Claudia Rankine Bristol Poetry Institute Annual Reading
This was my fourth year attending the Bristol Poetry Institute’s Annual Reading. Normally, we would be gathered in the great hall of the Wills Memorial Building and, upon arriving barely on time, I would be sat in a row towards the back of the hall, rummaging around my rucksack for my glasses. This year, I was sat at my desk staring at a Crowdcast on my laptop with Claudia Rankine on my screen. Rather than echoing round the neo-gothic arches of Wills Memorial, Rankine’s voice lags and bounces from America, round the internet, and into my earphones.
This year’s reading was always going to be different. Aside from the different setting, Rankine’s poetry departs considerably from the previous three readers – Simon Armitage, Alice Oswald, and Daljit Nagra. Rankine blends elements of conventional lyrical poetry with prose, essays and images to create a hybrid poetry. She demonstrates this hybridity in her ‘American Lyric’ trilogy – Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), and Just Us: An American Conversation (2020). On top of her achievements in poetry, she is also a professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University, a playwright and one of the most significant contemporary voices on racial issues.
I think many of us in attendance had expected Claudia Rankine’s reading to directly address the widespread Black Lives Matter protests earlier in 2020. In June, she published a new poem called ‘Weather’ in the New York Times Book Review, which reflected on the violence and overt racial discrimination that followed the murder of George Floyd. However, Rankine does not read this poem. Instead, she reads an extract from Just Us called ‘Ethical Loneliness’. The extract is anecdotal and recounts Rankine’s visit to the theatre with a white friend to see Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2018 play Fairview. Towards the end of the play, one of the characters breaks the fourth wall and asks the white members of the audience to come up on stage. The white woman that Rankine is with refuses. Maintaining a completely matter-of-fact tone, Claudia Rankine ruminates on her response to her friend’s refusal to go on stage: “Is my friend’s refusal to move, to be seen moving, a move she needed to make? Is it a message, a performance of one? Is she telling the black audience, you all don’t get to look at me. You don’t get to see me as a white specimen.” Although these questions are rhetorical, they seem to be also directed at the audience, asking us to consider them ourselves. It has now been over 8 months since I was last at the theatre, which makes it hard to imagine myself in a plush red seat with an actor on stage directly addressing me. Yet, as a white member of the audience, I find myself asking whether I would have got up from my seat and gone on stage.
This self-questioning is a common response to reading or listening to Claudia Rankine – her writing prompts us to interrogate ourselves. The reading is followed by a conversation with Vanessa Kisuule, Bristol City Poet for 2018-2020, in which she elaborates on these ideas. Kisuule highlights the use of pronouns in Rankine’s work as a device used to unsettle or draw in the reader and asks her about this. Rankine responds by describing her pronouns, particularly the insistent “you” that recurs throughout Citizen, as places – a ‘prenominal site’ that allows the reader to adopt the space and figure out where they stand in relation to it. A flurry of messages flash up on the right side of my screen in awe of Rankine’s incisive analysis of her writing. Right down to the level of the individual word, Claudia Rankine’s writing questions how we respond to difficult situations. Her pronouns encourage us to not shy away from the challenging questions but rather to interrogate our own participation in the western culture of whiteness. In the extract that she read, Rankine did not chastise her white friend. She seemed to understand that to be called up on stage in that manner is a difficult and intimidating prospect. Instead, she considered why her friend behaved the way she did and why this annoyed her as much as it did. By refraining from judgement, Rankine puts it to us in the audience to consider where we stand on such an issue.
One of the main advantages of the event taking place online is that it wasn’t restricted to only those people who could make it to Wills Memorial Building at 6pm on a Wednesday in November. While the great hall is normally filled with rows on rows of University of Bristol students, staff and alumni, this year’s event was accessible to a global and more diverse audience. At the start of the event, Kisuule points out the range of places that people are tuning in from and names a few – Cyprus, Galway, Winchester. Although Claudia Rankine’s writing is grounded in the socio-political landscape of the United States of America, she makes it clear that she does not write solely for Americans. She suggests that she does not have an intended audience in mind when writing because ‘you never know what a person takes from the work’. I know my experience of her work as a white person would differ considerably from other people’s experiences. For me, Rankine’s writing is a starting point for questioning my own biases and privileges. Yet, for many people from non-white backgrounds, Rankine’s work explores the constant challenge of maintaining a clear sense of self in a society that is founded on racist, misogynistic and classist ideas. A significant aspect of the self-questioning that Rankine encourages is about understanding the ways in which racism attempts to strip people of their identity and reclaiming that identity. As she says in Citizen: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”
As the event draws to a close, Claudia Rankine and Vanessa Kisuule respond to questions submitted by the audience and casually chat with one another. Rankine compliments Kisuule on her eye make-up. Kisuule asks Rankine about her lipstick. It is an interaction that seems hard to imagine happening in Wills Memorial Building. While it is easy to think about what is lost by the event taking place online, there are aspects that are enhanced by the virtual setting: sat in a room alone staring at my laptop, I feel able to reflect in solitude on the ideas raised by Rankine’s reading; simultaneously, I know that there are hundreds of others watching around the world who have experienced the event differently to me, and I feel connected to them.
Written by Jonathan Buchanan
Jonathan is a recent English Literature graduate from the University of Bristol. He is currently a postgrad student at UCL and in his free time likes to read, write and compile top ten lists.