Deciphering Rankine’s Pronouns

In Citizen: an American Lyric, Claudia Rankine usually employs the second person narrative point of view, the pronoun “you.” This narrative technique is a very powerful point of view that has the ability to influence readers in ways that first and third personal pronouns do not. In fact, one major reason for using the second narration point of view resides in the author’s intention to engage the reader in his/ her experience toward comprehending and realizing the significance of the threads and the implicit and explicit themes in literary texts.

Rankine utilizes the second-person, “you,” to address the reader for emotional impact, and this impact is best achieved by the use of this point of view. Through using this point of view, she exposes a considerable set of racist incidents that were experienced by her or her friends. In the book, Rankine’s style of narration splits between the “you” pronoun and the “I.” She recounts many instances of humiliation that has endured and experienced by the pronoun “you”; therefore, “you” becomes a symbol that signifies the black people who live in America, and “I” represents the poet’s voice in the poems or her implicit voice addressing it. Rankine explicitly mentions the reference of the pronoun “you”: “She is, he says, beautiful and black, like you” (78). Then, Rankine overtly tells one of the implications of using the first persona pronoun; the poet says: “Sometimes ‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. … This makes the first person a symbol for something” (71). On the other hand, the pronouns “she” and “he” are always referring to the white people. In her poems, Rankine codes colors through pronouns. As an illustration, the poet Says: “You never really speak except for the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and have features more like a white person” (5). This sentence provides a clear example on how Rankine allocates pronouns to races. Another clear example is in this sentence: “would call you by the name of her black housekeeper?” (7).

Nevertheless, Rankine, after many poems, begins blurring the use of the pronouns in a way that compels the reader to hark or work harder to discover the distinction among them. She muddies the use of personas whom the pronouns indicate. To recognize the allocation of the pronouns, the following quote exposes the foundations of framing that use. The poet says: “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 the American positioning” (14). At the beginning, appointing certain pronouns to certain colors expresses the poet’s mood in diagnosing the prevailing status of racism among different ancestries and the suffering that accompanies this epidemic. Blurring the use of pronouns and their indications, later in the poems, suggests the poet’s attempt to express her aspirations and hopes of dissolving racism and discarding it just as the pronouns lost their ability to refer to a particular race or color.