Like Whitman, Claudia Rankine addresses the idea of a collective soul. But Rankine does not discuss this concept with Whitmanian optimism. With subdued (and at times despondent) prose, Rankine chooses to focus on the tension of the individual self and collectivity, which are linked through the human feelings of loneliness, grief, and mourning. Alongside the friction of the individual vs. the collective, Rankine layers themes of death, racial injustice, and the continuation of public discourse through television sets. But for me the most interesting facet of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” is the dominance of the liver. While contemplating a conversation with her editor the speaker says, “Why do I care about the liver? I could have told her it is because the word live hides within it. Or we might have been able to do something with the fact that the liver is the largest single internal organ next to the soul, which looms large though it is hidden” (54). The question “Why do I care about the liver?” is never actually answered by Rankine, but the significance of the liver is its function – it filters toxins from the blood.
While reading her book I couldn’t help but feel that Rankine is urging us to acknowledge and filter out toxicity in ourselves and in our culture. Ranking’s novel feels like a metaphorical “liver” for the collective body that is our nation. At one point she quotes Myung Mi Kim, “the poem is really a responsibility to everyone in a social space” (57) and this is an idea shared by Whitman. Despite her concern that she is developing “IMH: The Inability to Maintain Hope” (23), the fact that she even wrote this book means that she has not lost hope and still believes that there is some power for social change in poetry.
Rankine concludes her novel with the comparison of poetry to a handshake. “The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handing over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here” (130). With the interaction of writing and reading “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” Rankine and her audience potentially enter into an agreement (one that would be physically acknowledged by a handshake) to be aware of the toxins in our society and to filter them out – both as individuals and as a united whole.
–I’ve included a link to a NY Times article that Claudia Rankine wrote in the aftermath of the Emanuel shooting here in Charleston. It continues the theme of racial injustice while calling for social change and I think it instills a more dynamic understanding of Rankine’s work.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html?_r=0
I think it’s really interesting that you’ve connected Rankine’s liver motif with the idea of social change. As the poem closes on a note of community engagement, condensed into the metaphor of a handshake, moreover, Rankine seems to follow Whitman’s lead of introducing and connecting human community through the body as both metaphor and physical object. Though the hand is an accessible image with respect to community and interpersonal intimacy, it is interesting that the image of the hand becomes so closely associated so closely with the perhaps less palatable image of the liver. Rankine’s associative move here, though less direct, less ecstatically celebratory, seems in fact to replicate that Whitmanian inclusiveness which reveres hands, eyes, souls, as much as liver, armpits, hip bones, etc.