Claudia Rankine Plays Dead
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“Triage,” Claudia Rankine’s new book, opens at a scene of inquisition. At a podium, under a spotlight, a theorist is asked a gloomy question by someone in the audience. How do they feel, given “what’s going on in the world”? The theorist is an estranged friend of the narrator. The setting is a lecture being held on a grand stage. The time is—well, the time is now. But what is “now”? And what is the audience member referring to, exactly, when they gesture toward “what’s going on”?
“Toomuchness” is the phrase that the theorist deploys onstage to describe life in the present, a phrase that Rankine repeats throughout the book as a shorthand for psychic overwhelm, the knowledge of ongoing violence which precedes emotional and spiritual collapse. “Toomuchness” is endemic to the times: “We were all struggling with varying degrees of powerlessness and capitulation,” Rankine writes. The auditorium is quiet while the theorist decides how to sum up their feelings. “Sometimes,” they reply, “I want to throw myself in front of a speeding car.”
The narrator, a poet, is about to turn sixty. She watches the lecture from an obscured position in the audience. “Triage” tells the story of how she got there—quiet, middle-aged, and looking up at her former friend, who smiles through the pained confession of their suffering. “Why the drama?” the narrator thinks. “Their very presence at a microphone suggested they wanted to live.” The theorist, unlike the narrator, is inclined toward public speech. This inclination is dispositional (their “need was to raise the volume, a volume already at a screech”), political (the recognition of cruelty “seemed to propel them toward voice”), and professional (their career as an academic would flounder without it). But it’s a survival mechanism, too. The theorist’s propensity for dramatic speech functions as a lifeline: “They thought all the definitive talk would keep them upright.”
The narrator, though curious to speak herself, is finally repelled. “I’d thought to take one of the floating mics and have the spotlight find me in the back of the auditorium,” Rankine writes. “But I was not brave. If fear was a strength, I was furious with it.” The scene in the auditorium replays throughout the book, its choreography—the theorist at the microphone, the narrator contemplating her position in the audience—dramatizing their estrangement, which has arisen from conflicting responses to personal and planetary distress. They have not spoken to each other in decades. They live on opposite coasts. Between them, there has been no dramatic betrayal, only “a feeling, more or less, of disquiet; a feeling of never being able to live up to the expectations of another.” The theorist values speech, equating it with action; the narrator values quiet, viewing it as “a portal to the mystery of an interior life.”
“Triage” is divided against itself. It is a book whose subject is the failure to act, but whose narrator takes for granted that defeat is an inevitable condition of life. Indeed, the narrator is resigned to death—if not the declamatory death of her friend in the lecture hall, at least the fact of death happening elsewhere, on the global stage. “We are being asked to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language or policy for,” the narrator tells the theorist, upon their reunion, over sardines. “I’m not going to pretend there is anything I could or can or will do to reroute the dying.” Reading lines like these, in which the mind consigns the body to a state of fundamental uselessness, you get the sense that you’re in the presence of a dead woman talking.
And it’s true: the narrator has been playing at lifelessness since childhood. She enters college “dead on my feet,” and first spots the theorist in the library, surrounded by “tired couches,” tearing down posters of women in bikinis. The couches are important: they are the symbol through which the narrator will go on to process the “toomuchness” of now. But in that first instance they are just couches, and the narrator’s attention is with the theorist, whose actions remind her of Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s raised fists at the 1968 Olympics. “The theorist’s hand ripping paper away from the wall reminded me to swing out at life,” she reflects. “One might act despite the impossibility of change or one might act to spite the impossibility of change.”
Watching the theorist, the narrator begins to believe in resurrection—in a “way of returning to myself, one reconnected emotion at a time.” The pair are bound by language, an erotic pull toward the expression of ideas: they write side by side, memorize the same stanzas, and paraphrase Miles Davis in unison. Together, they enjoy a “fabricated sisterhood” facilitated by a ritual of collapse. Though they spend their days apart—the theorist in student encampments that protest South African apartheid, the narrator mulling over Yeats—whenever they encounter each other on campus, they fall to the ground, two bodies behaving as one. Playing dead helps them come alive, despite their differences.
The narrator tells the theorist that together they are going to rise up as one, too. But even as she speaks she senses the implausibility of her statement. “Our twinning occurred through our downward motion,” Rankine writes. “But given that both of us had been ravaged by violence, once we regained our footing distrust abounded.” The narrator was born to a mother who blamed her for the joint injuries of the near-fatal experience of giving birth to her, her grandmother’s death, and the rape by a stranger that preceded both. The theorist was born in Ramallah, into occupation. None of this becomes obvious until halfway through the book. Genocide is the weather, but Palestine isn’t named explicitly until it surfaces as a conversational afterthought, like a secret that clarifies the origins of a lifelong argument. The narrator has just suggested, facetiously, that someone should install a billboard-size digital counter in Times Square to keep track of Manhattan’s sinking. The two are walking on the High Line.
“Triage” is Rankine’s first publication since the conclusion of her “American” trilogy, which comprised “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” (2004), “Citizen” (2014), and “Just Us” (2020). Like those books, “Triage” is written in the confessional admixture of prose and poetry for which Rankine has become widely known. Her language works by a logic of accumulation. Time is elastic. Her narrators are frequently caught in a flurry of interpersonal encounters, which happen and then achieve new significance as they accrue associations in memory. And yet Rankine’s subject is Rankine. When she writes, she seems always to be checking her own pulse.
“I feel like I am already dead,” the narrator of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” says. She is witnessing the commencement of the war on terror from the heart of the American empire. “I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize.” Like the version of Rankine who appears in “Triage,” she is convinced of her fundamental uselessness; she feels like a sack of skin. And yet her resignation isn’t total. Her interior world is animated by an energetic sadness. “The sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter,” she writes. “Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness . . . I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel.”
In “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” Rankine has already deemed resistance a threat. “Resistance will only make matters more difficult,” she writes. “Any resistance will make matters worse.” She evades the imperative to speak by surrendering to her interior, a site of doubt, contradiction, and partial annihilation. In light of this retreat into the underbelly of waking life, it is surprising to encounter, in “Citizen,” Rankine’s ode to public encounters in which racism is made manifest, obvious, and incontrovertible. In “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” the narrator is frequently at home, watching TV or else contemplating turning it off. But in “Citizen” she is out and upright, navigating conference rooms and airplane cabins in which she experiences a spate of interpersonal collisions, collisions through which she, as a subject, begins to come alive. In the words of the theorist Louis Althusser, she is interpellated: like a passerby hailed by a police officer yelling, “Hey, you!,” she is drawn into an awareness of the social circumstances that give rise to her existence.
“Citizen” deploys the second person, placing the reader in moments of corrosive identification originally experienced by Rankine. There is a knowing disbelief threaded throughout these scenes of negation, in which “your” presence, personhood, and profession are summoned in the same breath that they are called into question. The encounters (with acquaintances, strangers, friends) are always inevitable, usually identical, and yet described as if their cruelty is being experienced anew. Together, they read as something of a shock catalogue. Like a defibrillator, they incite a series of resuscitative gasps: “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?” Rankine’s follow-up, “Just Us,” adds to the catalogue, but this time she’s dropped the second person, and she’s travelling first class.
It’s exhausting to experience all those little resurrections only to realize that you are still in the midst of a great, long fall. In “Triage,” Rankine’s narrator has found a temporary landing place: the couch. Couches. In her apartment, she has two. By the book’s beginning, looking up at the theorist, she has already given up their shared ritual of collapse. The couch has entered her life as “an intermediary before a total collapse onto the floor.” She enjoys it as a place of rest and an object of study; the book is punctuated by images of couches as sculptures, symbolic material that has been sanctified as fine art. Most are in a state of disrepair: they look like the refuse of a ravished world. “I wrote about couches because what else is there once one’s fallen away from faith in each other, confidence in the good, trust in ourselves,” Rankine writes.
Rankine would like the theorist to join her in repose. And yet the theorist refuses. They are convinced that Rankine’s fixation is “getting in the way.” After all these years, they are still on their feet, and by the end of the book they have been beaten to the ground. The narrator sees on their face the remnants of two black eyes, a souvenir from police officers who attacked them at a protest in Berlin. While they both discuss the incident, a server interrupts to ask if they would prefer sparkling or still.
From the theorist’s vantage, the narrator’s couches will always be placating. The invitation to rest looks too much like resignation, like capitulation to the reality-denying luxuries of the good life. The narrator doesn’t disagree with this assessment, in theory. In theory, she knows that, although she isn’t doing nothing, there is more than what she is doing to be done. “Though it nagged me that the theorist tended to demand more from others within their quietude and though I remained attracted to forms of stillness, there were arguments to be made against inaction when air strikes, war, starvation keep others on the move,” she writes. There were arguments to be made—but she doesn’t make them. Much of the book is written in the queasy tone of self-defense. “The name-calling diminishes each of us a little more each day,” she tells the theorist, while in the same breath acknowledging “how close complacency is to complicity.” The theorist’s condemnations are repetitive, formal, and, occasionally, unbelievably cruel. “The time is not easy,” the narrator texts the theorist, relaying the news of her mother’s death. “Nothing is easy,” the theorist responds, as if their capacity for empathy has been overtaken completely by the impulse toward repudiation. They are “war-torn” and “assaulted by settler forces,” still suffering a broken rib. They appear at once physically diminished and wildly resistant, their self-expression operating always as a mode of public speech. The swirling mysteries of their inner world have been hardened by the harsh conditions in which they are trying to live.
The scholar Kevin Quashie has argued that the Black subject gets read primarily through her capacities for resistance: she is presumed to exist in order to produce social meaning, rather than for herself and in alignment with her humanity. For the narrator, that sacrifice is terrifying. She has survived by keeping quiet, by protecting, in the words of Quashie, “the right to be nothing to anyone but self.” “In what world,” she asks the theorist, “is a Black person existing up against the wishes of the state a small thing?” And yet she also knows that just because something isn’t small doesn’t mean it’s also enough. And, indeed, she is asked to do something more: the theorist, who may be “too bereft for generosity,” has asked the narrator if she will host a couple that has fled Gaza in her spare apartment in Berlin. The narrator decides it is not her “place”; surely, there are other things she can do. There aren’t. This is it. The book concludes on a deflation; her final judgment is no.
“Triage” has been labelled as nonfiction, and it opens with a disclaimer: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unless it isn’t.” The statement wouldn’t be so condescendingly winking if the theorist’s contributions to their field weren’t drawn, word for word, from the academic work of the late Lauren Berlant, the first person thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. Quashie is thanked in the first paragraph. Judith Butler, thanked in the same place, has twinned cameos as an anonymous friend, whose name has been “turned over to our government along with 160 others in a McCarthy era-type move,” and as a reference, their name attached to a quote from a lecture on grief they delivered in 2014. One of the pleasures of reading Rankine is reading her through the contemporaries with whom she is clearly in dialogue; “Triage” ’s most compelling story of friendship is told through its citations. And yet this metafictional doubling—in which people appear simultaneously as themselves and with a set of fictional flourishes—has the side effect of undermining the discursive conceit of the text. You feel, while reading, that Rankine is first and foremost in conversation with herself, or else in conversation with the version of herself that she has brought to life through the act of writing, a character who collides with her peers only to determine the outer limits of her own thinking.
Something similar can be said of the patient who speaks about her life from her position on the couch: by marshalling a cast of characters—her lovers, her family, her friends—and, through the act of speech, bringing them into the room, she becomes convinced that she is a character herself, a person with qualities mirrored in others. The theorist may be a version of Berlant, or else a shadow figure, who either trails behind Rankine’s narrator, marking where she’s already been, or anticipates her footsteps, pointing her toward the unknown places she is likely to go. How convenient, I thought, that this apparition, who seems always to be teetering on the edge of reality, and therefore death, should be figured as Palestinian; and how devastating that even a fictional Palestinian should be figured as a prop. Characters, of course, need not act ethically, or even realistically. But it’s striking to encounter, in the theorist, a character so flat, so devoid of interiority, in a book so invested in mounting a defense of quiet embodiment, and by an author whose previous works compelled writers of fiction and nonfiction alike to take notice when their imaginative sympathies “line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power.”
Rankine’s narrator wants to do something—anything other than what she is asked to do—in lieu of complete surrender. Surrender to what? “To the hardness of now.” But, as Quashie writes, surrender can also be an act of generosity, as in “the surrender to love: It is a deliberate giving up to another, the simultaneous practice of yielding and falling toward what is deep and largely unknowable.” This is the promise of Rankine’s way of being in the world; it is the divine principle of the retreat into her sovereign kingdom. She makes an interesting, often beautiful, argument. Reading it, you begin to think you might be going somewhere. But, in the end, her kingdom is a vacant rental in Berlin. It houses nothing. Maybe a couch—a place to rest, or else to break the fall. And yet a young couple, fleeing annihilation, is denied access to the interior. ♦