Citizen: An American Lyric

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.