Citizen: An American Lyric

by Claudia Rankine

And there is no (Black) who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked, and unanswerable hatred;

Each decision gave rise to the same hesitations, produced the same despair. No one is free.

That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it, knows … something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed, no church—can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable.

We hear, then we remember.

The state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.

It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates.

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

You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

because white men can’t police their imagination black people are dying

Some years there exists a wanting to escape— you, floating above your certain ache— still the ache coexists.

You are you even before you grow into understanding you are not anyone, worthless, not worth you.

Even as your own weight insists you are here, fighting off the weight of nonexistence.

And still a world begins its furious erasure— Who do you think you are, saying I to me? You nothing. You nobody. You. A body in the world drowns in it—

When you lay your body in the body entered as if skin and bone were public places,

when you lay your body in the body entered as if you’re the ground you walk on,

you know no memory should live in t...

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

You’ve grown into it. Some call it aging—an internalized liquid smoke blurring ordinary ache.

What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing, something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one’s irrelevance pulls at you.

Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling? Can feelings be a hazard, a warning sign, a disturbance, distaste, the disgrace?

Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the beginning of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you—the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside.

Though a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce— a truce with the patience of a stethoscope.

I can hear the even breathing that creates passages to dreams. And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.

Did you win? he asks. It wasn’t a match, I say. It was a lesson.