Summary
Part 7 begins with the death of Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was a domestic terrorist who committed the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured over 680 others. The speaker records that upon McVeigh's execution, news reporters ask the families of the victims if they had forgiven him. The speaker thinks that this is an attempt by the media to soften his public perception. Many people say they have not forgiven him but there are a couple who say yes.
This scene on the news causes the speaker to question what it means to forgive. The speaker quotes Jaques Derrida on forgiveness. The speaker notes that McVeigh never asked for forgiveness—not in his final statement (which quotes William Earnest Henley) nor during his televised lethal injection. There is an image of the chair McVeigh presumably died in—a reclining chair with straps on it in an otherwise empty room. It is enclosed inside of a television set. The speaker questions what forgiveness is and where we can see it in our lives.
The speaker ultimately likens forgiveness to a state that is close to death. Forgiveness is in the act of surviving an ordeal and it is a "feeling of nothingness" that is hard to describe (48). Only the living can experience forgiveness.
The speaker reveals that the evening she heard of McVeigh's death she had a dream that she was invited to a party by the Kennedy family. Caroline is welcoming and kind to the speaker. The speaker has a fine time and drinks a few glasses of sparkling water with lemon. When she is ready to depart, the waiter approaches with a bill for ten thousand dollars. As a result, the speaker feels unprepared.
At the beginning of Part 8, the speaker is having a conversation with her editor. Her editor tells her that her antidepressant prescription was switched from Prozac to fluoxetine because her insurance will only cover the latter. Fluoxetine is the generic brand of Prozac. The speaker responds by telling her editor that Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company that makes Prozac, is coming out with an antidepressant pill that you can take weekly instead of daily. The speaker reveals that she and her editor are having lunch because she is working on a book about liver failure. The speaker says that people assume that liver failure is usually caused by alcoholism but that in fact, most of the time, it is drug-induced. There is a scene in quotation marks told in the first-person about a person who ends up in the hospital after trying to commit suicide by taking a whole bottle of Tylenol.
The editor asks the speaker to tell her what the liver means to her. She shows the speaker Laurie Tarkan's article in the Times about liver failure. The speaker assumes that her editor hadn't read it yet but when she tries to show her editor an important part the editor says that she actually has read it. The editor gets up to leave and the speaker stays in the restaurant for an hour after her departure. The speaker reveals that she understands the true meaning of her editor's question—the editor wants to understand the personal connection that the speaker has to liver failure and to her text. In a "meta" moment, the speaker moves on to question her own voice and whether or not it can be understood as one "I." The speaker questions why she cares about the liver. Finally, she paraphrases a line from a poem by César Vallejo to explain why she cares about her subject: "Understand without effort that man is left, at times thinking, as if trying to weep" (55). For the speaker, this quotation suggests that knowing things can help save someone from sadness. In other words, the speaker wants to write about the liver in order to combat her own sadness.
The speaker moves on to confide that she never really cries. Instead, when she is sad, her abdomen hurts. Sometimes when she is looking at another person she braces herself for the abdominal pain because she knows it's on the way. It happens to her when she goes into her bedroom and Abner Louima is on the TV. Louima, a black man, was tortured while in police custody. It took two months and three surgeries for him to leave the hospital. He was on the speaker's TV because he had just made a settlement for 8.7 million dollars. Louima does not consider himself wealthy and instead feels fortunate. There is an image of Louima standing next to his lawyer while talking to the press. It is on a TV screen. The lawyer is talking while Louima has a serious expression on his face. A white man behind them is biting his lip and looking down.
Following this, the speaker addresses the constant reports of gun violence against black people in the media. They are so common and are ignored by the government and mainstream media. The speaker says that crying feels like a waste as Amadou Diallo's death is announced on her TV. There is an image of Diallo on a TV screen below this statement. The speaker feels sometimes like it is "sentimental, or excessive" to mourn each death of a black person that is reported on the news. Part 8 ends with a lyric poem about loneliness in which the concepts of lonleliness and death are intertwined.
Analysis
The contemporary reader of Don't Let Me Be Lonely would have picked up on the references throughout Part 7 and 8 of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. As stated above, Timothy McVeigh, who appears at the beginning of Part 7, was a domestic terrorist who killed hundreds of people in Oklahoma City in 1995. The speaker calls McVeigh "visually the boy next door," which is a way of saying that he is white and 'normal'-looking (47). The speaker believes that his race creates sympathy for him among the American public. This sympathy is mirrored by the news outlets, who ask the families of his victims if they have forgiven him. The speaker sees this as an "attempt by the media to immunize him from his actions" (47). This scene is a poignant example of the speaker using real-life events to evaluate and condemn to society she lives in.
The scene from Part 7 about McVeigh is in sharp contrast to the media depictions of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo in Part 8. Louima was tortured while in police custody and Diallo was an unarmed 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea who was shot 41 times by four police officers in 1999. The officers in Diallo's case were accused of second-degree murder but were acquitted at their trial. A news reporter refers to Louima as a "rich man" rather than a victim of violence (56). Additionally, the media portrays murders like Diallo's as isolated incidents and the government refuses to take responsibility: "All the shots, all forty-one never added up, never become plural, and will not stay in the past" (57). Here, "forty-one" refers to the country's 41st president, George W. Bush as well as the fact that the officers fired 41 shots, 19 of which hit Diallo. This suggests that Bush maintained an indifferent attitude when it came to Diallo's death. The speaker is arguing that we are expected to ignore deaths like this in America and to be immune to their emotional effect. This is especially true for people of color. When Part 7 and Part 8 are read in tandem, they give a picture of the American media that has an inherent bias towards white people over black people. This bias survives even when white people are the perpetrators of violence and black people are the victims.
The theme of the gray area between life and death in joined in an interesting way with the theme of forgiveness in Part 7 of Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The speaker describes forgiveness as a way to experience death while alive: "For the one who forgives, it is simply a death, a dying down in the heart, the position of the already dead" (48). In this work, "forgiveness" does not represent an emotional state nor a decision that one makes. Instead, it is a state of life that defies description: "it is a feeling of nothingness that cannot be communicated to another ... [it is] a bottomless vacancy held by the living, beyond all that is hated or loved" (48).
The voice of the speaker is put into question in Part 8. This is a result of the fluidity of voices in the scene with the editor and the speaker, as well as the speaker's reflection on her own subjectivity. When the speaker is meeting with her editor, it is not immediately demarcated who is speaking: "I was switched from Prozac to fluoxetine. Prozac's patent is up, and now that the generic brand, fluoxetine, is available, the insurance company will only cover that, my editor says casually" (53). The editor's story about her Prozac prescription is not surrounded by quotation marks and instead bleeds into the voice of the speaker. In fact, it is not immediately apparent upon first reading this passage whether it is the speaker or the editor who is talking at this moment. Additionally, when referencing people who have to go to the hospital because they try to kill themselves by swallowing pills, the voice of the person in the hospital enters the first person. The only reason we know that this voice is separate from the voice of the speaker is because of the question marks surrounding her account. The fact that all of these voices bleed together in this part of Don't Let Me Be Lonely speaks to the fact that the work is made up of a collage of voices rather than one single narrative voice.
The fluidity of the speaker's voice is also emphasized by her own meditations on her writing. She wonders whether or not she is responsible for the "truth" of a written work if that work is written in the first person. She wonders if the "I" can even represent her subjective point-of-view or if it is merely a device "to get from one sentence to the next" (54). She wonders whether it is more accurate to say "we" than "I," and if there are multiple voices if she takes responsibility for it (54). Most of all, this passage emphasizes that the first-person speaker in Don't Let Me Be Lonely does not represent a specific person and is not the voice of the poet. As readers, we are meant to understand the "I" in this text as a tool Rankine can use to get her ideas across and have them fit together cohesively.
