We want you to know the name Claudia Rankine. Rankine won the National Book Award in Poetry in 2015 for Citizen: An American Lyric. The book was also a National Book Award finalist in Criticism the same year — something that had never happened in the history of the prize. Citizen is not just a prose poem, not just a critical essay. It is a book that tasks itself with putting into motion — as experience — what it feels like to be black in America.
In Citizen, Rankine addresses the reader as you, asking the reader to feel and think through the violence of the events she distills. Rankine’s charged and plainspoken style speaks to what is inside: anguish, loneliness, grief, rage. You, the reader, must constantly take your temperature, position yourself within what’s happening on the page. It is a book about the constant assault on the mental health of black Americans. It is a devastating and necessary read for anyone practicing psychotherapy in our country today.
One page in the book is particularly disturbing to us as therapists who are advocates of social justice, shaking us in a way that we need to be shaken. It documents an incident of overt racism inflicted by a therapist:
The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. You have only ever spoken on the phone, Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. You walk down a path bordered on both sides with deer grass and rosemary to the gate, which turns out to be locked.
At the front door the bell is a small round disc that you press firmly. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?
It’s as if a wounded Doberman pinscher or a German shepherd has gained the power of speech. And though you back up a few steps, you manage to tell her you have an appointment. You have an appointment? she spits back. Then she pauses. Everything pauses. Oh, she says, followed by, oh, yes, that’s right. I am sorry.
I am so sorry, so, so sorry.
Rankine’s project is deeper than calling out the therapist for her overt racism. We enter the moment. Rankine asks us to involve ourselves in what we are already involved in — the relentless pain and trauma internalized by every black person in our country. She asks us to see, feel, think through it. To be American citizens, we must. To those who will hear, Rankine offers her voice.
Citizen: An American Lyric, was published by Graywolf Press in 2014. To this date, it has been reprinted 13 times.
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Purchase Citizen: An American Lyric from Graywolf Press
Graywolf’s guide to reading Citizen with your book group
Claudia Rankine talks about Citizen on Studio 360:
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Selection from Citizen above reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press. Copyright 2014 by Claudia Rankine. Photograph of Claudia Rankine at the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Award Festival used in accordance with a Creative Commons 3.0 license. Book cover for Citizen designed by John Lucas using an image of In the Hood by David Hammonds, 1993.