Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

“The purpose of art,” James Baldwin wrote, “is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” He might have been channeling Dostoyevsky’s statement that “we have all the answers. It is the questions we do not know.

Let him do his spite: My services which I have done … Shall out-tongue his complaints. (William Shakespeare)

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence. (Homi Bhabha)

This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. (James Baldwin)

Some call it aging—an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.