Summary
Part 3 begins by introducing the reader to an idea developed by Cornel West, a philosopher and theorist of African American history. She describes West's concept of "American optimism" and how it is different from "hope" (21). The speaker then goes on to recount her response to the 2000 election of Republican candidate George W. Bush. She says that she loses hope once the initial results of the election came in and she stops watching the news. She says that the response to the election will continue this feeling of "American optimism." This news coverage will ignore the fact that Bush could not remember how many people committed a racist attack in Texas, where he is from. Beneath this passage, there is an image of four sets of legs standing around a puddle. The voice of the speaker's mother then enters her head as she accuses Bush of not caring about the attack. The speaker finds herself saying these words aloud to the TV screen.
Following this, there is an image of pavement with the word "HEAD" painted on it in white. The speaker reveals that the voice seems like someone else's in her head. Finally, there is an image of the face of the man who was presumably killed in the attack about which Bush could not remember the details.
The speaker moves on to discuss sadness, saying that there is sadness in the knowledge that someone's life does not matter to someone else. She suggests that her sadness is based on the knowledge that people don't care about billions of lives. The speaker uses Bush's ignorance about the attack as evidence that the government doesn't care about billions of lives. The speaker then includes an allusion to Emily Dickinson's poem "'Hope' is the thing with feathers." She suggests that maybe her lack of hope is indicative of something wrong with her character and diagnoses herself with "IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope" (23). The speaker then brings back Cornell West, who suggests that the problem facing African Americans is too little hope. The speaker likens this state of existence as one that is close to death.
Following this, the speaker discusses the "FAV" button on the TV remote that one can use to save their favorite channels. Two of her saved channels are one that shows independent movies and HBO. The speaker says that HBO is showing The Sopranos and the indie channel is showing Spaghetti Westerns. The speaker then goes on to discuss Spaghetti Westerns and the trope that a character says "I am not going to make it" before he dies (24). She muses on where the "it" that the dying man cannot make it to might be. She ultimately decides that the "it" is the moment where we imagine our own death, our own life expectancy. The speaker moves on to describe Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, in which life and death are equally present. Following this, there is an image from a Spaghetti western enclosed in a TV screen. Part 3 ends with a description of the final shoot out in The Wild Bunch, which is equated to sensual release.
In the opening scene of Part 4, the speaker reveals that she has a hard time falling asleep and that when she cannot sleep, she watches TV. When she wakes up in the morning, the TV is always off, though she is unsure whether she is the one who turns it off or if it is her husband. The speaker says that some nights she takes note of how many pharmaceutical commercials for antidepressants come on TV. It seems right to the speaker that antidepressant commercials would appear most at night since the people who would be watching them would be more aware of the message on the TV as well as their own anxieties. There is an image of a TV screen displaying an antidepressant's tagline: "Your Life is Waiting." The speaker can see it in the back of her eyelids when she closes her eyes. Following this, there is an image of the fine print of a prescription label.
The speaker then discloses that she has been prescribed sleeping pills by a doctor. After two weeks, the speaker feels like they are not working. The doctor doubles the dosage and the speaker runs out of pills within a week. When she goes to the pharmacy to get more, the pharmacist tells her that she cannot give her more medication. There is a lyric-style dialogue between the speaker and the pharmacist. The speaker goes back to the pharmacist two times until, finally, it works. The speaker reveals she does not know what changed about the situation.
The speaker's doctor also prescribed pills that the speaker can use whenever she feels like she needs them. The speaker describes these pills as red and small. There is a shift in the form of the poem in which a set of 11 actions regarding the pills are listed. The speaker never takes these pills. There is an image of a warning label. The speaker reveals that she wishes she could give these pills away to someone who had the will power to get rid of them.
Analysis
Parts 3 and 4 of Don't Let Me Be Lonely introduce the theme of mental health and medication. The entirety of Part 4 is devoted to this theme. The speaker reveals her relationship with medicine and medical help through her descriptions of what's on the television, and her response to commercials for antidepressants. Even though the tone of these commercials is happy, the speaker sees through this messaging: "The woman on the television screen is smiling. I cannot help but think her results are not typical" (30). Even though the speaker uses medication for her mental health, she feels ambivalent about their presence in her life. The majority of the descriptions of these substances center on their danger. There are two images of the type of warning labels that are included with prescriptions. The underlying impression of this section is one of danger and skepticism towards the pharmaceutical industry.
The theme of the gray area between life and death comes up again in Part 3 and Part 4. In Part 3, the speaker describes the psyches of African Americans as "too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think" (23). Black Americans are closer to death than white Americans because systemic racism constantly puts their life at risk. Here, death is characterized as something that one can be "closer" to or "further" from, independent of one's actual lifespan. Additionally, when the speaker discusses Spaghetti Westerns, she muses on the difference between dying and dying before your time (24). This distinction separates the physical reality of death from the expectations one has of death. Death continues to be a malleable and multi-layered force throughout this work. Additionally, a theme of Spaghetti Westerns is the state of somehow being both alive and dead at the same time: the heroes live in a state of mortal danger. "For them, life and death are simultaneously equal and present. The simultaneity of the living who are already dead is filmed as sexy" (25). The way that this simultaneity is portrayed on the TV contrasts how the speaker feels about it in real life. She sees the fact that billions of people around the world are at risk of dying as "the real source of [her] sadness" (23).
Part 3 introduces the discussion of contemporary politics in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The work was written in 2004, four years after the election of Geroge W. Bush into office. The political landscape surrounding the publication of Don't Let Me Be Lonely was a fraught one: it was published only three years after the 9/11 terrorist attack. Many people across America felt that George W. Bush did not have their best interests at heart and instead would uphold systemic racism in the United States. Despite the fact that he had demonstrated a lack of interest in defending the rights of black Americans, Bush's approval ratings were at 68% in 2002 (Gallup). Often, a nation will band together to support a controversial president in times of war and following a terrorist attack—exactly what was happening in America in the years after 9/11. Bush's approval rating shows us that Rankine was writing from a minority position at the time of Don't Let Me Be Lonely's publication. The speaker's worldview is one that laments inequality and places at least some of the blame on the president (and, as an extension, the Americans who voted for him).
Television makes an appearance in both Part 3 and Part 4. In Part 3, the TV is a source of the news surrounding George W. Bush's election in 2000, and also how the speaker watches Spaghetti Westerns. In Part 4, the speaker watches commercials for antidepressants when she can't sleep. In both of these cases, the TV affects how the speaker perceives her own life. She switches off the news when she can no longer take listening to the election results because they cause her to lose hope. The news forces the speaker to think about systemic racism in America and "overwhelming American optimism" in the face of oppression. The Spaghetti Westerns help the speaker think about death.
An interesting thing to note about Part 4 is the shifts in form. Throughout the section, we see prose poetry, lyric poetry, and a list form. These shifts add lightness to an otherwise very emotional and revealing section of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. They also demarcate shifts in voices. The lyric form represents a dialogue while the list form resembles answer for a multiple-choice question. Even though these shifts in form occur, there is still an overarching narrative in Part 4 about mental health and pharmaceutical help.
