As if in reply to recent racial hostility, the National Endowment for the Arts made an addition to this year’s list of 28 books in their Big Read program: Claudia Rankine’s dense, shifting, avant-garde poetry book, Citizen: An American Lyric.
In it, Rankine deconstructs race and racism using inner monologue poetry, second-person anecdotes about micro-aggressions, art from others, a big essay about Serena Williams, and online experimental videos. Her observations and ideas swim throughout the book and the online videos, like motifs in a symphonic work that keep returning again and again, fresh with new revelations. Major topics include Trayvon Martin, stop-and-frisk, James Craig Anderson, Barack Obama, Hurricane Katrina and the daily slings and arrows endured by people of color.
Here, she describes someone (in the first person, but not necessarily her) getting pulled over and handcuffed by the police: “… the officer’s warm breath vacating a face creased into the smile of its own private joke.” The most high-profile line to emerge from the book, though, might be “Because white men can’t police their thoughts, black people are dying.”
The cover is a stark photo of a hoodie, like the one Trayvon Martin was wearing the night he was stalked and killed. The hood is cut away from the rest of the jacket, like a mounted trophy. Rankine intersperses art in her book, and for the reader it can feel like stepping from a poetry reading into an art gallery then into a movie theater.
In one of the online videos the book sends you to, Rankine reads poetry over innocuous shots (by collaborator John Lucas) of black teenage boys shopping in a boutique urban clothing store. It’s superimposed with video of police lights, turning the boys’ hands, smiles, backpacks and intentions suspect, illustrating how prejudice bends our grasp of reality.
The book earned the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and has become a New York Times best-seller. It also helped Rankine, a Yale poetry professor and Academy of American Poets chancellor, win a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship last year. (She says she’ll use that money to start up an institute of thinkers to deconstruct race.)
The National Steinbeck Center was picked again to receive an NEA Big Read grant, and chose Citizen from that list of 28 books to bring to this community.
“[It] is a quick but enthralling read,” Steinbeck Center Marketing Director Eric Mora writes in the NSC newsletter. “No other book on the list conveyed the sense of purpose and urgency that Citizen does.”
The Steinbeck Center team has set up a plethora of events to urge members of the community to read the book and to help them understand it.
NSC director Susan Shillinglaw admits the help may be needed: “I love that some chapters are lyrical and difficult to read – making readers stretch, as they should when confronting a subject that should make everyone stretch mentally and ethically.”
They began in late August with book giveaways – the NSC has bought and distributed copies of Citizen throughout the community, including 90 copies to each Salinas high school – and will continue until mid-October with talks, readings, book groups, poetry, panels, film screenings and miscellaneous other events across the county.
There are regularly occurring ones. On Mondays, at 6pm, various members of the community will introduce curated free films at Maya Cinemas. On Wednesdays, at 5:30pm, there are lectures at the Steinbeck Center: the next one, on Sept. 13, features journalists/authors Claudia Meléndez Salinas and Julie Reynolds on “Justice for Communities of Color.”
There are also special one-off events throughout.
The big kick-off is a poetry slam 4-7:30pm Friday, Sept. 8, at the Steinbeck Center, with folks from the community invited to riff on one of three lines from the book, like this one: “The worst injury is feeling you don’t belong so much to you.”
On Sept. 30 from 2-4pm, Western Stage is coming over from Hartnell to the Steinbeck Center to perform a dramatization of passages from Citizen. The next day, 10am-5pm, Hijos del Sol Arts Collective will unveil works inspired by the book as part of the Monterey County Open Artists Tour.
Unitarian Universalist Church is throwing down with anti-racism book groups and discussions, including one at 7pm on Thursday, Sept. 21. In addition to carrying the book, local libraries are carrying a heavy film load too, with screenings like Hidden Figures at Cesar Chavez Library (2pm Sunday, Sept. 10), Crash in the King City Library (1pm Friday, Sept. 15) and more.
It’s all an immersion into an interconnected subject that Mora describes broadly as “how we treat each other.”
Reaching for a book like Citizen, at a time like this, isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s a political act. It can fortify that fight for justice. When they go low, we can go deep.