The Claims of the Body Politic: Identity in 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely' and 'Citizen: An American Lyric' Anonymous College

The subtitle of both of Claudia Rankine’s most recent books, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, “An American Lyric,” frames these works as engagements with the relationship between an “I” and a “We,” understood as a political unit. The phrase lays claim, or appears to, to representativeness. But this is in fact exactly the claim both books, especially Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, on which this essay will focus, work to problematize. The speaker(s) of this poem live lives marked for violence by the identifications of race and gender, lives defined by the ideology of an abstract (implicitly white, male) universalism as partial, particular, marginal. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is composed of a fragmentary series of narratives, meditations, and conversations not related to any particular plot, but all situated historically in post-911 America. A variety of images—a static-filled television, text from prescription pill bottles, photographs of victims of racist violence—punctuate the text, continually jerking its narratives into the present-tense of reading, and interrupting the conventionally solitary, reflective, interiority of the lyric “I.” Rankine’s multi-media text seeks to recover mediation, separateness, as a common fact, rather than...