Citizen: An American Lyric

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Formal Experimentation

Citizen combines essay, images and visual stills of artworks, frequent quotation from artists and thinkers (for example, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and Claire Denis), scripts for films, and transcripts from television. Rankine’s writing is a collage of multimedia. Much of the meaning and momentum of Citizen is derived from disparate elements being viewed on the whole: Rankine’s words reverberate against the artwork and vice versa.

Cumulatively, the experience of reading Citizen is distinctly a visual experience. Images of artwork aside, Rankine’s words paint a portrait comparable to a film. Perhaps not coincidentally, much of Citizen (particularly Chapter 6) was co-written with John Lucas, a documentary filmmaker. The book is divided into seven sections with no index or table of contents. Without titles to separate and orient them, Rankine’s words function as free-floating poetic fragments. Echoing human memory, scenes are sometimes presented in high-definition focus, while at other moments, they are blurred beyond recognition; the reader does not know where they are in space and time, or even who is speaking.

Pushing the boundaries of form in this way, Rankine disorients the reader, and this disorientation puts the reader (particularly non-black readers) in a position to understand aspects of systemic racism perpetrated against blacks. Rankine encourages the reader to re-think everything they know about themselves, so that—again, especially with white readers—they can think how they participate in (and potentially benefit from) the racist power structures in the United States.

Visibility and Invisibility

Throughout Citizen, the black experience involves being rendered both hyper visible and invisible at the same time. References to visibility are made at multiple places in the text. For example, the narrator’s friend (a white woman) mistakes the narrator for the only other black woman in the white woman’s life: “Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning. What did you say?” (43).

Blue

The color blue can be seen throughout the book, but it is especially apparent in Chapters 5 and 6. From a blue light on page 70 to a blue sky on page 90, the color keeps cropping up in references throughout these sections. Thinking about color has an obvious connection to race. For Rankine’s purposes, the insistence that the reader keep color in mind, particularly blue, reinforces the idea that we are not the colorblind ideal of a post-racial society. Blue also evokes connections to visual art: Rankine reproduces a piece of art entitled “Blue Black Boy” by Carrie May Weems, which adds an element of overall cohesion to this motif (102-103). Finally, the motif of blue conjures visions of the ocean, which Rankine uses to evoke slave ships to reinforce the ever-present legacy of slavery In the United States. The narrator states that, for African-Americans, losing control of one’s emotions risks letting the entire weight of ancient tragedy to weigh upon that individual: “No, it’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads” (73).