Summary
The first few lines of Part 15 discuss Mahalia Jackson. The speaker says that the man she is with is trying to determine whether Mahalia Jackson "is a genius" or "has genius" (97). The speaker feels unease about the man's questioning because it starts to feel problematic. The speaker decides to change the subject. She and the man she is with had previously watched Louis Armstrong at Newport, 1971 together. At the movie theater, the people in the audience gave a standing ovation after Mahalia, in the film, sang "Let There Be Peace on Earth." The speaker wonders at why Jackson had the effect that she did on the viewers on the documentary. She uses Paul Celan and Hegel to help her try to explain, considering Jackson's genius and historical context.
On the next page, the speaker describes a dream in which she apologizes to everyone she interacts with. She notes how this is different from real life; usually when she makes eye contact with a stranger, she quickly looks away. The speaker wonders if this is a form of apology, or if the act of looking away is a reason to apologize. She considers that she could have reacted differently upon making eye contact with a stranger.
A friend of the speaker tells the speaker a story about going to a bathhouse in Los Angeles and seeing a woman with an identification number on her arm from the Holocaust. The speaker's friend assumes that the A in front of the number stands for Auschwitz. The speaker's friend tells the woman that her cousin was at the same concentration camp as her, and the woman asks how she knew this. The woman reveals to the speaker's friend that the A actually stands for "the German word for worker—arbeiter" (99). The point of the friend's story was to take note of how some people can "defy history" simply by existing in a world that previously wanted them dead (99).
The speaker moves from a description of this encounter into a meditation on the Israel-Palestine conflict. She recalls that Ariel Sharon wants to exile Yasir Arafat from Palestine. She pictures Yasir Arafat being exiled from Palestine and enjoys these musings before she admits that they are not reasonable.
The speaker celebrates her fortieth birthday in Part 16. Her parents send her lilies and she calls to thank them. Instead of her parents, her "parents' housekeeper answers the phone" (103). The prose then shifts into lyric form. When the speaker asks to speak to her mother, the housekeeper responds, "They're still at the funeral" (103). This confuses the speaker. It is unclear who asks the final line: "Is everyone you know alive?" (103).
The speaker notes that forty could mean that she has only lived half of her life or it could mean that she could die at any moment. The media tells the speaker that it's not okay to look like she's forty, because forty ages her and makes her seem like she has witnessed bad things. Forty also usually means that one has wrinkles on one's face. The speaker says that she has the option to inject Botox into her face, which would reduce her wrinkles and allow her to "purchase paralysis" (104). The speaker believes that if she were to get the Botox it would turn her into a fictional person but would also help her accept her own mortality.
Following this anecdote, the speaker reveals three things she is asked at the airport-security checkpoint while she is on her way to visit her grandmother. First, she is asked to take a sip from her water bottle. Second, she is required to take off her shoes. Third, she is asked if she has a fever. The speaker responds incredulously to all these demands from the airport staff.
The speaker describes her grandmother's living situation in the following pages. Her grandmother is in a nursing home, but the home isn't too bad. While she walks around the nursing home, the elderly people call out to her. This makes the speaker feel like an American visiting a third-world country. Among the elderly people, the speaker feels "young, lucky, and sad" (108). The speaker then meditates on the different definitions of sadness.
The speaker's grandmother tells the speaker that since she was told to stay away from cigarettes she smokes the longest ones possible so that they last longer. The speaker knows that in reality, her grandmother smokes a pack of Marlboros a day. The speaker tells her grandmother that the company that makes Malboros is changing its name. The grandmother replies, "We should all change our names when we don't like what we see in the mirror" (109). The speaker and her grandmother sit outside even though its the middle of winter.
Analysis
In Part 15, the speaker meditates on the distinction between subconscious and conscious existence. The speaker's subconscious and conscious worlds often collide throughout the work, as her dreams inform what is going on around her and help explain her emotional state. The speaker compares the dream described in Part 15, in which she apologizes to every stranger she meets, to her actual life. When she is awake, the speaker will break eye contact with every stranger she accidentally makes eye contact with in public: "In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone's eye, I quickly look away" (98). The speaker judges her behavior in public as a result of this dream. She recognizes that she could make some kind of acknowledgment to the stranger that she sees them and recognizes their existence. In a certain sense, the speaker wants to apologize to strangers when she is awake: "In some small way I could have wordlessly said, I see you seeing me and I apologize for not knowing why I am alive" (98). By the end of this passage, the speaker's subconscious and conscious worlds collide as sentiments from a dream inform how she analyzes her daily interactions with others.
At the end of Part 15, the speaker brings up the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Ariel Sharon was the 11th prime minister of Israel from March 2001 to April 2006. Yasir Arafat is a Palestinian public figure, who was a chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from 1969 to 2004 and the president of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994 to 2004. The speaker refers to him as the "legitimate, recognized leader of the Palestinians" (100). The speaker notes that Sharon expressed a desire to exile Arafat from Gaza in the early twenty-first century. Sharon's desire causes the speaker to feel tenderness for him, because she knows that the solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not as simple as exiling Arafat from his people. Even if Arafat were to leave Gaza, thousands of Palestinians would want to return to the land they have been exiled from: "[Arafat] is not every Palestinian who believes in his right of return. He is not every person who still holds on his person the keys to his former home. Arafat is not the leader of Hamas" (100). In other words, there are countless people and movements that would continue the conflict on the Palestinian side even if Arafat were exiled. The existence of these people and their demand to return complicates Sharon's easy solution.
As the speaker celebrates her fortieth birthday in Part 16, she meditates on the process of aging and what it means in terms of her life expectancy. The theme of television and its reverberance in our life appears in this section: "On the television I am told I don't want to look like I am forty. Forty means that I might have seen something hard, something unpleasant, or something dead" (104). In this way, mainstream media distorts the idea of wisdom and morality coming with age by suggesting that with age comes a perversion of one's previous innocence. Instead of being a good thing to celebrate, the speaker sees her birthday as a further reason for her to be ostracized from society. Cosmetic surgery would allow the speaker to hide her identity from others, which would free her from being an object for others to look upon: "With injections of Botox, short for botulism toxin, it seems I can see or be seen without being seen; I can age without aging" (104). Thus, because of the bias towards aging women in the media, the speaker is expected to physically alter her body in order to avoid standing apart from the crowd. In a sense, the process of aging "others" the speaker, as it makes her hypervisible to the general public.
In Part 16, the speaker expresses shock at everything that the TSA agents ask her to do while going through airport security. Today, these TSA guidelines might seem commonplace—or even less harsh the current ones—but they were very out-of-the-ordinary at the beginning of the 21st century. Many TSA guidelines were only put in place after 9/11—before the attack, people could walk up to gates who weren't getting on the plane, there was minimal security screening, and the entire process was much quicker and more cost-effective. In the Notes, Rankine talks about the increase in airport security following 9/11: "In the wake of the September 1, 2001 attacks, airports were particularly strapped for cash, not only due to the marked drop in air travel but because of the exorbitant costs for increased security. For instance, John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, estimated spending an additional $1 million per month on security and at the Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, security costs increased by $2 million per month" (151).
When the speaker visits her grandmother at her nursing home, she notes that her young age makes her feel like an American in a third-world country: "In third-world countries I have felt overwhelmingly American, calcium-rich, privileged, and white" (108). In other words, despite the fact that the speaker is an African American woman, she feels overwhelmingly privileged both in the nursing home and in developing nations. The image of the elderly people reaching out their hands to her evokes the fact that she has something that others want. Notice the contrast between feeling "white" in the nursing home and feeling sad at the same time. In this passage, the speaker defines "sadness" as a part of her Black identity: "it meant of a color: dark" (108). This emotion is different from mainstream conceptions of sadness, which she believes has been "neutralized and coopted" for the American Dream "into a tinge of discomfort" (108). This is a superficial kind of sadness. The speaker's sadness, in contrast, is visceral and inseparable from her identity: "it meant me" (108).
