Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric is one of the more interesting reads of my college career, and it fittingly serves as an extension of (and in my opinion, an improvement from) Ben Lerner’s 10:04. Rankine demonstrates many stylistic similarities to Lerner, including the flexible form which weaves between prose, verse, dialogue, photography and 2D art, as well as her narrator’s range in proximity to the action- zooming in and out of the first person narrative. However, Rankine deviates from Lerner in the way she responds to Whitman. Where Lerner’s aim is to merge with Whitman’s optimistic voice, Rankine appears to subvert our expectations and resist the idealistic Whitman.
On page 91, takes note on what the public reaction to the 9/11 attacks has meant to us as Americans, saying it “stole from us our willingness to be complex […] or that we were never complex.” By this, she means the attacks forced us to pick a side, as a grey area did not appear to be a viable option. This idea conflicts with the Whitmanian idea of containing multitudes and being able to maneuver appropriately among them. Here, Rankine is saying these multitudes must face each other and acknowledge their inability to coincide. As the poet who we have come to accept as our national voice, how does Whitman continue to sing inclusive democratization as truth when national tragedies encourage polarity- “them” and “us”?
On one hand, we can be inclined to offer a little bit of favor to Whitman in that 9/11 ironically complicates the America Whitman knew and understood; he could sing unity in response to a war in which the nation’s brothers were at battle, but underpinning an attack from a group of foreign rebels is a completely different story. However, by suggesting “we were never complex,” Rankine forces us to remove 9/11 as a pivot in our cultural timeline and reintroduce Whitman into the conversation. In this case, the multitudes sung by Whitman and the many who followed cannot be selectively showcased. America at its simplest is a singer who is fixed in its position, unwilling to give way to its own inconsistencies. This idea is perhaps best displayed by the likes of George Carlin, who delves into the America whose double standards are mistaken as complexities in the video below (beware- mature language and whatnot).
No comments yet.