Citizen: An American Lyric (9 page)

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? Don’t feel like you are mistaken. It’s not that (Is it not that?) you are oversensitive or misunderstanding.

You know feelings destabilize since everyone you ask is laughing that kind of close-the-gap laughter: all the ha-ha’s wanting uninterrupted views. Don’t be ridiculous. None of the other black friends feel that way and how you feel is how you feel even if what you perceive isn’t tied to what is …

What is?

And so it goes until the vista includes only displacement of feeling back into the body, which gave birth to the feelings that don’t sit comfortably inside the communal.

You smile dumbly at the world because you are still feeling if only the feeling could be known and this brings on the moment you recognize as desire.

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. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering—

“The subject of so many films is the protection of the victim, and I think, I don’t give a damn about those things. It’s not the job of films to nurse people. With what’s happening in the chemistry of love, I don’t want to be a nurse or a doctor, I just want to be an observer.”

As a child, Claire Denis wished to be a nurse; she is no longer a child. Years have passed and so soon we love this world, so soon we are willing to coexist with dust in our eyes.

And, of course, you want the days to add up to something more than you came in out of the sun and drank the potable water of your developed world—

yes, and because words hang in the air like pollen, the throat closes. You hack away.

That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmaneuvered years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.

That’s the bruise the ice in the heart was meant to ice.

To arrive like this every day for it to be like this to have so many memories and no other memory than these for as long as they can be remembered to remember this.

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.

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.

Images

Page 6

Michael David Murphy

Title:
Jim Crow Rd.

Date: 2008

Credit: Michael David Murphy

Page 19

Kate Clark

Title:
Little Girl,
2008

infant caribou hide, foam, clay, pins, thread, rubber eyes

15 × 28 × 19 inches

Page 23

Hennessy Youngman

Screen grab from
ART THOUGHTZ: How to Be a Successful Black Artist

Courtesy of Jayson Musson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_NnX8oj-g

Page 33

Nick Cave

Title:
Soundsuits

Photo by James Prinz

Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Page 37

Title:
Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition

Date: December 7, 2012

Collection: AFP

Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Page 41

Title: Untitled
(Rutgers women’s basketball team)

Date photographed: April 10, 2007

Credit: MIKE SEGAR/Reuters/Corbis

Pages 52–53

Glenn Ligon

Title:
Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background),
1990–91

oilstick and gesso on panel

80 × 30 inches

Page 74

Mel Chin

Title:
VOLUME X No. 5 Black Angel

The Funk and Wag from A to Z, 2012, excised printed pages from
The Universal Standard Encyclopedia,
1953–56, by Wilfred Funk, Inc., archival water-based glue, paper 524 collages, each varies from 8 × 11 inches to 17 × 23 inches.

Image courtesy of Mel Chin

Description: A popular, vintage encyclopedia is processed to represent contradictory layers and logic of personal and public information. The images have been extracted from all twenty-five volumes of a 1953–56 Funk & Wagnall Encyclopedia and reconfigured as collages, unleashing the potentiality of images trapped by historical context. New political and psychological associations emerge in the black-and-white presentation that covers the walls.

Pages 86–87

Toyin Odutola

Title:
Uncertain, yet Reserved. (Adeola. Abuja Airport, Nigeria.),
2012

pen ink and acrylic ink on board

20 × 30 inches

29½ × 39½ × 1½ inches framed

Page 91

Hulton Archives

Title:
Public Lynching

Date: August 30, 1930

Credit: Getty Images

(Image alteration with permission: John Lucas)

Pages 96–97

John Lucas

Title:
Male II & I,
1996

gelatin silver prints and found objects

72 × 60 inches

Pages 102–103

Carrie Mae Weems

Title:
Blue Black Boy,
1997

From the series “Colored People”

silver print with text on mat

30 × 30 inches

Pages 110–111

Glenn Ligon

Title:
Untitled
(speech/crowd) #2, 2000

silkscreen, coal dust, oilstick, glue on paper

40 × 54 inches

(101.6 × 137.2 cm)

Page 119

Radcliffe Bailey

Title:
Cerebral Caverns,
2011

wood, glass, and 30 plaster heads

97 × 100 × 60 inches

Pages 122–128

John Lucas

ABC NEWS IMAGE

Page 147

Wangechi Mutu

Title:
Sleeping Heads,
2006

mixed media, collage on Mylar; “wounded wall”: punctured latex

Set of 8: Approx. 17 × 22 inches

(43.2 × 55.9 cm) each.

Wall installation done on site.

Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter

Los Angeles Projects

The Pinnell Collection

Page 160

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Title:
The Slave Ship,
circa 1840

oil on canvas

© Burstein Collection/CORBIS

Page 161

Joseph Mallord William Turner

Detail of Fish Attacking Slave
from
The Slave Ship

© Burstein Collection/CORBIS

Works Referenced

Baldwin, James.
The Fire Next Time.
New York: Laurel-Dell, 1962.

——.
Notes of a Native Son.
New York: Dial Press, 1963.

Berlant, Lauren.
Cruel Optimism.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Bhabha, Homi K.
The Location of Culture.
London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Blanchot, Maurice.
The Space of Literature.
Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
1845. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Ellison, Ralph.
Invisible Man.
New York: Random House, 1992.

Fanon, Frantz.
The Wretched of the Earth.
New York: Grove Press, 1963.

——.
A Dying Colonialism.
New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Hammons, David.
Concerto in Black and Blue
(mixed media), 2002.

Lee, Kevin.
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/spectacularly-intimate-an-interview-with-claire-denis
. Published on April 2, 2009.

Lowell, Robert.
Life Studies.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1959.

——.
For the Union Dead.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.

Shakespeare, William.
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice.
New York: Washington Square Press, 1993.

Williams, Patricia.
The Alchemy of Race and Rights: The Diary of a Law Professor.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Youngman, Hennessy/Musson, Jayson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L_NnX8oj-g&list=UU1kdURWGVjuksaqGK3oGoxA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXL0SYJ2eU&list=UU1kdURWGVjuksaqGK3oGoxA

Zidane, Zinedine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2004/apr/04/sport.features

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the publications in which poems and essays from this book first appeared:
Blackbird, Boston Review, Lana Turner, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poets Writing Across Borders: The Strangest of Theatres,
and
Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses.

Immeasurable gratitude to Elizabeth Alexander, Catherine Barnett, Calvin Bedient, Lauren Berlant, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Sarah Blake, Jericho Brown, Prudence Carter, Jeff Clark, Allison Coudert, Nick Flynn, Louise Glück, Hillary Gravendyk, Kate Greenstreet, Annie Guthrie, Rupert Grant, Karen Green, Marilyn Hacker, Christine Hume, Melanie Joseph, Nancy Jugan, Alex Juhasz, Bhanu Kapil, Sally Keith, Aaron Kunin, Robin Coste Lewis, Diana Linden, Casey Llewellyn, Beth Loffreda, Maggie Nelson, Lisa Pearson, Maitreyi Pesques, Nicolas Pesques, Adam Plunkett, Patricia Powell, Romarilyn Ralston, Ira Sadoff, Sarah Juliette Sasson, Sarah Schulman, Lisa Sewell, Connie Rogers Tilton, Jen Tilton, Susan Wheeler, and Ronaldo Wilson.

To everyone who generously shared their strories, thank you.

Thank you also to Pomona College, UCross Foundation, and Graywolf Press. Thank you, Katie Dublinski and Jeff Shotts.

And finally, jaw-dropping gratitude to Ula and John for everything.

Claudia Rankine is the author of four previous books, including
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize. She teaches at Pomona College.

This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College.

Previous titles in this series include:

Loverboy
by Victoria Redel

The House on Eccles Road
by Judith Kitchen

One Vacant Chair
by Joe Coomer

The Weatherman
by Clint McCown

Collected Poems
by Jane Kenyon

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship
by

Nuruddin Farah:

Sweet and Sour Milk

Sardines

Close Sesame