The Big Read 2018 Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

The book selected for the 2018 Big Read is Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. At 162 pages this book is dense!  Not necessarily dense with words, but dense with emotion. Of course, before reading it, I thought, Oh, a poetry book, it's pretty short so let's add another book of prose to read as well."  This is how we ended up with two books for the June 2nd discussion. 

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the ward in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with visual art. This book examines racism in through specific examples of racism in everyday life (referred to as microaggressions)as well as the physical violence inflicted on people of color such as Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. 

The book written for young adults, Long Way Down won a 2018 Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Author Honor and Michael L Printz Honor. It’s a novel in fee verse that tells the story of an African American teen boy at a crossroads. Determined to avenge his 19-yearold brother’s death, Will, age 15, takes his brother’s gun out of their shared bedroom to kill the person he’s certain is the murderer, but it’s a long way down in the elevator.

The thing these two books have in common is that they're both written by people of color and they're both written in prose. Citizen: An American Lyric is written for adults.Ms. Rankine's audience is mainly well-educated and participate in many of the situations she writes about: lunches with friends, riding in the car, traveling on trains and planes, signing contracts, buying houses. Whereas  Long Way Down is written for teens. The main character in Long Way Down lives in a much narrower world: his neighborhood.  All of the offense in the book is is perpetrated by other black people.  What these two writers share is the language of their inner dialogues, and consequently, the verbal acrobats they are both able to perform.  

From Citizen: An American Lyric p. 44

At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, 

I didn't know you were black!

I didn't mean to say that, he then says. 

Aloud, you say. 

What? he asks. 

You didn't mean to say that aloud. 

Your transaction goes swiftly after that. 

From Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds 

Random Thought No. 5

The sound you hear

In your head,

The one people call

Ears ringing,

Sounds less like a bell,

And more like a flatline.