Citizen: An American Lyric

Chapter 6 is broken up into eight sections and each draws on a “situation video.” A situation video refers to an actual video that Rankine created in collaboration with documentary filmmaker John Lucas. (These videos can be viewed on the author’s website.) The videos are a kind of visual poetry; they collect footage from historical events like Hurricane Katrina or the World Cup, and edit them together in short, curated clips. The sections are as follows:

Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2005. Quotes are collected from CNN’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The question “Have you seen their faces?” is asked, we assume by a news anchor. This phrase is repeated throughout the chapter. Other quotes from the Katrina coverage are offered and, taken out of context, seem even more horrific: “It’s awful, she said, to go back home to find your own dead child. It’s really sad” (84). Interspersed among the CNN quotes, Rankine adds her own narrative: “He said, I don’t know what the water wanted. It wanted to show you no one would come” (85). There is no protagonist, and no clear trajectory of action.

In Memory of Trayvon Martin, February 26, 2012. Though named after Trayvon Martin, this section does not delve into the details of his killing. Instead, it is a larger rumination on solidarity borne from racism, centered around a speaker’s “brothers.” Here, “brothers” may refer to blood relatives, or a larger type of family:

My brothers are notorious. They have not been to prison. They have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter. It is no place.

My brothers are notorious. They do regular things, like wait. On my birthday they say my name. They will never forget that we are named. What is that memory? (89).

In Memory of James Craig Anderson, June 26, 2011. James Craig Anderson was the victim of a hate crime in Jackson, Mississippi when 18-year-old Deryl Dedmon fatally ran over Anderson with a pickup truck. This section opens with a scene of someone watching a pickup truck on screen: “In the next frame the pickup truck is in motion. Its motion activates its darkness. The pickup truck is a condition of darkness in motion” (93). A speaker engages in an imagined conversation with Dedmon, asking questions that emphasize the loathsome nature of his crime: “The pickup is human in this predictable way. Do you recognize yourself, Dedmon?” (94). The section concludes with the speaker feeling angry over this senseless murder, and then having to let that anger go, not because they are over it, but because they must in order to get on with their own life.

Jena Six, December 4, 2006.  Aggravated by racist treatment at school, the Jena Six were six black teenagers in Jena, Louisiana convicted in the 2006 beating of Justin Barker, a white high school student. This section goes back in time, before anyone knew this would be a historic event. The narration follows the teenagers as the moments prior to the beating of Justin Barker unfold.

Stop-and-Frisk. This section puts the “you” in the position of a black person who is wrongfully stopped by the police as part of a “stop-and-frisk” procedure. The subject is angered over this false accusation but expresses a feeling of resignation at the unjust system: “And still you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description” (109).

In Memory of Mark Duggan, August 4, 2011. The Hackney riots occurred in the U.K. in 2011: 

The riots began at the end of the summer of 2011 when Mark Duggan, a black man, a husband, father, and a suspected drug dealer, was shot dead by officers from Scotland Yard’s Operation Trident (a special operations unit addressing gun crime in black communities) […] Whatever the reason for the riots, images of the looters’ continued rampage eventually displaced the fact that an unarmed man was shot to death (117).

This section is set in a time after the riots have occurred. It focuses on a conversation between the speaker (a writer of color) and a white English novelist. The novelist is “slightly irritated” when the narrator suggests he might write something about the Hackney riots, implying that it is the work of black writers to writer about “black things.” In this section, both microaggression (the incident with the novelist) and physical violence (the killing of Mark Duggan) are highlighted.

World Cup, October 10, 2006. This section explores a scene during which French soccer star Zinedine Zidane head-butts Italian defender Marco Materazzi after Materazzi verbally provokes Zidane with a racial slur at the FIFA World Cup final in 2006.

Making Room, July 29-August 18, 2014. This section returns to the prose-poem form and examines another instance of everyday racism. The subject is aboard a moving train and sees that there is a black man with an unoccupied seat directly next to him, despite it being a crowded train with every other seat taken. The inference is that the rest of the train is scared, hesitant, or otherwise unwilling to sit near him. The subject, understanding this, makes a conscious choice to sit next to the man as an act of solidarity: “The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that” (132).

Chapter 6 concludes with a list of twenty-three names listed one after another. These names are of victims of recent racial violence: “In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis/In Memory of Eric Garner/In Memory of John Crawford” (134). The text gradually fades to white, with “in memory of” bleeding into the white of the page and disappearing.