A Poetics of American Citizenship: Blackness,Injury,and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

I. Introduction

“There is no notion more central in politics than citizenship,” Judith Shklar writes, “and none more variable in history, or contested in theory.” ¹ For Shklar, the history of citizenship in the United States is best narrated in terms of standing. Standing names the public recognition of one’s status as a full and contributing member of society that successive groups have struggled for and yet gradually attained – the unpropertied and then freed slaves and then women, on Shklar’s account. Given the history of the United States, slavery has always been a backdrop to the development of citizenship, the ground upon which citizenship is figured. As Shklar glosses this process: “From the first the most radical claims for freedom and political equality were played out in counterpoint to chattel slavery.” ²

The influence and persuasiveness of Shklar’s image of citizenship as standing appear in the range of critiques and responses her work has elicited. ³ One line of response has focused on how Shklar’s story of progressive inclusion denies the ways in which inclusion remains structured by power – especially racialized power – that delimits inclusion’s significance and influence. In The Abolition of White Democracy, Joel Olson argues that citizenship remains white citizenship and that Shklar ignores the psychological, social, and political barriers to genuine inclusion. Andrew Dilts has extended Olson, showing how Shklar fails to account for the role of slavery in the construction of race as well as its connections to state punishment; her approach cannot explain the importance of ongoing criminal exclusions to the franchise. ⁴

Cogent and important as critiques by Olson and Dilts may be, their arguments do not depart from the fundamental vision of citizenship Shklar introduces. While they criticize operative understandings of inclusion – and thus a legalized form of standing – they nonetheless rely on standing as activity – a figurative standing. All three see citizenship in terms of standing and view its internal development as a struggle for inclusion. As Stacey Clifford Simplican has pointed out, however, this vision of citizenship fails to come to terms with various inequalities within the lived experience of citizenship, in particular how those outside white citizenship as constructed in particular normative terms (e.g. cis-gendered and ablest in addition to racial and sexual) struggle to comport themselves as citizens. ⁵ While “external exclusions,” to borrow from Iris Marion Young, have largely been overcome, “internal exclusions” persist: citizens may have a presence in public and yet still lack influence. ⁶ Analysis of Shklar, Olson, and Dilts reveals that a particular image has held us captive, one that disappears the diverse realities of citizenship lived by many Americans and thus overlooks the kinds of response necessary to theorize and eventually to actualize a more fully democratic vision.

In this article, I introduce “injury” as a counterimage to “standing” to elicit an alternative poetics of citizenship and thus a different imaginary of democratic practice. In doing so, I turn to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, as a productive site for developing this contribution. With a bold declaration in its very title, Rankine’s book-length poem addresses the question of what it means to be a citizen by putting the raced, gendered, and vulnerable body at the center of her inquiry, replacing the metaphor of standing with one of injury. “Injury” denotes the wrong, the violation of a right – “in” negating “jure” – felt by black citizens in the United States; it also illuminates and details the physical, debilitating experiences of many citizens (not to mention non-citizens) of the United States that preclude full participation in the polity. Figuring citizenship as a site of harm, interruption, invisibility, disembodiment, and silencing, Rankine challenges Shklar’s image as well as the continuing hold of the metaphor of standing that persists in critiques such as Olson’s and Dilts’.

Offering a new poetics of citizenship, I read Rankine’s Citizen as calling attention to how dominant language and representations both create and misrepresent an uneven experience of citizenship in the United States; while doing so, moreover, I show how the poem intervenes at the level of metaphor, language, and representation to resist the causes of what it diagnoses. This poetics of American citizenship contrasts with recent calls such as Danielle Allen’s for reorienting citizenship in response to the sacrifices living in democracy entails as well as Wendy Brown’s concern that tarrying with such sacrifices will produce a destructive politics of ressentiment. Unlike Allen’s argument for acknowledgment of sacrifice in general, Rankine’s poetry demands that its readers account for their position with respect to the injustices she chronicles. Unlike Brown’s diagnosis of a politics of ressentiment, the poetics of citizenship elicit transformed citizens in nascent solidarity. While highlighting the limits of words to contain or explain these experiences, poetry provides a “lesson,” a reading of the injurious and damaging condition of excluded citizens that resists the dominance of the narrow view of citizenship with a performance of an alternative. Rankine’s Citizen does not merely replace standing with injury, however; the poem calls for new metaphors and practices of citizenship to embody a complicated, political existence.

II. “Stand Up and Fight For Your Rights”

Shklar’s account of the development of American citizenship through successive challenges in the name of inclusion goes a long way toward explaining the triangle of slavery, race, and citizenship in the United States. As Shklar argues, in early America citizenship was premised on not being a slave: not being an actual slave prior to Emancipation; and not being enslaved to economic necessity following it. In both cases, those without the standing of citizenship demanded recognition so that their interests could be defended and promoted. In both cases, one became a citizen because one was not a slave. In both cases, one proved one’s status as free by demanding standing (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Still image from Selma, Ava DuVernay, director.

However, as Joel Olson has argued, Shklar fails to consider the racial dimension of American citizenship. According to Olson, to be a citizen in the United States was also to be white. Citizenship consisted in racialized standing; black people functioned, in the American imagination, as anti-citizens. Moreover, changes in citizenship rights produced white citizens, making, for example, the Irish white. Whiteness functioned as a badge that marked membership in community. As Olson puts it, “white citizenship reconciles racially oppressive practices with democratic ideals.” ⁷ One is a citizen because one is not a slave but also because one is white. Whiteness was invented to deal with the need for standing in a polity marked by structural exclusion.

According to Olson, overcoming the whiteness of citizenship is not merely a matter of inclusion. Building on Shklar even while he criticizes her argument, Olson proposes replacing standing with empowerment, inclusion with participation. The strategy of inclusion fails to resolve white supremacy for two reasons: first, while it may eliminate white standing, it does not abolish whiteness as a norm; second, inclusion does not necessarily promote greater participation. On Olson’s argument, theorizing citizenship in terms of inclusion and standing ignores the prepolitical work done by whiteness, the ways in which whiteness as a norm marginalizes non-whites while also effectively discouraging political participation through both subtle and unsubtle means. For Olson, a strategy to “dissolve or abolish the cross-class alliance that constitutes whiteness” ⁸ offers the best means by which to destroy the domination and oppression perpetuated by whiteness below the radar of typical discussions of citizenship. The “abolition of white democracy” promises to energize participation and foster new norms of collective empowerment and agency undivided by racial categories.

Olson’s critique of Shklar hits the mark, but by demanding robust ability and energy among would-be citizens, it nonetheless remains within the imaginary that Shklar invokes and formalizes. To put it directly: Olson’s language of empowerment, abolition, and participation presupposes standing: one must stand before one can run and one needs to run to “chase the troll away,” as Olson puts it. ⁹ Shklar’s standing deserves criticism for its legalism, but Olson’s critique still involves standing insofar as the kind of political activity he endorses requires capacity. Shklar relies on “standing” as a noun while Olson emphasizes “standing” as a verb. In effect, Olson’s language intensifies Shklar’s without leaving its register: the bar of activation is higher and the burden heavier. Olson demands more of the citizenry than does Shklar: agitation, freedom, and radicalism. ¹⁰

By conceptualizing citizenship in terms of standing, both Shklar and Olson overlook very real obstacles to standing. Those oppressed and dominated by racist structures cannot be expected simply to stand up and fight; to demand so much disregards the very real debility inflicted on them and the crisis this condition incurs for any theory of citizenship figured in terms of standing. Indeed, arguments such as Shklar’s and Olson’s both effectively disappear these populations by ignoring their distinctive circumstances: both assume that citizenship must be taken by those previously excluded; both couch their arguments in terms of the self-activation of would-be citizens.

These metaphors of citizenship have real consequences for political life. As Benedict Anderson famously argued, citizens need to imagine themselves part of a whole they cannot see. Democratic peoples, moreover, need metaphors to make “the people” conceivable. In Danielle Allen’s words, “citizens can explain their role in democracy only by expending significant conceptual and imaginative labor to make themselves part of the invisible whole.” ¹¹ Yet when this imaginary community conceives of citizenship in terms of capacity and activity while ignoring the degree to which structures of domination empower some bodies while vitiating others, it comes up short on the promises of inclusive and equal democratic government. As George Yancy points out, Barack Obama’s “mantra-like” campaign slogan, “Yes we can!” prompts the question of who “can” “vis-à-vis differentially raced bodies.” ¹² The terrain of democratic citizenship is not merely uneven but jagged and marked by injury.

With this argument I do not intend to ignore the many vital and energetic forms of citizenship that have emerged from positions of oppression and domination. As Orlando Patterson and Christian Meier have argued, the first stirrings of democracy came from the dispossessed. ¹³ Yet citizenship envisioned only in terms of activity neglects practices of citizenship complicated by injury. “Standing” both forecloses correct identification of alternatives while also reinforcing the exclusive paradigm of citizenship at the same time. Looking closely at what George Yancy calls “the concrete muck and mire of raced embodied existence” ¹⁴ and how this existence is poeticized by Rankine reveals not only an alternative set of metaphors for understanding the experience of citizenship of the marginalized and oppressed, but also a different approach to the poetics of citizenship, the crafting of the matter of citizenship to respond more fully and openly to this “raced embodied existence.” In this way, a new poetics of citizenship can not only serve the theoretical end of illuminating practices beyond the ken of standing; a new poetics of citizenship can also inspire and invigorate these and other practices previously discouraged and misrecognized.

III. “It’s Just This, You’re Injured”

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen suggests a different overarching metaphor for theorizing American citizenship at the beginning of the twenty-first century: injury. “Injury” captures the history of wrong inflicted on black inhabitants of the United States, suggesting both the legal sense of injury, something against (in-) the law (jure) as well as the physical sense of being damaged, hurt, or harmed, a doubled meaning contained in the phrase personal injury, for instance. ¹⁵ Black citizens do not just suffer disrespect or marginalization; they suffer a history of violation, legal and physical, that has accumulated in their very bodies, producing not just inequalities and dispossession, but also anger, loneliness, and feelings of invisibility. Rankine’s Citizen speaks from “the concrete muck and mire of raced embodied existence” to add this dimension of citizen experience, in the process severely complicating the “primordial struggle for recognition” invoked by Shklar. This struggle has taken place outside of what goes by the name of the political in both Shklar and Olson; moreover, this struggle has depleted and debilitated its participants. Rankine confronts her white readers with this unacknowledged dimension of being a citizen and thus challenges political theories ostensibly committed to anti-racist critique. ¹⁶

Rankine’s new metaphor for citizenship begins with the arresting cover image of Citizen (Figure 2):

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Figure 2.

David Hammons, In the Hood, 1993.

“In the Hood,” by David Hammons, was created in 1993. A disembodied hood from a generic dark green hoodie, alone and “mounted on the wall like a hunting trophy,” the hood appears to cradle an invisible head as wire props the rim. ¹⁷ “In the Hood” refers simultaneously to both sides of racial intimidation and violence against African Americans: the hood of the Klansman and the hood(ie) of the racially profiled victim. While the work dates from two years after the Rodney King beating, Rankine selected the image with Trayvon Martin in mind (Figure 3). ¹⁸ The resonance is shattering.

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Figure 3.

Trayvon Martin.

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Figure 4.

Kate Clark, “Little Girl” (2008).

The murder of Trayvon Martin confronted many Americans with the uneven experience of citizenship in the United States: that certain lives do not matter as much as others; that, as Eddie Glaude puts it, “race still enslaves the American soul.” ¹⁹ Claudia Rankine’s Citizen examines and illuminates the affective and personal aspects of this unevenness in terms of disembodiment, loneliness, and invisibility. Citizenship as currently imagined overlooks and silences the injuries wrought by these experiences. That is, the metaphors of activity and energy, of standing and “chasing down the troll” demand a letting go and a forgetting, a moving on past injured black existence that is impossible. As Rankine puts it: “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. / Move on.” ²⁰

Rankine shows first of all how contemporary political life demands that black people deny the bodily affliction living in the United States exerts. As Rankine recounts experiences of prejudice and aggression, she describes how these memories lodge in your body and sicken you: ²¹

An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The

wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth

and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing

your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look

around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you

smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not

right away, because gathering energy has become its own

task, needing its own argument. . . . ²²

The experience of prejudice – be it direct or indirect – has a visceral dimension. It makes you sick. Rankine links these experiences to John Henryism, the medical term that describes the stress stemming from racism: “microagression” as a term does not do justice to the thousand cuts that gouge and score you, keeping you always bleeding and yet painfully still alive. Citizen is full of headaches and nausea, sleeplessness and anxiety, depression and sighs of pain. Some may struggle to escape through forgetting, but “they achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.” ²³ Feelings are displaced back into the body from which they came: “mouth full / dust in eyes.” ²⁴

Citizen thus begins from Ralph Ellison’s observation that “perhaps the most insidious and least understood form of segregation is that of the word.” ²⁵ This segregation seems required in order to cope with the social and political world:

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred

street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean

is making him hire a person of color when there are so

many great writers out there. ²⁶

Did he say that? Is this a test? Or punishment? You have learned “to drive straight through the moment,” ²⁷ absorbing the shock of the insult yet saying nothing. A man knocks over your son in the subway.

                 You feel your

own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept

walking. . . .

  . . .   Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the

child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his

feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him,

has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who

is not a reflection of himself. ²⁸

The immurement of whiteness – white grammar and the white world – prevents whites from seeing and acknowledging the injuries experienced by black Americans. ²⁹ To exist in the white world, then, black Americans must forget their bodies, working double time like John Henry. Until they can’t.

Not being able to name the innumerable injuries of everyday life, you feel not only disembodied but lonely. At first, you react with anger: this injury is an injustice and injustice provokes righteous indignation. Yet being black and angry falls straight into the stereotype; you are misunderstood from the beginning. Some black artists have made this anger into something marketable. But Rankine contrasts your experience with “sellable” black anger, a commodified anger that “can be engaged or played like the race card” yet “is tied solely to the performance of blackness and not to the emotional state of particular individuals in particular situations.” ³⁰ The emotional state of these particular individuals – you and her – reveals another kind of anger, one that accumulates through “the quotidian struggles against dehumanization every brown or black person lives simply because of skin color.” ³¹ Anger surges at the experience of injustice, but without an avenue for its expression, it merely builds up, sponsoring the production of loneliness. “The daily diminishment is a low flame, a constant drip.” ³² You feel yourself begin to ache.

Disembodiment and loneliness compound a pervasive feeling of invisibility. You believe that feelings are what create a person, yet these feelings cannot be named. You feel your personhood dissolving, dissipating. “Why do you look so angry?” someone asks you.

         . . .   Do

you look angry? You wouldn’t have said so. Obviously this

unsmiling image of you makes him uncomfortable, and

he needs you to account for that. ³³

But how can you account for what is unspeakable, the disavowed dailiness of racial violence in the United States? Even if it were spoken, could it be heard?

And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I

didn’t know black women could get cancer, instinctively

you take two steps back though all urgency leaves the

possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize no-

where is where you will get from here. ³⁴

These episodes all seem to point to the depressing truth: “No amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived”; “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much / to you –” ³⁵

Citizen thus suggests a three-fold image of citizenship experienced as disembodiment, loneliness, and invisibility. Citizenship evokes what Jill Stauffer calls an embodied ethical loneliness: the experience of dissociation that results from being unable to speak of one’s injuries; the separation and estrangement from a world that might acknowledge and repair these injuries; and the simultaneity of being both hypervisible and yet invisible. As Stauffer puts it, such “ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.” ³⁶

Once put in terms of injury, citizenship in the United States appears a hopeless predicament. But Rankine does not merely diagnose. Even while she catalogues the injuries of black denizens of the American polity, she also asks about how redress might be possible.

How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can’t hold

the content it is living? ³⁷

Forgetting is not an option. While others may disregard this – “You have to learn not to absorb the world,” a colleague tells you – you cannot ignore your scars or deny your wounds. ³⁸ As Rankine describes Serena Williams:

Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls

more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which

each objectionable call passes into consciousness – all

the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience

does not erase the moments lived through, even as we

are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to

be inside, among, a part of the games. ³⁹

Moaning like a deer, the world says “stop that!” but “the world is wrong”:

   You can’t put the past behind you. It’s

buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.

Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes

from the world to be stored in you. ⁴⁰

“Words work as release,” but “despite everything the body remains.” ⁴¹ If the state of citizenship in the United States is one of injury, injury held in the body, how can this fit the “counterpoint” envisioned by Shklar or the “agitation” exhorted by Olson? “Though you can retire with an injury, you can’t walk away because you feel bad.”^{42, 43}

IV. The Matter of Citizenship

Rankine’s metaphor of injury to describe the experience of citizenship in the United States stands apart from nearly all treatments of citizenship, save one: Danielle Allen’s theorization of citizenship in terms of sacrifice. ⁴⁴ Allen takes as her starting point the revolutionary moment in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when the first black students were integrated into Little Rock High School. For Allen, this moment focuses us on a core problem in America that persists today, the problem of interracial distrust. We have failed to address this problem because of the guiding image of citizenship. Considering citizenship as “oneness” and unity within the polity, argues Allen, overlooks the historic and ongoing sacrifices that different groups of citizens endure as part of the burdens of collective life. Whereas Olson and Dilts still work within the Shklarian paradigm of standing, Allen criticizes this formulation by elaborating a new metaphor of “wholeness” as the aspiration of a democratic polity. Such wholeness comes about through trust-building practices of friendship, which culture the connective tissue of democratic life to enliven the interconnections and interdependencies in which we are always already awash.

Allen’s language of sacrifice would seem to resonate with Rankine’s figuring citizenship as injury. Sacrifice, according to Allen, names a “democratic fact,” and for citizenship as wholeness to become a reality, citizens must create ways to acknowledge and redress sacrifices produced by the polity. Allen argues that citizens are related to each other by mutual benefaction but the networks of connection are disavowed. Social or economic loss becomes political when citizens believe themselves disadvantaged by a collective decision, and often anger, resentment, disappointment, and despair follow. For Allen, democratic life must develop responses, forms of replying to the losses incurred. ⁴⁵ “Political friendship” names the condition toward which Allen hopes divided Americans can strive, a kind of friendship possible when we recognize the matter of coexistence and begin to act in friendly ways toward one another. Taking direction from Aristotle, Allen argues for the importance of rhetoric for building trust, that if we can only learn to talk to strangers, we can begin to repair the connective tissue of the polity. ⁴⁶ For Allen, these skills include listening as well as speaking, the development of emotional as well as elocutionary capacities. We can only accept the uncertainty of representative democracy if our fellow citizens are trustworthy. “Attending to losses” is necessary. ⁴⁷

Despite their apparent similarities, Allen and Rankine’s responses to the conditions of American citizenship differ in important and illuminating ways. ⁴⁸ First, by demanding that “we” talk to strangers, Allen narrates from the perspective of the dominant, those who are already citizens and prepared to participate. Rankine, on the other hand, not only calls attention to how citizens experience political life from outside this “we,” but focuses on the differential positions of her readers. Here is the opening stanza of the poem:

When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any

of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked

among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blan-

kets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is miss-

ing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems

approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on

the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets

reconstructed as metaphor.

Is this “you” the poet? The reader? If the opening stanza remains ambiguous, the second and third do not:

You never really speak except for the time she makes her

request and later when she tells you you smell good and

have features more like a white person. You assume she

thinks she is thanking you for letting her cheat and feels

better cheating from an almost white person.

Or consider this:

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel

you have already settled into your window seat on United

Airlines, when the girl and her mother arrive at your row.

The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are

our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s

response is barely audible – I see, she says. I’ll sit in the

middle. ⁴⁹

While in the first of these examples the “you” is clearly raced, the particular race is not obvious. In the second, race could be at stake or it could be another experience of being seen and thus constituted as abject. “You” can describe the poet, those who suffer from racial discrimination, those who suffer from other forms of discrimination, and even those who witness this discrimination.

The “you” in Citizen has multiple functions: we cannot label these as Rankine’s experiences, different from our own; if these thoughts seem strange to us we feel pressure with the pronoun to identify at least some commonality; these are not merely confessional lines because they address us so directly. The “we” from which “we citizens” speak in Allen has disintegrated as Rankine confronts “us” with the particularity of each of our own subject positions. As Ben Lerner puts it, this is a direct response to “the Whitmanic (and nostalgist) notion of a perfectly exchangeable ‘I’ and ‘you’ that can suspend all difference.” ⁵⁰ We must ask ourselves where “we” stand, if anywhere.

In interviews, Rankine describes her use of the second person pronoun as an attempt to disallow readers from knowing immediately how to position themselves. Whereas the first person would have deactivated the scene by allowing for immediate identification or disidentification, the second person, on the other hand, forces the reader to question how and why they might apply a racial identity. As critic B.K. Fischer puts it: “Citizen’s dominant grammatical mode is the interrogative.” ⁵¹ The tone moves from one of inquiry and intimacy to confrontation and alienation. How one hears these episodes depends on where one stands.

This paragraph also intimates a second aspect to Rankine’s poem that sets up a contrast with Allen’s conception of citizenship. Allen’s praise of rhetoric and discourse as the means by which we can talk to strangers and repair the distrustful polity also presumes that language will suffice for this task. Even while Allen herself invokes images and metaphors for reorienting her readers, the emphasis on discourse remains. ⁵² Yet as Robin D.G. Kelley has argued, the black radical tradition, a tradition that has so often spoken from the implicit position of injured citizenship, gives grounds for doubting the adequacy of language for articulating and communicating these injuries. ⁵³ Rankine also connects Kelley’s work and her own when discussing her use of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits. She describes how “change come out of the surreal, and that we have to find pathways there.” ⁵⁴ A new poetics of citizenship must include spaces and times undetermined by speech.

Like the black surrealists Kelley describes, Rankine’s poetry also pushes against the boundaries of linguistic intelligibility in ways that resist Allen’s insistence on discourse. From its arresting cover photo, Citizen deploys images between and within its seven sections. These images interrupt and disturb the flow of prose, create silent breaks among the poetic stanzas, and force the reader to pause and wonder about their function and meaning. In an interview, Rankine quotes James Baldwin, who said that artists teach writers how to see. Along these lines, these images thus pull away from the writingness of Rankine’s text, calling attention to these as encapsulated observations: visions but visions with a particular frame, limited by their diction, tone, rhythm, and so forth. ⁵⁵

In a conversation with Lauren Berlant, Rankine describes how the images “were placed in the text where I thought silence was needed, but I wasn’t interested in making the silence feel empty or effortless the way a blank page would.” ⁵⁶ The images thus work to “talk back” to the “unreadable or unbearable encounter,” engaging in “conversation with an incoherence . . . in the world.” Surreal images evoke pathways of freedom; documentary images and stills from videos reposition the reader as a spectator, breaking the intimate relationship and forcing self-assessment of a different kind; more directly political art, such as Carrie Mae Weems’ Blue Black Boy (Figure 5) confronts readers, in Rankine’s words, with “a study of the weight the black male figure carries, given the fact that they are targeted by the police, and are constantly in danger of being misread in public spaces.” ⁵⁷

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Figure 5.

Carrie Mae Weems, “Blue Black Boy” (1987–1988). ⁵⁸

Allen’s talking to strangers and habits of political friendship assume the injuries of citizens can be articulated and explained; the poetics of citizenship insist on the unspeakability of most injury as well as the radical futures imaginable when one relinquishes the demand that everything be intelligible.

Rankine’s interruption of discourse with images calls attention to the effects of her poetic intervention; attending this, a third point of contrast with Allen’s argument appears in terms of the speaking and listening both Allen and Rankine practice and, implicitly, prescribe. Rhetoric for Allen consists in persuasion that can build trust and repair the damage done by unrecognized sacrifice in the polity. Yet taking this rhetorical stance presumes knowledge of the sacrifices as well as understanding of citizens’ preparedness for the work of building wholeness. In other words, Allen overlooks how the realities of chronic injury may require slower and more careful inquiry; political prescription may well rest on an incorrect – or at least imprecise – diagnosis.

Citizen entrains its readers in a different mode of response. Not only does the choice of address create a tone of intimacy that implicates the reader, the “embodied rhythms” of Citizen suggest a quality of attention and slowness that the text demands. This appears most of all in Rankine’s distinctive use of the spondee. As B.K. Fischer writes, “stressed monosyllables sound in pairs throughout Citizen like gongs of a Greek tragedy – ominous and riveting. . . . spondees drive plot and conflict . . . they are markers in an assay of the venom that is systemic racism.” ⁵⁹ The “low, gray ceiling” looms in the previous passage as well as how its “dark light dims.” Listen also to this:

Everything shaded everything darkened everything

shadowed

is the stripped is the struck –

is the trace

is the aftertaste.

I they he she we you were too concluded yesterday to

know whatever was done could also be done, was also

done, was never done –

The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much

to you –

As Fischer puts it, spondees “deploy the speaker’s pain (‘head ache’), then worse (‘chokehold’), then worse still: in the section about Trayvon Martin, after ‘pink sky’ turns ‘bloodshot,’ we hear it – ‘hey boy.’” ⁶⁰ While revivifying the struggle to write, idioms of anger, and the imperatives of a racialized society, Rankine’s spondees force readers to pause in the pain and violence around us. Before rebuilding we must stop and listen.

The contrast with Allen calls attention to how even an approach to citizenship that acknowledges injury, as Allen does with her concept of democratic sacrifice, can still construct metaphors of citizenship ill-equipped to attend and inquire into the tortuous realities produced by racism in American society. Not only does Allen’s insistence on trust-building move too quickly from the profound complications of living in what Linda Martin Alcoff calls a “post-enslavement culture,” ⁶¹ but Allen’s invocation of wholeness also remains within the dominant metaphorical register of citizenship conceived in terms of activity and energy.

V. A Poetics of American Citizenship

The formal structure – what I call the poetics – of Citizen also opens a line of criticism of the modes of theory employed for conceptualizing citizenship. With its spondees, second person address, and discourse-interrupting images, Rankine’s Citizen does not merely chasten logophilic attempts to make these experiences intelligible; it also entrains its readers to slow and attentive reading of the world of injury. One might object here that as a work of political theory, Talking to Strangers cannot concern itself with spondees and images, the limits of discourse and the need for painstaking reading. Yet discourse, the flesh of a raced world, is itself racialized, and thus must also be confronted and challenged. We live by metaphors and can only disturb these metaphors through self-conscious formal disruption and innovation. As George Yancy has argued, “to communicate an experience that is difficult to express, the very medium itself may need to change.” ⁶² Discursive political theory that strives to articulate the experience of citizenship risks obscuring and effacing the particularities of injuries that afflict the dominated and oppressed.

Disturbing the dominant metaphors of citizenship and crafting a new poetics in its place thus involves changing the modes and means of address that constitute citizens. In a world where, in Judith Butler’s language, “we suffer from the conditions of being addressable,” a poetics of citizenship calls attention to how we are addressed – through what metaphors, languages, and representations. Disturbing and shifting these terms of address means disrupting the linguistic structures that have made life unlivable for so many citizens. The discursive power of the grammar of whiteness must be interrupted. Ultimately, “words are the thing,” Rankine puts it, “that either triumphs or fails.” As Rankine elaborates in an interview, the failures to acknowledge and respond to injury detailed in the book all consist in failures of communication. Language can be an instrument of violence but it also holds the potential for repair. “It’s a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another,” Rankine adds. “It becomes a thing in between the two bodies.” ⁶³ Language enacts something. It can both destroy and heal.

Rankine’s allusion to Butler also calls attention to the crucial role of the body in a poetics of citizenship. As Butler has argued, the force of rehearsing conventional formulae in non-conventional ways is linked to the body – bodies perform these formulae, they either reinforce or deviate. Even written text bears the mark of the body behind it. ⁶⁴ Whose body it is may remain unclear yet in a world where “the body is drowning,” asserting the body, in particular the black body, holds within it a counterpractice. Returning language to its place as a project undertaken and sustained by participants in a common world is not merely discursive but fosters new relationships among and between bodies, a pluripotent and potentially political act.

While remaking the conditions of address that shape citizenship, a poetics of citizenship also intervenes at another level in political life. This intervention takes material shape in poetry as an artifact that changes the world into which it is placed. As Christopher Nealon has argued, citizenship has long been a central subject of 20th century American poetry, offering itself as a site to create new “textual imaginaries” to confront destructive trends. Rankine, on his reading (which predates Citizen), seeks to “pit the vulnerability of the textual assemblage against the mercilessness of the image stream,” setting her own “poetic craft labor” against the flood of commodities. ⁶⁵ When Johari Osayi Idusuyi pulled out her copy of Citizen during a Donald Trump rally in Springfield, Illinois, her action bespoke the material reality of this claim. ⁶⁶ The “textual assemblage” became an act (and an art) of resistance against the merciless image stream which Trump’s candidacy rode.

The fashioning of poetry thus creates something permanent and coherent – even if replete with lacunae and silences, interruptions and half-finished phrases. The poem can endure through the struggle of the challenges it names. Subtitling Citizen “an American lyric” calls further attention to how a poetics of citizenship can interrupt mainstream white American poetry and intervene into political discourse. As an “American” lyric, Citizen recalls Langston Hughes’ famous “Let America be America Again” and its haunting line, “America never was America to me.” Alluding to Hughes’ poem, Citizen reiterates its claim about the persistent divisions in America, that there is not one America but two, the one of whites who disavow the legacies of violent racism and the other of those who cannot or do not. Against an American literature that has “for the most part,” in Toni Morrison’s words, “taken as its concern the architecture of a new white man,” ⁶⁷ Rankine follows Hughes in destroying the illusions that disavow this architecture’s injurious foundations.

Yet by subtitling this prose poem a lyric, Rankine also rejects merely calling Citizen “a book about race.” “Lyric” denotes a musical form as distinguished from epic or drama, one devoted to the expression of some feeling. As Rankine puts it, “the lyric is tied to the intimate.” ⁶⁸ As we have seen, the use of “you” puts white readers in uncomfortable proximity with what has been disavowed. At the same time, the “you” speaks with an intimacy – we first meet “you” nestled in your pillows – of love as well as pain, hope as well as fury. If, as Virginia Jackson argues, “to be lyric is to be read as lyric,” ⁶⁹ Rankine’s American lyric demands readers read Citizen not simply as a catalogue of microaggressions or essays on female black embodiment but rather as a particular wording of the world, both public facing (“American”) and personal (“lyric”).

VI. “Injury is Not a Metaphor” ⁷⁰

A metaphor of injury beyond repair throws into crisis the conventional understanding of citizenship. Injured citizens cannot just stand up and claim their place. The burdens of history and the injuries of everyday life are too heavy. The structure of the world is a problem; its reconstitution and restructuring will not come easily. Rankine’s Citizen evokes a poetics of citizenship that intensifies the experience of evil and violence at work in this world of white hegemony, forcing readers to tarry with its horrific reality.

Yet ending with injury as metaphor risks ignoring how figuring citizenship in these terms may exacerbate the injury. As Wendy Brown has forcefully argued, the promise to address a social injury yields a paradox: on the one hand, the “first imaginings” of freedom come constrained by the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose; on the other hand, freedom “responds to a particular practice of domination whose terms are then often reinstalled in its practice.” ⁷¹ For Brown, beginning from social injury can produce a politics of ressentiment that fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions. In such a politics of ressentiment all political identity and action concerns itself with addressing the damaged identities of the injured; there is no world imagined beyond the current states of injury and their immediate redress. This renders all injury intentional and individual and reduces politics, with justice equated to punishment and protection. ⁷²

At the core of Brown’s critique lies a concern for the “reactive identity” caused by suffering; this identity, on Brown’s account, becomes interested in its own subjection and thus incapable of developing solidarity and a genuine politics of liberation. To borrow from Eve Tuck, the “damaged-centered” perspective brought by attending to injury continues the damage: depicting the injured as injured forecloses their transformation into vital citizens; documenting the damage that has taken place produces a “deficit model” without hopes for genuine change. ⁷³ A vicious circle emerges where struggles for emancipation re-perform and thus re-instatiate the injured identities they seek to overcome.

Here Jill Stauffer’s work provides a useful parallel to the poetics of citizenship for considering how to escape this vicious circle. Drawing on the writings of Jean Améry, a Holocaust survivor who resisted forgiveness and reconciliation, Stauffer argues that Améry presents a case of ethical loneliness, the condition of having suffered social injury that is both irreparable and not yet acknowledged by the broader world. What makes this loneliness distinctive is, as we encounter in Rankine’s Citizen, its being denied and made invisible in the broader social world. The world still lacks terms to address such injuries. Ethical loneliness stems not simply from not being heard but rather from not yet being hearable. ⁷⁴ Améry’s refusal of reconciliation thus involves a refusal to accept the world as it is and, instead, a demand that the world be refigured and a new language invented.

While Améry’s refusal may appear as ressentiment and thus risk producing a politics of revenge and wounded attachment, Stauffer’s analysis distinguishes his resentful anger from ressentiment. ⁷⁵ By demanding a transformation of the world and refusing redress within its current configuration, “Améry’s resentment . . . is his way of saying Yes to life rather than remaining indifferent to it or suppressing a ‘genuine demand for revenge.’” ⁷⁶ Améry does not demand redress of his social injury but insists on both remembrance and his desire to live. Preventing further injury is Améry’s chief concern; only a world that can learn to hear the unhearable can avoid committing such injustices again. To inaugurate such a world, Améry develops what Stauffer calls “revisionary practice”: building a counternarrative and changing how the past is lived in the present. This is work that involves survivors (or the injured) but not solely them: the entire world must change and “no one can repair a world broken on their own.” ⁷⁷

Stauffer’s language of revision and repair illuminates how the poetics of citizenship offers an alternative to the politics of ressentiment named by Brown. Reconstituting the world where injury has taken place and yet remained unspeakable starts with language. Recall Butler’s description of human beings as “suffering the condition of being addressable”: a poetics of citizenship begins here, with the community of speaking and listening that human beings form; it intervenes at the level of language while also maintaining skepticism about the possibilities of language to capture and communicate experience once and for all. This returns language to its place as a project undertaken and sustained by members of a common world and fosters new relationships among and between identities and bodies, transforming the conditions of address and articulation.

Moreover, the poetics of citizenship invents a language for speaking what has been unspeakable and depicting the invisible. To avoid developing reactive identities and a politics of ressentiment, Brown counsels that we must “supplant ‘I am’” with “‘I want this for us’”; ⁷⁸ a poetics of citizenship shows how this might take place through its use of the second person pronoun and refusal of a singular identity even while it words the world of the injured. Whereas Shklar, Olson, and others avoid the realities of injury, a revised poetics of citizenship begins from these realities in all their complex multiplicity to transform them. Whereas Brown sees wounded attachments leading to a politicized identity that clings to its own disfigurement and suffering in rage and Nietzschean ressentiment, Stauffer’s reading of Améry allows us to recognize how injury can offer a site for a necessary and productive crisis in the conditions of citizenship; the poetics of citizenship provide both entry and potential exit from such a crisis through revisionary and reparative creation. ⁷⁹

VII. The Politics of Interruption

Brown’s call for re-opening the desire for a transformed future also calls attention to the implicit politics of this poetics of citizenship. This poetics of citizenship does not merely replace standing with injury. It illustrates that, in Patricia Williams’ words, “life is complicated,” yet in doing so, it illuminates how the folds of lived experience hold possibilities for radical alternatives. Standing overlooks these options with its assumption of a singular mode of citizenship; a poetics of citizenship can prefigure multiple options, embodying new political practices and cultivating these practices through its very structure. ⁸⁰

This poetics of citizenship prefigures an alternative politics of citizenship in the first place with its demands of listening and tarrying. These demands exert their force through the very structure of Citizen, as we have seen. Moreover, Rankine presents her poem neither as an argument to be incorporated into extant frameworks nor as a correction of previous misrecognitions but as an experience, and an instructive one. Here are the final stanzas:

Tell me a story, he says, wrapping his arms around me.

Yesterday, I begin, I was waiting in the car for time to pass.

A woman pulled in and started to park her car facing mine.

Our eyes met and what passed passed as quickly as the

look away. She backed up and parked on the other side of

the lot. I could have followed her to worry my question but

I had to go, I was expected on court, I grabbed my racket.

The sunrise is slow and cloudy, dragging the light in, but

barely.

Did you win? he asks.

It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson. ⁸¹

Likening the poem itself to a tennis lesson, Rankine invokes the learning that might come through iterated encounter, both the experience of the point of view in which the poem positions its readers as well as reflectively with others in the world. The etymology of “lesson,” stemming from the French leçon, also suggests that the reading of the poem itself holds some educative power. Reading the poem creates a transformative experience from which the reader can learn. The lesson is complex, a parable or Zen koan of sorts, capturing both the deep sense of injury and the continuation of life that holds possibilities for change.

The lessons of listening and tarrying also suggest a second register of prefiguration in this poetics of citizenship: that of interruption. While Shklar describes the development of citizenship as having played out in “counterpoint” to chattel slavery, Rankine refuses to lend her voice, instead insisting on the violence and injury of this fugue, the “many thousands gone,” and the inadequacy of demanding the injured simply stand up and join the chorus of “progress.” This refusal avoids re-installing the injured by demanding alternative structures of expression and intelligibility. Citizen seeks to arrest readers as it confronts them with this history. Like recent “die in” protests and acts of civil disobedience that have sought to interrupt ostensibly normal traffic while anti-black violence persists, these works demand a halt.

Interruption is not simply negative, however; refusal without revision would produce a politics of ressentiment. Prefiguring a politics of citizenship in a third register, this poetics of citizenship suggests on the contrary how the activity of the injured can interrupt in constructive ways. Moments of Citizen depict an active interruption of lifeworlds structured by racism just as the poem itself disturbs the discursive power of whiteness: Sitting in (as you do beside a man on the train), intimacy (when you hold your beloved), and passion (the passion of suffering and the passion of desire, both of which you admire in Serena Williams and Zinedine Zidane). ⁸² These are not passive products of injury so much as affirmations of life and vitality in spite of this injury. As Lauren Berlant puts it, these gesture toward a “nascent solidarity,” an “affective optimism about sharing whatever.” ⁸³ Micropolitical practices of resilience, affection, mutuality, and reciprocity offer ways to acknowledge injury while rediscovering words for a broken world. ⁸⁴

In these three ways, this poetics of citizenship prefigures an activity of the injured and shows where injury and standing might meet. Not just a standing up or a mere crying out, this poetics of citizenship with its spondees, images, and deconstructed “you,” its interruption of the language of subjection and public rewording of the world hold readers in a space of complicated, multifarious citizenship while denying easy remedy or exit. We live by metaphors, but certain metaphors of citizenship have made many lives unlivable. Yet “unlivable” lives can act and speak their desire to live in powerful ways, prefiguring a political community worth pursuing. Practicing a poetics of citizenship in these registers provides a path of repair worthy of our hopes and hopeful for our future solidarity.