A note from Corrina Lesser, CHF Senior Program Manager:
Naturally, I’m biased when it comes to believing how important and influential CHF’s presenters are in the worlds – be it academic or artistic – that they inhabit. I’ll say that very few things bring me such professional satisfaction, in this particular case, as being able to present a writer who truly inspires awe and reverence in the creative lives of the greater artistic community. Time and again when I’ve mentioned that poet and essayist Claudia Rankine is coming to the Festival, the writers I know have been elated; Rankine’s challenging work is resonant and affecting. One of these admirers is Elizabeth Metzger Sampson, a writer and editor of Dear Navigator, who offers this meditation on Rankine’s work.
Claudia Rankine’s is an expansive and open-hearted poetics in which the heart belongs to all of us; her “I” as flexible as her form. From project to project she carries the or of possibility and the fragment, placing them among and within our modern society. As her format expands from the word into multiple mediums and now into the city itself, so does her “I” expand along with it. Owning us, our society belongs to her, is optioned out among her works for our review.
You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had
a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness,
is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better
than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily
or unhappily experienced a momentary pause.
(from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely)
Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was published in 2004, the first time visuals entered into her text. Swallowing our society and reordering it within the text, the poet embeds collective trauma and gives it back in images. From static televisions with George W. Bush silhouetted in the background, to a prescription bottle of pills, to an image of James Byrd Jr.—a black man brutally killed in a hate crime by three white men in Jasper, Texas, 1998. George Bush, then governor of Texas, could not remember certain basic facts about the case, so Rankine has given us his image. Here is James Byrd Jr, back from the dead: look at him.
I think sometimes I am too private, too lonely in my heart,
but my mind rows constantly as if involved in a public disturbance.
(from Rankine's contributor note in
Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature)
Since Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine’s work has continued its social and open trajectory while expanding further into other mediums. In “Situation #1” (the first in a series of collaborative video essays with John Lucas) we watch in slow motion the famous headbutt delivered by Zinedine Zidane to Marco Materazzi in the final moments of the 2006 World Cup.
Zidane and Materazzi immediately after their altercation
Rankine’s audio weaves a text upon the image including Ralph Ellison, Shakespeare, herself, and Zidane among others. Repeatedly throughout the audio we hear Materazzi’s comment to Zidane leading up to the headbutt: Big Algerian shit. It echoes through, puncturing the collaged text. Big Algerian shit. She asks us to review, to listen again. 2009 debuted The Provenance of Beauty, a play for which the audience boards a bus and takes a guided tour of the South Bronx. Rankine complicates the space with its own history. The city is now her text, and ours to live again. In each, Rankine plays out our world before us, hands it to us and expands it, asking us to look. Here. I am here.
Throughout each of these projects and extending out of her earlier works is the fragment and the or of possibility:
Still, it seems he needs me,
and as my face turns away, my hand
reaches out. It can.
Why doesn't it?
(from Nothing in Nature is Private)
Taking the obsessive, fractured thinking of our modern world, Rankine worries it into every conceivable outcome. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, she has a sister whose entire family has died in a tragic accident. Or, she doesn’t. By moving the fragment into multiple potentialities of action (each thought built out into a possible reality) she creates a poetics of multiple options. A paratactic and hanging poetics presenting the reader with all possible universes.
There is a generosity and a direct challenge in Rankine’s ever-expanding universe. Her destabilized “I” accommodates and engages our modern American world. Here. I am here. Never answering, never explaining away the trauma, Rankine interrogates and circles, asks us to look again.
Elizabeth Metzger Sampson is a writer and artist currently living between Cairo and Chicago. She is the editor of Dear Navigator magazine.
Northwestern University, Harris Hall, Room 107: Oct. 16, 1:30 PM
Tags: poetry, poetics, politics, racism, video, literature
