On the train the woman standing

Claudia Rankine published her fifth book, Citizen: An American Lyric, in 2014, with Graywolf Press. Citizen quickly gained critical acclaim and won numerous awards, including the 2015 National Critics Book Circle Award in Poetry and the 2015 NAACP Image Award in poetry. Currently, Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University, and as of 2013, is an elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Rankine is both a theorist and poet; much of her work straddles the line between critical essay and poetry. This is especially true of Citizen, a poetic text that defies traditional genres; the book includes essays, images, reprinted visual art pieces, and poems. Overall, the book speaks back to the racism and sexism that Rankine sees permeating US culture, and “[On the train the woman standing]” is a profound representation of these themes.

Please note that the line numbers used in this guide refer to each sentence in the poem that contains end punctuation.

Poet Biography

Rankine was born in 1963 in Jamaica and has lived most of her life in the United States. She attended Williams College, and, later, Columbia University, pursuing a career as a professor, essayist, poet, and playwright. Professionally, Rankine taught at Pomona College from 2006 until 2015; she currently works as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Much of Rankine’s work deals with themes of race and oppression in society; in addition to her writing and teaching, she also founded and currently curates the Racial Imaginary Institute.

Rankine’s interest in furthering thinking about race and racism cannot be separated from her poetic interests. In her most recent publications—The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Just Us: An American Conversation (Allen Lane, 2020)—Rankine calls attention to how whiteness impacts US society in the present day. Much of Rankine’s writing and teaching aims at shifting the general understanding of how race functions and impacts individuals.

Over the course of her career, Rankine has been recognized in many arenas. She was given a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, and most recently, in 2021, was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. Rankine’s work has also been highly awarded, including a 2005 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and multiple book prizes for Citizen.

Poem Text

Rankine, Claudia. “from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing].” 2014. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

The speaker is on a train. There is one other passenger introduced, a woman who “makes you understand” (Line 1) that there are no empty seats when “in fact, there is one” (Line 2). The speaker describes her own surprise that the woman who is choosing to stand isn’t even getting off the train soon. The speaker makes clearer why the woman is standing in the second stanza, explaining that the woman is afraid of “[t]he space next to the man” (Line 5).

The speaker decides to support the man that the other passenger wouldn’t sit next to. She sits down next to him, and while he doesn’t acknowledge this act, the speaker describes that this is because “for him [… the seat] is more like breath than wonder” (Line 9). The speaker observes that the woman passenger finally sits when another seat becomes available. The speaker watches the man “gazing out the window into what looks like darkness” (Line 11).

The speaker connects this experience with other times she has been in transit locations—“the train, bus, in the plane” (Line 12)—where a man was “forsaken” (Line 12), imagining her “body there in proximity to, adjacent to” (Line 13) the man. The speaker wrestles with wanting to “fill” (Line 14) the space next to the man, but it belongs to him and not to her.

The speaker reflects on the meaning of the space next to the man, describing that the “struggle against the unoccupied seat” (Line 17) is distinctly attached to his presence. She imagines the man saying, “it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here” (Line 18) and yet she sits anyway, thinking about the train moving through the tunnel. The reflection of the “darkness allows [her] to look at him” (Line 21), and she thinks about what “suspicion mean[s]” (Line 24) and what “suspicion do[es]” (Line 25).

When the speaker’s coat touches the man’s sleeve, she notices that they are “shoulder to shoulder” (Line 27) and thinks about whether she is doing “repair” (Line 28). She cannot focus on “anything beyond the man” (Line 32) and the darkness surrounding them, which is sometimes punctuated by a “white light” (Line 33). Conflating this experience, again, with others, the speaker overhears a woman asking to switch seats so she can “sit with her daughter or son” (Line 35). The poem concludes with the speaker deciding, with the man next to her, that “if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family” (Line 39).