Don't Let Me Be Lonely Essay Questions

How would you describe the speaker in this work? Is it one single person or multiple voices? Is the speaker the same as the poet? Use examples from the text to back up your answer.

The speaker's voice in Don't Let Me Be Lonely is not static at all—it is made up of a patchwork of voices that are constantly evolving and hard to pin down. While there is a consistent tone throughout the work, it would be detrimental to assume that there is a single speaker or that the speaker is the poet herself. Understanding the speaker as a configuration of multiple voices allows for a more generous and comprehensive reading of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Thus, understanding the speaker as part of a multiplicity universalizes the topics of Don't Let Me Be Lonely and opens them up for everyone.

Pick a movie, TV show, article, or book that is mentioned in Don't Let Me Be Lonely and do research on it. How do the themes of the work interact with Don't Let Me Be Lonely? Does your new knowledge about this other work inform your reading of Don't Let Me Be Lonely in any particular way?

Zadie Smith's White Teeth was the author's debut novel, published in 2000 when she was 21 years old. The novel focuses on the wartime relationship between two friends—Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones. The novel centers around Britain's relationship with people from the countries it has formerly colonized. Learning about this novel can inform a reading of Don't Let Me Be Lonely because Rankine also focuses on colonization and social hegemony in significant ways throughout her work.

How does Rankine use images in Don't Let Me Be Lonely?

Rankine uses images to break up her text and provide a visual element to the reader in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Additionally, as in the case of the images of televisions, they help evoke a particular omnipresent theme. They also provide physical evidence of a lot of what the speaker mentions throughout the work, which adds to the text's credibility as a whole.

Should we take the political events described in Don't Let Me Be Lonely as literal fact? Why or why not?

While many (very nearly all) of the political events outlined in Don't Let Me Be Lonely happened in real life, we have to take them as both fictional and factual because we are writing about poetry. In her Notes, Rankine shares the exact details of these events, which adds legitimacy to their presence in the text. However, they must also be understood as tools that the speaker uses to craft her narrative and methods through which the speaker moves from one topic to the next. In this way, these events are very carefully crafted and the way that they are described show a very particular point-of-view.

How does the symbol and motif of the liver speak to the theme of the gray area between life and death in this work?

The speaker mentions the liver many times throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. It speaks to the theme of the gray area between life and death because the liver's function is necessary for the survival of the body. If it begins to fail, then the person whose liver it is has a very low chance of survival.