Slight tangent: I work for the English
department, and the other day, I saw that someone on the faculty ordered
Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely:
An American Lyric. I’m curious to know whether that book is related to this
one? What then does she mean by “American lyric”?
Talking about Black issues is
always personal for me. The overwhelming feeling I had throughout the reading
was remorseful agreement, because so many of the sheer emotions expressed are feelings
that I’ve experienced for the same
reasons. Of course the way this is written is meant to invoke feelings in
all of the readers, in the white readers, to have the injustice sitting plain
and unavoidable before you. It’s set in second person—it forces you to imagine
the situation before you as if you are a participant. Because some readers get
the “as if” option. I think in that way, that makes it a work of protest.
Pathos can be a very effective tool in changing the way people think about
something; it’s the one thing that can throw off rationality.
She
also asks a lot of questions. This might just be a me-thing, but it seems that
people can’t encounter questions without attempting to answer them. So, with so
many questions in this piece, the reader is forced to engage.
The
visuals were the hardest part for me. Sometimes I could understand where they
fit into the narrative, but sometimes I didn’t understand it at all. I checked
the titles in the back of the book as well. I would love to talk about page 113 next week though.
I also kept track of my favorite
lines:
“no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one
is perceived.” (24) I feel like this plays into that idea that sometimes
uncivil disobedience is necessary. Just having your problems blatantly on the
table doesn’t mean anyone is trying to help you fix it. But if you threaten
them, people will cooperate at least a little more. I’m just saying.
“The world is
wrong.” (63) It took me a long time to learn this, personally.
“Though you can retire with an injury, you can’t walk
away because you feel bad.” (65) This just made me think about the idea that
only certain types of hurt are considered legitimate. And often times, the
hurts of black people are not considered
legitimate.
“And 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.” (105) Honestly, this just made me feel straight out fear for my
younger brother. Because he doesn’t like to keep in touch with people, and I
really never know whether he will be randomly selected as another murder
victim, Fruitvale Station style.
Tiara,
ReplyDeleteI loved your perspective on the book. One of the greatest parts about this book is that each person walks away with something different. For me, it was Rankine gifting me with the ability to no longer have to guess what it is like to be an African-American: she painted a brutally honest, painful picture, holding the reader hostage while one microattack after another was thrown the audience’s way. If you take each story she told individually and applied it to someone, you would think ‘oh that’s not bad.’ But when all of the stories are piled on top of one another, you are suddenly faced with a lifetime of embarrassing and unfair events which come to define you. Rankine made it clear that even those who are held dear and seem to be harmless, such as a best friend, can have the ammunition to hurt you the most (as we discussed in class).
I agree with you that the pictures, at first glance, often didn’t seem to fit with what Rankine was talking about in her prose. But as I looked them over with my group in class, we highlighted some interesting ones that really seem to have an impact:
“Little Girl” by Kate Clark on page 19 really stood out to me because of the fact that it is a picture of a physical art piece, made of different materials. The piece of art is heart breaking because it depicts a human being with the body of the animal, effectively communicating that some humans are treated no better than wild animals. This reminds me of the use of the term chattel, before the civil rights movement, when slaves were bought and sold as property, instead of being seen as an equal human being.
“Tennis-Brazil-Wozniacki-Exhibition” on page 37 also stood out because it is one of the only times that an aggressor is called out by name throughout the entire book. The majority of the book is made up of hypothetical situations, but the Serena Williams example is different because it is extremely pointed. In my opinion, I am not sure that Wozniacki was making fun of Williams’s body specifically because it is black, but I guess the point the Rankine is trying to make is that ignorance of a situation, even with all-in-good-fun intent, is no excuse for an action that comes off as racist.
On a different note, I loved the lines that you picked out! Great analysis of each.
I'm glad you liked it! And you know what's funny about that? I was actually worried about speaking up when we were discussing and analyzing the book in class, because I did already relate to so much of the message, it wasn't quite the same impact on me that it had on everyone else. Which makes me wonder: if something is a work of protest, and you are a part of the protest movement, how does that work impact you? Because it's not me that she's protesting, I'm who she's speaking out for, sort of. So I feel like as a student in a protest rhetoric class, my relationship with this work is complicated, for lack of a better word.
DeleteYou know what else I find interesting? There are movements and organizations that fight for animal rights. I'm not saying that I'm anti-animal rights, I just find it interesting that stopping animal cruelty is, for the most part, entirely acceptable, but speaking up for PEOPLE who are discriminated against solicits responses like "ALL lives matter" and "that's reverse racism". I'm just saying.