Analysis Of Citizen By Claudia Rankine

“No,” she said. “I’m determined to overdo it. Listen,” she exclaimed, as two birds sang together. “Not grieving, nor amorous, nor lost. Nothing to read into it. Simply music, Like Mozart. Complete. Finished. Oh, it is rain to listening ears.” She glanced at Edwin to see how he took this rhetoric. He took it calmly. She let go his hand and capered amidst the fallen eucalyptus leaves.

When the author’s father passed away, Wes was in shock, he said, “everything around you vanishes, all you hear is wind filling your ear, all you feel is the wind on your skin.... Your mind all but empties.” (Moore, 14) He couldn’t think or do anything. He was lost.

She is explaining a deeper meaning using nature as her based. She states that things can seems perfect, but can change quickly. For example: pain and illness. Sometimes we can bear these problems and have to give in. You don’t know when death will come because it’s uncertain. She describe this reality with the sky becoming saturated as the color of the clouds turn gray. At any moment it can fall and it did. It hit the small leafs, but also affected the old elm tree which can only take a small of amount rain. The ground failed first then the tree, all that was left was

When one thinks of a “citizen”, they often imagine the process of gaining the title of becoming a citizen within a country. But often times people do not think of “citizen” or “citizenship” to be connected to race. In Claudia Rankine’s book “Citizen”, she takes time to discuss and display specific moments that have happened in the lives of African Americans who live in the United States. By doing so, she is investigating in depth of what it means to be a Black American “citizen” today in society. These stories, although reflecting upon minuscule moments, paint a large picture of the true reality of racism in America very prevalent today. In context to Rankine’s Citizen and other supporting documents such as Keywords: “Citizenship”, White Like Me and Cops See it Differently it can be proven that racial bias deprives full Black American citizens of “citizenship” within everyday society.

From the book: I was walking in a cemetery, among stiffened corpses, logs of wood. Not a cry of distress, not a groan, nothing but a mass agony, in silence. No one asked anyone else for help. You died because you had to die. There was no fuss. In every stiffened corpse I saw myself. And soon I should not even see them; I should be one of them-a matter of hours.

In Citizen by Claudia Rankine, there is a selection of images scattered throughout the work, adding intriguing visual aspects uncovering sometimes-hidden themes in her writing One such image is an excerpt from Wangechi Mutu’s Sleeping Heads instillation, featured on page 147 of the book. In this collage, a child painted in red looks plaintively off-canvas, a cut out hand grasping his throat, with a bullet through his brain. This image is not easily shaken, and stands out from the others. Not only is it eccentric like the rest, but the longing tone the child’s eye gives off draws the viewer in, causing them to feel the need to figure out exactly what he is trying to tell them.

Citizen is a narrative written to connect with the reader by telling stories in the second person . In the novel, “Citizen”, Claudia Rankine uses short stories and personal experiences to encapsulate the struggle that African American people endure when they are thrown against a sharp white background .

hedonistic urges. Later on Dixon points out “We are facing the loss of our generation…gay men lost to AIDS. What kind of witness will you bear? What truth telling are you brave enough to utter and endure the consequences of your unpopular message?” (Dixon 73-74).

Claudia Rankine’s contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America’s biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. While she highlights a vast number of stories that illustrate the hate crimes that have occurred in the United States during the 21st century, the James Craig Anderson case is prevalent because his heartbreaking story is known by few individuals throughout the country. In 2011, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old man of Mississippi was nearly beaten to death by a group of white male teenagers due to the abundance of melanin in his skin. As if this was not enough, he was then purposely run over by a pickup truck as if he was just a random object in the road rather than an actual human being. These white young men stole the life away from Anderson, a devoted husband, and father similar to any other citizen of America simply because of him being black. While these Ku Klux Klan- reminiscent acts were thought to be “normal” in the 18th and 19th centuries, the 21st century is claimed to be the era of racial growth towards equality. Being that Anderson’s unjustifiable story was not nationally publicized further explains how the world seems immune to the racial injustice that is apparent today due to the cyclical nature of the occurrences. James Craig Anderson exemplifies how the world has yet to revolutionize, evidencing how we are still cemented in a racially insensitive epidemic. In other words, America is still racially insensitive to those who are seen as an inferior race, African Americans. `

Claudia Rankine analyze racism to its core, bringing to surface that miniscule event are just as problematic as televised one. Her words are beautifully brutal, striking up emotions for anyone that reads it. As readers we are taken through a journey from past to present events of racial incidents experienced by different genders and ages. Above all, Claudia provides a strong indication that racism is far from over.

Citizen, is a book by the author Claudia Rankine, who was born in Jamaica, and then immigrated to the US at a young age. After seemingly absorbing and understanding the culture of America, she writes the book Citizen, to not only define violence, but as a voice to black individuals on the racism and violence they face daily. The book does a very good job of putting the reader in the shoes of a black individual in America, without not making it believable. The book has its own style, which is used to show the violence that blacks face daily. This book was the perfect addition to the course in the sense it unwittingly attempts to answer the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”.

“There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading-and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, and no matter how often I reread the same lines, they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading, and I see myself as

Reading chapter three was truly a thoroughly enjoyed adventure. In that, it was like a hunt, where the prize catch was a deeper understanding of word choice, word order, and tone. Furthermore, understanding the poets have a duty to words opened up new revelation as the poems in chapter three were read. Notably, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks stated that “I still feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things And it’s too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them” Poetry goes far beyond the simple rhyming of words, it is an art.

In today’s world, there are so many racial things still happening. Whites hating blacks, blacks hating white, everybody hating somebody. We’re so quick to not like someone because of how they look, or their religion, or how they feel about certain things. We’re always so fast to judge someone for their race, sex, size anything. A lot of the times, we choose hate over love. We choose violence over peace and we never take a second to step back and take into consideration we’re the problem with the world. Especially whenever it come to racial discrimination. Whenever anything happens, were always so quick to blame it on the color or ethnicity of the person, instead of the motives of why it happened. Sometimes it’s not just white or black

Mpe, in this passage adds, changes, and omits various aspects of the previous narrative. He specifies that See the World Through the Eyes of a Child is a “favorite song, providing the musical background to your brooding…” The stream of consciousness about the state of the city is cut short with parts of it being omitted. However, despite these changes the last part remains unchanged. We are still presented with this list of emotions that have seemed to settle comfortably into the consciousness of Refentše.