Collective identity versus particular identities
A pervasive theme in Don't Let Me Be Lonely is the examination of American identity and what it means to be an American while also being part of a marginalized identity. The work shows us that factors such as immigration status, race, and mental health are often at odds with the "majority" white national identity. This theme is apparent from the very beginning of the work, in which the speaker describes witnessing her father's grief after the passing of his mother: "His mother was dead. I'd never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral" (5). In this passage, the speaker describes the physical distance that separates her nuclear family (her father, mother, and siblings) from her extended family (her aunts, uncles, and grandparents) due to immigration. This passage brings up questions about what it means to be an immigrant in America, and what it means to be born to immigrant parents. Because of this geographic separation, the speaker's father, and the speaker herself, are alienated from the rest of their family and are denied the proper grieving process following death. As a result, the father adopts silence as he shifts from his homeland back to America: "When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral" (5).
Later on in the work, Rankine discusses Cornel West's idea of "American optimism," stating that "hope is different from American optimism" (21). In this part of the prose poem, the speaker is recalling her response to Bush's election: "After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news ... I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism" (21). By linking Bush's election to this idea of "American optimism," Rankine suggests that responses to the political situation in the United States are not the same for everybody. The speaker uses the idea of "American optimism" ironically, as she notes that the man who won the presidential race "is the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas" (21). In this way, the speaker's identity influences her absence of hope in the face of Bush's election because of his past disregard for people of her race: "The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter" (23).
This theme arises again in the description of one of the speaker's dreams: "That same night I dream the Kennedys invite me to a party" (49). Despite the fact that the setting of the dream is a place of celebration, there is an underlying threatening tone as the speaker interacts with one of America's most elite families. Finally, she discovers through her dream that she cannot afford to party with the Kennedys: "When I am ready to leave, the waiter, a camel at his side, comes forward with the bill. I take out ten dollars, but all those glasses of water add up to ten thousand dollars. Pardon me, I say to the waiter. I am, obviously, caught unprepared both financially and emotionally" (49). In the passage, the speaker is acutely aware that she is separate from the Kennedys and cannot "financially and emotionally" afford to fraternize with them, even if it is just a dream. This shows the reader that the complicated tension between American collective consciousness and personal identity is so pervasive that it extends into a person's subconscious mind.
The gray area between life and death
Don't Let Me Be Lonely is full, to the brim, with death. It is hard to find a page that does not deal with death in one of its forms. One of the largest themes that Rankine examines is the gray area between life and death—i.e. not-death, death-while-living, or living-while-dead. There are many scenes throughout the work that examine this gray area. This theme is introduced at the beginning of the work, as the speaker recalls asking in the third grade whether the actors she was seeing on the TV were dead in real life: "Is he dead? Is she dead?" (6). The duality of seeing a person moving and speaking, alive on the screen in front of you, and knowing that they might be actually dead in real life is our first introduction to this theme. The actors are both alive and dead at once; they exist in the gray area between life and death.
Similarly, the speaker questions this gray area when describing a friend of hers who has breast cancer: "The lump was misdiagnosed a year earlier. Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes—then when does her death actually occur?" (8). In this scene, the speaker argues that her friend is experiencing a kind of death while living, as she goes through her life with a misdiagnosed terminal illness and has no idea. Later on, the speaker goes to visit her in the hospital, and even though the friend is still alive all the speaker sees is the reality of death: "the cancer has been replaced by the approach of death. It is easy to accept that her personality has been overshadowed by its condition, that the condition, her death, has imprinted itself. No second look is necessary" (9).
Ultimately, Rankine connects this theme of the gray area between life and death to the theme of race politics in America: "Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think" (23). This "closeness" to death comes from the overpowering threat of dying before one's time at the hands of another. The speaker sees black people as existing beneath a constant threat of violence—from the state or from others—which reduces their life and brings it closer to death.
Television and its role in contemporary life
Rankine shows a deep interest in popular culture and its presence in our life throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. While she engages with popular culture from a variety of mediums, she is most interested in television. This is particularly apparent with the number of physical images of TVs throughout the work—there are 27 in total.
Often, the speaker uses the TV as a way to come to understand life through media, as when she is watching movies with her friend who has terminal cancer. While discussing the movies, the speaker notes "Tom Cruise is convincing as the disappointed son in Magnolia. There is another character with my same name who is also bitterly disappointed. Though the subject of cancer did not come up in our late-night conversation about the two movies, it did for him, for Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia" (10). In this way, the speaker relates to popular culture as a kind of catharsis—it allows her to digest the realities of her life through the TV screen.
Similarly, the speaker discusses the power of the television to construct different realities for its viewers: "There is a button on the remote control called FAV. You can program your favorite channels. Don't like the world you live in, choose one closer to the world you live in" (24). Here, we see the speaker digesting reality through media and making an active choice to blur the lines between what is real and what is not in her life. For her, TV is a way through which someone can "choose" a better reality.
Throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine uses the presence of the television to question the information that we get from the TV, whether or not it is targeted, and how we digest it. In "Politics and Poetics of Fear After 9/11: Claudia Rankine's 'Don't Let Me Be Lonely,'" scholar Emma Kimberly asserts this point: "Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an explicit poem of protest against contemporary targeted uses of word and image, focussing on media representation, its omnipresence in domestic and public spaces, and its effect on perception of events and people."
Loneliness
Loneliness, of course, is a huge theme in Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. It is discussed in more detail in the "Summary and Analysis" section, but it will be outlined here as it is an important theme that extends throughout the entire work. In Don't Let Me Be Lonely, the speaker analyzes her feeling of loneliness as it relates to popular culture, current politics, her family dynamics, and grief. In the final section of the work, the speaker reveals that loneliness is intrinsically connected to the writing process: "I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist ... The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness" (129). In this quotation, the speaker notes how we think about words as being separate from what they are actually denoting. Thus, everything that we hear on the TV or say to each other is in a sense removed from its actual meaning or physical consequences. This makes the speaker feel "useless" in her project of writing, as she cannot fully "fit language into the shape of usefulness."
The aftereffects of 9/11
Throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely, the speaker meditates on the emotional and political aftereffects of the attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. This theme helps the speaker to describe the political moment that she is narrating and adds a visceral emotional weight to her descriptions. The speaker also makes sure to look at each side of the matter—she acknowledges the pain that the attack caused, as well as the destruction wrought by the US's "War On Terror" which followed it. In her usage of this theme, the speaker talks about both the short-term effects as well as the long-term consequences of 9/11. She describes going to the site of the attack a few days after it happened. Her description of the rubble is visceral and emotional. She highlights the plight that the rescue workers faced by working in such hazardous conditions. The atmosphere of these descriptions is one of overpowering grief and sorrow. The emotions are beyond description for the speaker and the other onlookers: "The language of description competes with the dead in the air" (82).
The speaker also talks about the long-term effects of 9/11 in Don't Let Me Be Lonely. She uses this theme to talk about the callousness with which the media talks about Saddam Hussein and his death. In this way, this theme is tied to other themes in this work, including television and its reverberance in our life and the gray area between life and death. Rankine uses this theme to question the national response to the events of 9/11, which was largely manipulated by the media and relegated to a very narrow and nationalist point-of-view: "what is there to say since rhetorically 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).
Mental health and medication
Mental health and medication is a huge theme throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Many of the speaker's friends, the speaker's sister, and the speaker herself struggle with their mental health. Mental illness weaves in and out of every section of this work, and the speaker uses its pervasiveness as a window through which she analyses American society as a whole. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is blatantly honest about the ways in which so many of us struggle to be happy in a society that has decided that happiness must be a norm, a society that is mediated and inundated by media and technology, and a hegemonic society where race and class determine the quality of one's life. In this way, Don't Let Me Be Lonely uses the theme of mental health and medication both to fight stigma around mental illness and also to question its pervasiveness in our culture. An example of this questioning is when the speaker is up late at night and she counts how many antidepressant commercials that she sees. The speaker describes these commercials as both helpful—because they offer potential solutions to unhappy people—and also worrisome, because people see them on TV when they are alone "and less distracted and capable of turning in more and more and most precisely to their fearful bodies and their accompanying anxieties" (29).
How one's life is valued by society
How a person's life is evaluated by society is an important theme throughout Don't Let Me Be Lonely. In a very poignant passage of the work, the speaker reveals that she has a sister whose children and husband were killed in a car crash: "My sister had a daughter and a son. Is she dead? Is he dead? Yes, they're dead. My sister's children and her husband died in a car crash" (61). This causes immense grief for the speaker's family, particularly for the speaker's sister: "She is a psychiatrist, but she cannot help herself" (61). Part of the sister's grief has to do with the insurance process following the death of her family: "she has been asked to assess the value of her dead children's lives. She has to meet with an insurance adjuster" (77). This is hard for the sister because she has to place a monetary value on her children's lives and compile a document for insurance: "Each activity is a sign, a sign that points to social class, which points to potential worth" (78). In a way, the sister's family is reduced to what is perceived as most valuable on paper. Thus, though she is receiving money for the death of her children, "it is a place of compensation divorced from compassion" (78). The process of dealing with the insurance adjuster speaks to an economic system that is devoid of empathy and reduces people to their perceived economic value.
This theme arises again in Part 6 when the speaker is interacting with her mother. She notes that her mother "wants [her] to lead a readable life—one that can be read as worthwhile and successful" (40). The repetition of the word "read" here sets up the artificiality of this valuation. Rather than wish that her daughter be happy, the mother wishes that her daughter appear successful to others on paper: "My mother is not overly concerned with happiness, its fruitless pursuit or otherwise" (40). The speaker is emphasizing how what society values in a person, and what that person values in themselves, may be very different, and how this divergence can lead to anxiety and unhappiness: After the interaction with her mother, the speaker begins to question herself: "Is there anything wrong with my mind?" (40). The pressure that the speaker feels to evaluate her life according to others leads to questioning her own self-worth and mental stability.
