Citizen: An American Lyric

The final chapter of Citizen is written again in the second-person perspective. However, in this chapter, the identity of the subject is ambiguous and shifts throughout the chapter.

Rankine explores disassociation from the self in this section. Though many of Rankine’s prose poems occupy only the top half of the page, as a block paragraph, the text of Chapter 7 takes up the entire page. The text floats down the page, as the narrator describes a feeling of serene detachment from their own existence: “Some years there exists a wanting to escape— / you, floating above your certain ache— / still the ache coexists. / Call that the immanent you— / You are you even before you/grow into understand you / are not anyone, worthless, / not worth you” (139). Rankine describes floating, feelings of worthlessness, and listlessness.

Chapter 7 also touches on invisibility and feelings of worthlessness in the black community. Rankine suggests that black people are rendered as less-than from childhood: "You are you even before you / grow into understanding you / are not anyone, worthless” (139). The next scene focuses on white privilege by recounting an anecdote about two friends, one white and one black, eating in a restaurant. Directly following, there is another scene about a man watching his and other children playing at a block party.

Suddenly, the narrative snaps back into a physical act, the act of “sitting around,” so the subject becomes more grounded:

Soon you are sitting around, publicly listening, when you hear this—what happens to you doesn’t belong to you, only half concerns you. He is speaking of the legionnaires in Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail and you are pulled back into the body of you receiving the nothing gaze (141).

The subject then dissolves: “When you lay your body in the body / entered as if skin and bone were public places, / when you lay your body in the body / entered as if you’re the ground you walk on, / you know no memory should live / in these memories / becoming the body of you” (144). With this dissolution of self, Rankine emphasizes that the loss of control of one’s own body is part of the experience of blackness.

The final section is dated July 13, 2013, which is the day that it was announced that a jury found the killer of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, not guilty. The poem puts the reader in the experience of hearing that news, and the text that follows is an account of the narrator struggling with intense feelings after the announcement. The book concludes with a final vignette showing an incident of racial microaggression in the parking lot of a fitness center.