In Rankine’s work, Don’t Let me be Lonely, An American Lyric, one of the first things I noticed was her brief mention of race in the very first paragraph. Rankine describes how she never truly knew anyone who had died: “The years went by and people only died on television -if they weren’t black, they were wearing black, or terminally ill.” While Rankine could have easily chosen not to explicitly call attention to race, she chooses to specifically tell readers that many of the deaths she witnessed on TV were those of black people. I paused after reading this line and wondered if race was going to pop up
again in Don’t let me be Lonely because when looking for a Whitmanian connection, discussing African Americans, to me, signifies a good place to find one.
Although after finishing the poem I did not find as much about race as I thought I would, one of the paragraphs that really struck me was the part where Rankine discusses Abner Louima. “It’s been four years since he was sodomized with a broomstick while in police custody.” On the one hand, Rankine, as she does with her first paragraph, calls attention to a modern society which strays heavily from Whitman’s hopeful egalitarian one. Rankine reveals that ultimately, black lives still face unforeseen horrors such as being heinously abused in jail. However on the other hand, the Abner Louima portion of the text led me to a small Whitman connection where I saw Rankine as channeling the good grey poet. In this section, Rankine discusses how rather than crying, she feels a dull pain in her stomach to signify sadness. After describing Louima, Rankine reveals that she felt this stomach pain in relation to Louima’s struggles. Here, Rankine is unconciously connecting to a completely non-related human, which is exactly what Whitman attempts to do throughout many of his poems. It is important to mention here that Rankine herself is African American and so her connection to an African American man is not as hard to grasp as Whitman attempting to connect with a black slave, but this sense of connection is nonetheless important.
I loved that you picked up on some of the more subtle Whitmanian components in Rankine’s work. I think it is very easy to comment on the work as a whole and pick up on broader allusions to Whitman, however the race theme is a very concrete parallel. There is the sense in Rankine’s work that she is attempting to connect however much she can with other genders and races by acknowledging their suffering in a very specific and intimate way. This is undoubtedly something we see Whitman doing in his work time and time again.
It’s interesting that you see Rankine’s inclusive nature as well, in her discussions of different races and peoples, as this aligns her with Whitman. In addition, I do believe she channels the “good grey poet” when she speaks of this “dull pain” she feels in the face of sadness. One might extend upon this to discuss how she connects the physical with the emotional, yet does so in a more elegiac manner, that seems to culminate in a less optimistic vision than that of Whitman, who tends to couple his crisis moments with that of recovery as well. Overall, I feel Rankine best demonstrates her Whitmanian nature in her sensory approach, such as in the 9/11 poem, in which she describes how her “eyes burn and tear,” her own identifications with other peoples. (82). However, Rankine diverges from this through a more negative view of human nature, as seen in her prose poem form, which differs from Whitmanian free-form lines, to pinpoint how people “categorize” people and their stories, and then limit themselves to “lines,” or representations, such as on TV.