If there are autobiographical elements, they are stitched invisibly into narratives from elsewhere. Rankine, although a mother herself, was not pregnant when she wrote it. This is a bracing, discomfiting and complicated read partly because it breaks a taboo Plot is an arresting curiosity: an embattled, intense, extended prose poem, published in the UK for the first time.
Rankine was aware Woolf had decided against having children because of mental instability and her narrator wonders whether a mother and an artist can be expected to coexist. Her narrator is pregnant, uncertain whether to become a mother. In the novel, there is a point at which Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay revels in a mind at liberty, “free for the strangest adventures” and observes: “When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.” Rankine’s own project is about the imagined limits to that freedom. She had been reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse – and Woolf seems to have become for her, as happens to many readers, a muse of sorts. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.T wenty years ago, the poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine, hailed for Citizen – an original, unnerving and unforgettable scrutiny of racism in the US and winner of the 2015 Forward prize – was involved in a more inward undertaking. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. The salads arrive.Ī friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.
This exchange, in effect, ends your lunch. The prestigious school she mentions doesn’t seem to assuage her irritation. You are not sure if you are meant to apologize for this failure of your alma mater’s legacy program instead you ask where he ended up. She wanted her son to go there as well, but because of affirmative action or minority something-she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?-her son wasn’t accepted. This overlap is not the beginning of anything because she immediately points out that she, her father, her grandfather, and you, all attended the same college. In the café you both order the Caesar salad. A woman you do not know wants to join you for lunch.
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