The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Claudia Rankine More Quotes by Claudia Rankine More Quotes From Claudia Rankine Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying. Claudia Rankine white-man imagination men I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being. Claudia Rankine moments want believe You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Claudia Rankine flesh past world Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment. Claudia Rankine creating environment arguing I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, "Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen?" I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary. Claudia Rankine lots-of-friends ordinary people So you're just moving along and suddenly you get this moment that breaks your ability to continue, and yet you continue. I wanted those kinds of moments. And initially people would say, "I don't think I have any." Their initial reaction was to render invisible those moments weaved into a kind of everydayness. Claudia Rankine people moving thinking Define loneliness? Claudia Rankine loneliness The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow. Claudia Rankine blunt tomorrow past Sometimes the art pieces I gravitate toward speak to me in terms of narrative, at other times they speak to me in terms of mood. Claudia Rankine narrative pieces art I think that one of the positions we have taken around the question of race, is that we already know. We know. We know. We know. And so we don't need to look at it again. And yet everybody is still upset. Everybody is still being driven by their outrageous imagination to the point of killing people because they feel that a black man in front of them is a demon, or the Incredible Hulk. Claudia Rankine taken men thinking The truce is that. You forgive all of these moments because you're constantly waiting for the moment when you will be seen. As an equal. As just another person. As another first person. There's a letting go that comes with it. Claudia Rankine forgiving waiting letting-go The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed? Claudia Rankine behind-you past thinking The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much / to you. Claudia Rankine injury worst feelings I think words are the thing that either triumphs for you, in your desire to communicate something, or fails. I love language because when it succeeds, for me, it doesn't just tell me something. It enacts something. It creates something. And it goes both ways. Sometimes it's violent. Sometimes it hurts you. And sometimes it saves you. Claudia Rankine hurt desire thinking Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body? Claudia Rankine body Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away. Claudia Rankine writing long fall I was really interested in the fact that blacks have high blood pressure, heart disease, and diabetes at a higher percentage than the rest of the population. That didn't stay very aggressively in the book, but that's how it started. I began to document these moments as support for this other thing I was thinking about, and then the moments themselves began to take over. Claudia Rankine heart book thinking You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you're a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live - you will live together. Claudia Rankine interaction-with-others waiting together I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in. Claudia Rankine important ideas thinking I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists. Claudia Rankine optimistic past thinking
