English
For the English portion of the Citizen unit, we read Claudia Rankine’s critically acclaimed book Citizen: an American Lyric, a collection of lyrical essays about the experience of being black in America. We subsequently wrote a lyrical essay of our own based off of an interview we conducted with a chosen subject.
I wrote my lyrical essay about my mother’s experience of immigrating to America as a high-schooler.
Out the house In the plane Off the ground.
Floating in the sky.
On the ground Off the plane In the street.
You grip your new bright red USA tracksuit to your chest as the New York traffic zooms by. Ready to wear your new life. Bright red. Hello Democracy. Nice to meet you.
Your expectations are as empty as the backpack you carry through the heavy wooden doors.
The school is big, brick. The schedule not split between morning and afternoon shifts like you are used to. The hallways are packed. You go to your classes, make friends.
You’re grateful you speak English better than your brother. You’re also grateful that they give you a translation dictionary to use on tests. And even though you struggle because you have to spend so much time translating words, you’re a good student. You enjoy school.
But on Saturday in your special class for kids of representatives from your country, you belong. All of you have been transplanted temporarily. Language, History, Marxism, Geography. You need to keep up with the studies of your homeland while you are growing new roots in this foreign land. All of you carry empty backpacks and heavy burdens.
Your P.E. teacher approaches you with an unimaginable proposal. Girls don’t play soccer…
You help start the first girls’ soccer team at your high school. You tell your brother you’ll play forward, and he laughs. But by the end of the season, you have scored 24 out of 25 goals and accomplished the fabled hat trick.
Your brother stops laughing. He is proud.
Your biology teacher approaches you about a specialized pre-college medical program. You apply. You are accepted. For an entire semester, you spent 2 – 3 hours after school at the local hospital doing a rotation in different wards. You see some of the first AIDS patients in New York. You observe an autopsy on a lady you had just spoken to the day before.
Your backpack is a little fuller than when you stepped off that plane and bought that tracksuit.
History class – no, not your special Saturday class. Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization Memorization
Memorization
Memorization
Memori– Better Dead Than Red
The teacher is looking straight at you.
You drop your backpack and your things fall out.
You tell your family what happened that evening when you get home. You are all so shocked you laugh about it. Who would we be to go report the teacher…
Americans are strange. America is strange.
That’s the tax we pay to get to come here and taste the American Dream.
Back to school. Memorization. Playing soccer. Memorization. Hospital Work. Memorization.
You get a compliment on your bright red bow tie from the supermodel-like fashionable Italian girl.
Saturday.
Family time. Homework. Friends.
Monday.
Math, Gym, Science. Girls chase you in the hallway trying to cover you in shaving cream, again. This time you clench your fists and tell them through your teeth that you will kill them if they ever come near you again. You’ve had enough.
You don’t wear your tracksuit anymore. Maybe you had to give it up as part of the tax.
You had a pretty usual childhood, you say. Decades later in California, in your 50s, you still have the red USA tracksuit. It is not as bright as it used to be. Sometimes your mother – now a grandmother – uses it as work clothing for gardening when she comes to visit.
Otherwise, it sleeps in the same drawer undisturbed.
You don’t carry a backpack anymore either.
Well, I guess you can be American now.
Honors
In addition to the lyrical essays we read and studied, myself and the other honors students read and studied lyrical essay memoir Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss and a novel memoir of our choice – mine being Born a Crime by Trevor Noah.
Eula Biss’ lyrical essay memoir focused on her experience being half white and half black in America. Because of the many parallels it drew with Rankine’s lyrical essays on the black experience in Citizen, we wrote a comparison essay to juxtapose the two.
Biss-Rankine Response: duality and apologies
The lyrical essays of both Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine are a series of intricate tellings of interactions with race and the two books discuss a kind of racial duality that plagues the individuals of these stories. Biss’s duality is an obvious one – being a person of mixed race – but she also talks about the duality in the lives of black people in America that Rankine spotlights. They are American like everyone else, but being of a certain skin color, are held to a kind of dual standard that they are not designed to meet. The section “Relations” in Notes from No Man’s Land is perhaps one of the most directly racial chapters of the book, about a strange case of mistaken fertilization of a white woman with a black woman’s eggs. The white woman gave birth to twin sons, one white and one black, and there was a huge discussion about whether the white woman got to keep the black boy because she gave birth to him or is the black woman got to keep him because he was her biological child. Biss uses this section to talk more about her conflict with her own mixed race background. Telling the story of when a U.S. census-worker came to the apartment of her and her cousin, she says, “And then there was question six: ‘What is this person’s race?’ The census taker marked the box in front of ‘White’ for me, with no discussion” (Biss pg. 34). Biss is constantly able to “pass” – as she describes her family calls it – for a white person and while this does give her certain convenient privileges, it leaves an unsettling feeling of being put into a box that is not entirely accurate. This problem, however, is one that Biss explains even non-mixed black people feel because of their disenfranchised status. They are both American and other at the same time. This is something Rankine talks about a lot more as it relates to black people. In part III of Citizen, Rankine writes, “Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world… You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear of see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meaning behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition” (Rankine pg. 55). Through all her stories Rankine is showing us the extremely high bar that has been placed – just out of reach – for black people. Society expects black people to be more collected, composed, behaved, well-spoken, than they do white people yet they also never recognize when they meet that bar, or when they continue to hold black people to that bar as the white people around them fall so short of it. Stories of media coverage and people’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina in both Notes from No Man’s Land and Citizen further demonstrate this. Rankine tells of the wholly negative media portrayal of black people in the hurricane-afflicted regions – as criminals, rapists, murderers – but not of the lack of aid, of response to help these people so they wouldn’t have to steal food to survive. Biss’s students react to this media coverage in her class, saying that the looting just “crosses a line” for them, that it’s a step too far, yet when they experience a hurricane in their own city, they themselves are looting beer from grocery stores. Not out of respect and dignity, but out of fear and hatred, the system has been set up in a way that asks much more of black people than it does of white people and so they must – much like the black man whistling Vivaldi – try to dance to the white man’s tune while the white man doesn’t dance at all.
Another topic Biss and Rankine both write about is a premature apology phenomenon, a natural result of being held as a community to such a high dual-standard. In the stories both authors tell, the individuals of color are treated as if they have committed some crime without them having to do anything. In the section “No Man’s Land,” Biss tells a series of stories – from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s experience writing Little House on the Prarie and her own experience moving to Chicago with her husband – to talk about grey spaces of “No Man’s Land” in different times and settings that comes from racial conflict. In one of her stories from Chicago, she says, “I looked back over my shoulder as I stepped into the street, and the boy passed on his bike so that I saw him looking back at me also, and then he yelled agin, directly at me, ‘Don’t be afraid of us!’” (Biss pg. 154-155). These boys, teenagers, know already the implications of their skin color and assume that sentiment is what Biss and her husband are drawing on when they cross the street. They are apologizing for something they didn’t even do. In a story about being a teacher Biss tells, she describes an incident with a black boy: “A boy came to the door of the office and looked at me uncertainly. ‘I’m sorry I secually harassed you.’ I stared at him. He wasn’t the same kid. ‘But it wasn’t you,’ I said finally. ‘Yeah,’ he said as he pulled down his baseball cap and started to walk away, ‘but it might have been my cousin’” (Biss pg. 194). The entire community has been lumped together and demonized in a way that makes black people in America constantly sitting on edge, waiting to apologize for something done by someone completely unrelated who looks like them. Similarly, in Rankine’s Citizen, Serena Williams is forced to concede to a fear of the same color of her even though she is the best in her entire field. Rankine says about this, “Neither her father nor her mother nor her sister nor Jehova her God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world. From the startmany made it clear Serena would have done better struggling to survive in the two-dimensionality of a Millet painting, rather than on their tennis court – better to put all that strength to work in their fantasy of her working the land, rather than be caught up in the turbulence of our ancient dramas, like a ship fighting a storm in a Turner seascape” (Rankine pg. 26). Serena being strong and powerful Serena Williams tries to stand up and fight it, but she is only demonized worse for being “crazy,” “out of control,” “wild.” Just as Biss talks about common black folks having to apologize for something their “cousin” did, Serena is having to apologize for being too black. The things black Americans have to apologize for have nothing to do with them but just like immigrants have to pay a social tax for living in America, black people have to pay a tax for not being white. And so over and over, because it is easier to apologize for something you haven’t done than take blame for something you did, black people are sitting on needles, whistling Vivaldi, apologizing for their “cousins,” and calmly continuing to play even when booed and penalized.
For my individual memoir essay paper, I read Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and analyzed the complexity in style of his casual syntax and diction.
On Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime
Through much of the memoir, Trevor Noah repeatedly tells stories that illustrate his feeling of invisibility or the wrong kind of visibility and so this memoir is a way for him to prove his existence – especially to himself. Even though he was anything but invisible, the fact that he stood out so much in every demographic made him somewhat invisible in the sense that he was not included in the party, he was removed from all population, he was not being noticed for what he was and how he identified regardless of looks. Trevor Noah grew up in South Africa during apartheid as a mixed-race child – something that was highly unusual and very illegal. His memoir is a chronicle of experiences of his life, growing up as a mixed-race child in a society where he was not supposed to exist. The narrative style of Noah’s memoir Born a Crime is simple in both syntax and diction, allowing his humor to come through candid and simplistic storytelling.
Unlike most stylistically unique books, Noah’s memoir distinguishes itself by being deceptively simple in its word choices and sentence structure. Considering the jarring nature of the stories Noah is telling, one would expect his narrative style to be more elegantly crafted. In describing his experience living in a colored neighborhood and the murder of his cats, he says, “I wasn’t exactly devastated about the cats. I don’t think we’d had them long enough for me to get attached; I don’t even remember their names. And cats are dicks for the most part. As much as I tried they never really felt like real pets” (96). This example of Noah’s narrative style is so interesting because it lends itself to being understood. Much of the classic literature that is read in school is known for being disliked by students because it is written in a poetic fashion that isn’t meant to be easily understood by ordinary people. This sentence is not only quite simple regarding sentence structure and word choice but it uses a mildly profane colloquialism to describe the subject of this anecdote. This makes the story more relatable for the reader, as it is true prose style defined by being written in ordinary spoken form without metric structure. When you read this sentence and every other one in Noah’s memoir, you can imagine the young man speaking to you over a coffee or walking down the street, casually retelling this strange childhood story, permitting you as the reader to engage both vicariously and empathetically with the narrative. At this point in the story, it doesn’t matter if the larger message is being understood because Noah just wants you, the reader, to understand his experience and feeling of coming home to seeing his cats hung up by their tails and slit open. Another example of this minimalism technique is in Noah’s description of his meager relationship with his estranged white father: “I celebrated my birthday with my dad every year, and we spent Christmas with him as well. I loved Christmas with my dad because my dad celebrated European Christmas. European Christmas was the best Christmas ever. My dad went all out” (106). This excerpt serves a descriptive purpose but he does not use flowery language and technical flourishes. He sets content down plainly as it is so he can get to the point. The message Noah wants readers to take away is learned from understanding the hardships in the stories rather than understanding some nuanced argument derived from poetic interpretation, so the clean simplicity of his writing truly aides his purpose as a memoirist.
Using the focus on simple diction and syntax, Noah constructs a strong element of humor that adds an extra unique twist to his stories. Once again, he uses a light narrative style to tell a dark and heavy story. Noah tells many little stories to illuminate his relationship with his mother and in one of the stories he describes her disciplinarian side, saying, “My mom would have given me proper sit-down hidings if I’d given her the opportunity, but she could never catch me. My gran called me ‘Springbok,’ after the second-fastest land mammal on earth, the deer that the cheetah hunts. My mom had to become a guerrilla fighter. She got her licks in where she could, her belt or maybe a shoe, administered on the fly” (84). He is continuing the pattern of words and sentence structure, but the very specific arranging of it all adds a comic tone to it that he wouldn’t have gotten if he had described his mother as being strategic rather than just saying “guerrilla fighter” and letting the power of the allusion work. The effect this has on the reader is profound because it allows them to feel as if they are figuring out Noah’s mother’s personality themselves by “decoding” the significance of the term. The reader can understand what is happening in the story and stay engaged because the sentences and word choices are not too complicated, but they are kept from being too bored by the use of comedy – a perfect balance. Noah’s life under apartheid has been so full of struggles that the only way to get a good story out of it is to tell it all with a laugh, as he does. In summarizing his experience under one metaphor, Noah says, “We only moved forward and we always moved fast, and by the time the law and everyone else came around we were already miles down the road, flying across the freeway in a bright-orange, piece-of-shit Volkswagen with the windows down and Jimmy Swaggart praising Jesus at the top of his lungs” (74). He is still using simple wording and phrasing, but as a metaphor, the sentence adds a powerful humor. It’s much easier for a reader to relate to going fast down the highway and listening to music than it is to try to relate to Noah saying outright that he and his mother had to be consistently one step ahead of the law with their lives so Noah wouldn’t get arrested for being born with his mixed-race complexion. Humor always carries truth and for Noah’s story, humor is perhaps a necessary vehicle to be able to effectively share a story so uniquely harrowing like being a mixed-race child under apartheid.
At a time when racial tensions are growing higher and higher along with general distrust and polarization, the timing of the release of Born a Crime couldn’t be better. Discussion in America is becoming more and more extreme on every side and so exposure to unique stories like Noah’s provide a crucial perspective, showing us not to panic because it could be much worse and as Noah’s mother said in the book, “You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay.” Many Americans are afraid of each other and what’s to come, but what we need to do is listen to each other’s stories with an open heart and mind so we can fly across the highway of freedom in our own beat up Volkswagen bug, defying what we imagine is possible.