The temperament of this opening paragraph eases the reader into the abstract arena of the rest of the book as well.
The ambitions of the narrator's great country are all but extinguished in this dark and lonely space. The moonlight, symbolizing the goal of America's mission to land on the moon, is no longer present. There is no location, but rather an overwhelming dark feeling. The first paragraph of Citizen offers an entrance into the complicated web of subjects that will tell the story in its pages. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor." (Citizen, 1) - Section I In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society."Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetryįinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismĪ provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Ĭlaudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry
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