I think Abigail makes an interesting point regarding embodiment and Citizen, with a specific focus on the World Cup Situation. I’m drawn to part VI of the text for several reasons, and Abigail addresses the two major components: embodiment and image.
Part VI is strikingly different from the preceding sections because it shifts from the largely internal to the largely external. Sections I through V focus mainly on microaggressions experienced in daily life. Of course, this is not to diminish or trivialize the power of these episodes. In fact, I think part of the reason that they are powerful is because Rankine often sets up seemingly quotidian scenarios only to twist them ever-so-slightly with some sort of remark, action, or thought that gives both the reader and the subject in that scenario pause; then, the accumulation of these instances illuminates the true detrimental effect of such microaggressions. Yes, the section surrounding Serena Williams also appears in these early chapters, but, despite the injustices she experiences, physical violence does not erupt until part VI.
Almost every Situation in part VI deals with a violent, bodily confrontation: Hurricane Katrina, focus given to the violent aspects like “the missing limbs…the bodies lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters, lying facedown, arms outstretched on parlor floors” (84); Trayvon Martin, shot and killed; James Craig Anderson, beaten and run over; Jenna Six, culmination of racial tensions in a fistfight; stop and frisk, self-evident; Mark Duggan, shot and killed; World Cup, the headbutt that Abigail elucidated above. It’s impossible to come to a singular conclusion about this section because each of these engagements plays out differently. We see the African American (or the intentional non-American) as victim, as aggressor, as living, as dead, as accountable, as innocent. Regardless, I believe that this section’s highlighting of the body (without abandoning the internal entirely) compliments the early focus on the mind, creating a fuller picture of what it means to be a Citizen.
Now, to connect to Abigail’s other point, I move to the video clips. As I watched the different Situation videos, I found the World Cup to be particularly powerful because we just get the one slowed down clip—the clip of the individual frames we get in the book. It has a different effect in video form because certain lines that Rankine speaks coincide with specific moments of the video. For example, “I resolved to fight” occurs at the exact moment of the headbutt and “it is the black man who creates” occurs when Materazzi hits the ground, an earth-shaking underscore of this powerful statement. Yes, we get the frames in the actual book, but there is something about hearing these words while watching this connection of head to chest and body to the ground frame by frame that instills a sense of weight to both the words and the images that neither can achieve independently.
With that said, I think another interesting avenue that we can choose to explore is the multimedia aspect of Citizen. Stated plainly, there’s a lot going on. We have the writing itself, which weaves through different forms and styles throughout. We have the images that appear either with the text or as interruptions of the text (plus whatever that thing is on page 19). We have a lot of white space, which I would say is no accident. We have the online Situation videos that are imbedded in a larger website. Then, we have a surprising amount of paratextual matter that comes both before and after the seven sections of the lyric.
Both Love and Reed note the experimental nature of the text, with the former linking this “range of resources” to “the desire to ‘see what’s there’ and to ‘speak all that you see’ [that] is strong in Citizen” (Love 424) and the latter claiming that it “shows what is awry in the present and awakens us to the possibility of another possibility—alternate ways of valuing lives and imagining an inhabitable world together” (Reed 100). While I agree with both of these assessments to a certain extent, I think the intermedial nature of this text is also another instance of the external complimenting the internal. We are compelled to look both in and out when it comes to the book (the lyric, the images, the paratext) as well as the larger Citizen network (the physical book and the website).
