatred metamorphoses himself into a commodity while he takes Anderson to be “a black object”

(93, 94). Thus, Dedmon’s crime turns him into an object of shame as he thinks only as a white

body and displays his “dependence on elements outside the self” (Alcoff 338). Hooks states that

“Lorraine Hansberry argues that black stereotypes of whites emerge as a trickle-down process of

white stereotypes of blackness, where there is the projection onto an Other all that we deny about

ourselves” (170). By asking “Do you recognize yourself, Dedmon” (94), Rankine depicts that

Dedmon projects on Anderson whatever the former denies about himself. In fact, Dedmon denies

that he is a human being just like Anderson is. In the pick up truck, Dedmon becomes a truck, a

white object, killing Anderson, a black object. Rankine depicts Anderson and Dedmon as

representations or body images. Hooks highlights that “Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one

form of representation. Like fictions, they are created to serve as substitutions, standing in for

what is real” (170). Racism gives rise to the manifestation of false selves in both the oppressor

and the oppressed. The oppressor acts as a white body eliminating the oppressed’s black body.
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Consciousness also makes the Black person’s self problematic when the public identity

and the lived self, the subjectivity, become opposing entities. Alcoff argues that “My public

identity and my lived self may be at some significant odds from each other” (336). Racism

creates a rift between identity and subjectivity. Rankine depicts it as “Slipping down burying the

you buried within. You are everywhere and you are nowhere in the day” (141). Fanon finds this

situation as “a corporeal malediction, that is, the disequilibrium induced by the experience of

having one’s subjectivity and one’s identity, or one’s first-person self and one’s third-person self,

seriously at odds with one another” (in Alcoff 336). The Black person begins to see the public

self, his body, as a curse. This is so because the white’s gaze makes him feel inferior: “You

nothing. You nobody” (Rankine 142). These insults become part of his consciousness and it

begins to have effects on his lived self, his subjectivity. Alcoff mentions that “Western common

sense has it that we have more individual control over our subjectivity than we have over our

public identity, especially if the former is thought to be “internal” and the latter “external” (336).

But in Citizen, the white person’s gaze destroys the Black person’s prospects of having control

over his subjectivity as he is overpowered by the image given to his body. Alcoff highlights this

process as “Our sense of ourselves, our capacities and aspirations, is made possible by our public

identity” (336). Rankine depicts it as “You are not sick, you are injured- you ache for the rest of

life”(143). The self finds its subjectivity enslaved to the public identity given to the black body.

The black person cannot understand his body in the way he wants to. His body is already

possessed by his racist society. ` The individual begins to rely heavily on the body image and

functions only as he is seen by others. Self- esteem dies in this way and the black person

perceives itself as a void. Judith Butler highlights that “Accepting identities is tantamount to

accepting dominant scripts and performing the identities Power has invented” (in Alcoff 321).
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At the end of my presentation I want all of you to voice out your own conclusions as I

want my presentation to follow the concept of the open-endedness and responsiveness of Jazz

music present in Rankine’s Citizen. I want the conclusion to be spontaneous rather than pre-

meditated. Your conclusions will give Rankine’s portrayal of the self in Citizen the ability to

create a mood and emotional context.

Thank you!

Bibliography

Models of the Self. Edited by Gallagher, S. and Shear, J. U.K: Imprint Academic (ISBN

0907845096) Print

Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Edited by Moya, P.,

Hames –Garcia, M. University of California Press, 2000. Print.

http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/give-me-liberty4/docs/WEBDuBois-

Souls_of_Black_Folk-1903.pdf 16 nov.

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation

Professor Caroline Brown. The Black Female Body in American Literature and Art