TRIAGE

A celebrated poet asks how to live.

When she was an undergraduate, Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric, 2014) discovered a kindred spirit. To acknowledge their “twinned feeling of brokenness” and “misalignment with the world,” the two devised a strange game: “When we spied the other during the day,” Rankine recalls, “we had to collapse, as is often the trajectory in Greek plays where one then another becomes gagged by terror. Exploring this “fabricated sisterhood,” Rankine now refers to her friend as “the theorist,” who has opted to use nonbinary pronouns and appears to be a composite of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant, among other outspoken feminist philosophers. Their response to brutality and injustice has become radically different from collapse. Rankine knows that the theorist gave up “a life, a landscape, family, friends, in search of another route,” but she cannot follow that example. She reads the theorist’s books and attends their lectures, but although once their ideas seemed like “a portal to what was possible,” now Rankine struggles to make sense of their “combative” stance: “What does fighting back even look like?” she asks. “What does it mean to do something when the rule of law, voting rights, checks and balances, decency, the democratic laundry lists mean less and less?” If she has collapsed into a “pained and callous position of witness and observer,” what does it mean to remain in “a state of protracted grief…asked to be silent about our feelings and our responsibility to the buried and unburied.” When the theorist asks her to help a refugee couple by allowing them to use her Berlin apartment, Rankin demurs, fearful of making herself vulnerable. “We are trying to gain footing by landing without putting our hands out to any other,” she admits. Illustrated with politically resonant artworks, Rankine’s lyrical melding of memoir and criticism poses urgent questions.

An unsettling meditation on bleak times.