Category Archives: close reading

A book that retrieves ‘hushed’ voices !

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Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is absolutely fascinating. It literally helps its readers going through the same complex waters of how racism is lived, seen and felt by black Americans. Reading her, one comes out with a sense of knowing what it means to fill these shoes, this hoodie, this body. Rankine wants us to understand how one can become “invisible and hypervisible” in language and life — as she has.

Line by line we are invited to share her her race’s very deepest and most personal feelings and thoughts. Her line in which she says: “I feel most colored when I’m thrown against white background”(53) drives me to think about my own self driven to live a life with people to whom I don’t belong, and with whom I tend to be driven to feel less, belittled, and down-looked  at. How “Colored” people are “colored” and the realization of being “colored” gratifies whenever a “colored” person is thrown in the middest of white people.

This piece of art with all its language, pictures, paintings, and piercings adequately serves as a vehicle that convey’s black citizens experience. “For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person,” Rankine says. “Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please.”(49) Rankine, who recognized the quiet violence makes this struggle visible throughout the book.

Close Reading of Rachel Zolf’s “the lone soldier”

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The lone soldier is a very expressive poem. Regardless of its precise condensed nature, it opens up the door wide for different readings. Personally speaking, the lone soldier is a poem that passes to its readers a soldier’s feeling of sadness. The word “ALONE” sums it all up. It mirrors vividly how he is thrust to live in the frontier all alone. “Lone soldiers don’t get visits from mom and dad_,” this phrase alone conveys a soldier’s  feeling of being not only misplaced but also forgotten.

“Alone Don’t have a brother to our coping”, Those soldiers are driven by outer forces to cope, yet ‘no assistance is offered’. And even if they wanted to escape, again there is nobody there to help them. It feels like as if they were born to suffer, created to go through all this misery ALONE.

Their situation is way much harsher than anyone can imagine. They just can’t flee it all and head back to that peaceful place from where they came in the first place. Ironically, they are “Supposed to get wings and fly off on their own,” yet how can they do that while their feet is glued to the frontier.

Those people are not in any way able to enjoy life’s simplest and most mundane affairs. Being a soldier “means Mom can’t bake a cake for their buddies.” Being a soldier “means coming home before Shabbat and doing laundry.” The unjustness of being a soldier doesn’t stop at the level of not only denied life’s simplest practices, but also robbed the right to rest even when the whole world around them is resting.

Indeed, they are ” A book with no cover,” easily torn into pieces. Those people are vulnerable, lacking the crust and shell that keeps them safe. They “pray” to “receive” mercy, they “can’t even express” that “being alone soldier means being alone”