Summary
Part 17 opens with an encounter between the speaker and a woman who is hailing a cab on the street. The speaker says that it is hard to get a cab because it's 4 pm and all the cabs are off duty. The woman misinterprets her and responds, "It's hard to live now" (113). The speaker sees this response as an example of national propaganda about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the War on Terror. The speaker sees this ideological framework as one that ignores complexity, blurs all of the factors of the situation together, and obscures the truth.
On the next page, the speaker tells us that her apartment building's super put a yellow ribbon around the flowerpot but failed to do "the flag thing" (114). This causes one of the speaker's neighbors who is a lawyer to remark that "the super should be careful he doesn't lose his job" (114). The speaker reveals to us that she raises her eyebrow at this remark but does not say anything to her neighbors.
The next two pages are filled with the bolded names of the 39 pharmaceutical companies. The speaker notes that while she is reading the news, she discovers news that she has been waiting for: "President Mbeki has decided antiretrovirals will be made available to the five million South Africans infected by the HIV virus" (117). The speaker has a positive physical reaction to this news as she feels the tension leave her body. Beneath this is a picture of Mbeki with his hands up, donning a T-shirt that reads "HIV POSITIVE." The speaker reveals that the pharmaceutical companies that were listed above had all sued the South African government in the hopes of preventing them from making this care available to everyone.
The speaker moves into a discussion of how "useless" she felt when she could do nothing and how that feeling "moved in with muscle and bone" (117,8). Suddenly, the speaker feels hope. On the following page, there is a lyric poem that questions what hope is. It ends on a melancholic note: "And I am still lonely" (119). If hope is similar to waiting, the speaker rationalizes, then living is "a form of waiting" (120).
Following this, the speaker describes an interaction she has in the street with someone who hands her an evangelical pamphlet. The pamphlet says "Be Like Jesus" and the speaker waits until she is sufficiently far from the woman to throw it away (121). The speaker has just seen The Matrix Reloaded and she recounts having said out loud to Neo, the film's main character, "be like Jesus." She connects The Matrix Reloaded to her own life and the pervasive loneliness that she feels.
The speaker reveals that her father dies on the next page. She says that she cannot attend the funeral and so she sends flowers, but what she would actually like to send is a replacement mourner. She tells her mother that she thinks her father should be cremated. The speaker dreams about her replacement mourner. The speaker and this woman "talk about what a lonely occupation she has chosen" (122). And the mourner tells the speaker that she, the speaker, is actually the one with a "lonely occupation," because death follows her into her dreams.
On the following page, the speaker describes her sister waking up from night sweats and taking a cold shower. She attributes this to a possible side effect of the medication she is taking, Zoloft. She calls the speaker to tell her what has happened. The speaker watches on the TV as medical examiners show Saddam Hussein's dead body to the camera. The sister takes note of this news story because it is supposed to bring peace in Iraq. The sister takes a cold shower and imagines what it would feel like to be inside of the ground.
In Part 18, the speaker notes that she would have to increase her coffee consumption by five cups a day if she wanted to reduce her chances of getting type 2 diabetes. She does not look at her husband while she tells him of a dream that she has "about the darkness and the curtain" (127). The speaker's husband interprets this dream as being about the upcoming election, but the speaker is not convinced. Neither the speaker nor her husband look at each other throughout this interaction.
The speaker closes Don't Let Me Be Lonely with a meditation on her use of language. She uses a Paul Celan quote to assert that a poem is like a handshake, "a ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) of a self to another" (130). This process depends both on the offering as well as the recognition of the reader: "In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive" (131).
Analysis
Through her interaction with the woman waiting for the cab, the speaker typifies the woman as someone who holds complicated and misconstrued beliefs about the Iraq War in which "it's not about our oil under their sand but about freeing Iraqis from Iraqis and Osama is Saddam and Saddam is 'that man who tried to kill my father' and the weapons of mass destruction are, well, invisible and Afghanistan is Iraq and Iraq is Syria and we see ourselves only through our own eyes and the British" (113). Because of this, the speaker does not respond to the woman. She sees this woman on the street as holding the belief that the Iraq war will ultimately bring peace, and she does not think it's worth it to break it to the woman that this is not actually so. This passage contains long run-on sentences which mirror the weight of the speaker's "packages getting heavier by the minute" and the growing sense of how wrong this belief is (113). Ultimately, this passage is about how someone's misunderstanding can lead to more misunderstandings which ultimately can lead to a whole war.
Later on in Part 17, the speaker interacts with her imagined surrogate mourner and they discuss each other's professions: "In the dream we talk about what a lonely occupation she has chosen. No, she says, you, you are the one with the lonely occupation. Death follows you into your dreams. The loneliness in death is second to the loneliness of life" (122). This passage connects to the theme of the gray area between life and death as the speaker is being haunted by death in her life. Additionally, if we understand the speaker's "occupation" as storyteller or memory-keeper, then the act of writing becomes intrinsically tied to the loneliness of life.
The speaker's subjective voice overlaps with that of her sister at the end of Part 17. When her sister wakes up in the middle of the night, the speaker inhabits her sister's point-of-view and describes the thoughts that are going through her sister's mind. This is the first time that the speaker's voice turns into another character's voice in this work. Rankine uses this narrative style to give us an intimate look into the sister's own grappling with death and loneliness: "She closes her eyes against the water beating down. Would the natural coldness of the earth prevent night sweats? she wonders. Would a spider hole be considered a homeopathic cure for feeling like a corpse?" (123). By layering different voices on top of each other, Rankine uses the final moments of Don't Let Me Be Lonely to evoke a universal psychology of loneliness, pain, and death. It is also interesting that the speaker's sister's life is as affected by the television as the speaker's own. Finally, note how the speaker introduces her sister as "this character" in this passage (123). This strange way of referring to her reminds us that we cannot understand the speaker as simply Rankine herself; thus this also applies to Rankine's own family members. The speaker's sister exists in this work as merely a "character"—a literary device through which the speaker can introduce and analyze different experiences.
At the very end of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, the speaker positions herself as a poet and explores the notion of "here," meaning both giving something to someone else and asserting one's own existence: "The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another" (130). In this way, the poet calls upon the reader to receive her work in order for her project to succeed: "'I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem'" (130). The speaker unifies her identity with that of the reader by using the pronoun "we" in the final sentence: "We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of" (131).
