In Citizen, Rankine focuses on moments of discordance when black and white citizens interact. These moments seem to hold no weight in the blind charge of the day, or seem to be simple misunderstandings; but upon reflection, they unpack troubling, raced contents.
The book begins with the author lying on he bed at night, going through her thoughts on what happened in her day, as we all do. In that liminal darkness, she arrives by a chain of association at a troubling, distant memory:
The girl in class who paid you the compliment that you are almost white.
This is typical of the reflections in Citizen. They are a sifting of the author’s consciousness, a slowing down of hurried moments, and in that slowing, a dissection of them, and a revelation of their hidden contents and associative echoes:
A white friend who accidentally calls you by the name of her black housekeeper.
A colleague who confides in you his department is being forced to hire a person of colour when, he says, there are so many talented people out there.
Your neighbour ringing to say a menacing black guy is casing your home and the guy turns out to be your friend who you asked to babysit, taking a breather outside, phoning you.
The key text is written almost entirely in the second person – the ‘you’ voice – and the use of this voice is the making of the book. It does several things. It brings the black reader in close to the author. It reflects the research Rankine did with her black friends – so the experiences described are owned by the community – black citizens in general – rather than being a testament of one individual. It gives the sense of a conversation, where that storytelling mode use of ‘you’ is often found, though this conversation is not colloquial, trivial. The first line of the book begins:
When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices…
The ‘you’ here is not that winsome kind of you, nor the jokey vernacular; it contains an urgency. The line is not “when you’re alone” but “when you are alone”. The difference matters. It’s there also in the use of the term, ‘devices’ – at once a 21st century term, yet retaining formality. It suggests the serious language – of the courtroom, of earnestness. The language of weighting, sifting, defining and naming. It’s beyond post modernist playing or the egocentric shout of ‘I’. I wonder also, of the effect of that ‘you’ on the white reader. Now, for once, they ride along, they become the Other, they wear the shoes; as they read the book the white reader intermittently becomes the black ‘you’. Rankine is saying, this is how it is.
How it is is laid out quietly. Impressively. The ways these small episodes dull the life out of you, snatch your breath, wear you away slowly, increase your sigh rate.
The myriad resonances and meanings of these discordant encounters, the alternative ways of responding emotionally and intellectually, the power structures they reveal and the way a black person must select an option to move through them – accommodation, adjustment to your own sense of self, anger, disappointment, confusion, denial. You are forced to choose one. Just so you can get along, put food in the fridge, petrol in the tank, do your job, pay your bills.
The moments occur around cars, in public spaces, on streets, in offices, in restaurants – in all those places citizens encounter one another. Citizen is a lyric but there are no cascading strings of love here. It’s an essay in Civics. How we get along. The messy complexity of that.
Interspersed in the book are essays, artwork, photos and cut-ups. They provide a breathing space between the encounter descriptions; and further context.
As far as I know this is the first time this has been done. It is a novel of the middle class black person getting along in the city. It radiates a quiet intelligence, a questioning strength, a submerged rage. The descriptions are in their nature descriptions of water torture- of the small daily stresses endured, their never-ending-ness. It brought to my mind Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. There is in Citizen a similar nod to the moral courage needed to endure in the face of absurdity: in Sisyphus existential, in Citizen racial. Hell is other people, Sartre wrote. Oftentimes, hell means white people, adds Rankine.