September 14, 2015 - 18:21
[full disclosure that this posting is "live" so to speak; i hope to edit and add onto it once we've had our class discussion, and i've done some more of my own legwork. think of this as a hybrid essay/lesson plan]
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I'll freely admit it - this assignment threw me for a loop. I agonized over it, coming up with some pithy one-liners and some framing ideas that sounded cool but offered little substance in of themselves, but little else. Through a (only slightly panicked) meeting with Joel this afternoon I recognized my problem: I had devised a lovely container for my thoughts (as Shiela had put it), but had nothing to fill it with. From my first reading I had been fascinated with the use of the second person POV in Citizen, and I knew that I wanted to encorporate that style somewhere in my work while still including some academic writing as well. However, it had not occurred to me until this meeting that I could make those "you" statements both the form and the substance of my analysis, and the ideas began flowing from there.
To that end, I want to begin by examining the different types of you statements made by Rankine in her lyric. More specifically with the question in mind - who is "you"?.
At the most basic level, there seemed to be two distinct you's used in her writing. There's the relatable you, the one that's meant to resonate with and as the reader, the one that could be anyone and everyone. It is the first you, "when you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices", nestled in blankets of darkness. It is plural and singular, encompassing the addressee but expanding to fill society as a whole as required.
But there's another you, one that is distinctly not you at all (or at least, it's not everybody). The you who is a little black girl, having her exams copied in class. The you, invisible and ignored in the store queue. The you, an unexpected intrusion in the first class cabin of an airplane. It isn't you at all, but in the space of those paragraphs you the reader are made to inhabit that position, regardless of your own position outside of these pages. It's this form of you that seemed to clash with a lot of people reading this work for the first time, especially the white students in our class, who felt that suddenly we were out of place, shoved into shoes that don't fit - a forced change of perspective.
[These are two basic categories of use that I've developed so far, and as I delve deeper into the text I hope to pick it apart for further nuances. Though at this point I'd like to ask for external input from the class, if there is any- what other forms of you come to mind when thinking about Rankine's Citizen? Is there something missing from this provisional list? I'll open this up for discussion in class but feel free to reply as a comment if anything comes to mind.]
Next, I'd like for us as a class to do some writing that I can collect and use in my own work. Imagine we were going to write our own book here in this class, based on our own shared experiences in our college communities, along with the discussions of education we've had in Jody's class - Student: An American Lyric. Thinking about the demands on a student that ignore and erase our differences, that place the same enormous expectations on everyone while forgetting that we are not all on equal terrain. With that in mind, take some time to write out a "you" statement of your own, in the style of Rankine. It can be a personal experience or the story of a friend - I'd just like to bring in a shared experience of sorts with this prompt. Those who want to share theirs aloud can if they'd like to, but it's not required - your names won't be attached to your words in my writing.
I'm looking forward to our discussion!