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''Citizen: An American Lyric'' is a 2015 book by the American poet Claudia Rankine. The book has been described as both criticism and poetry, described by critic Michael Lindgren as having "boundary-bending potency...an innovative amalgam of genres". ==Description== The book consists of seven chapters interspersed with images and artworks. The first chapter details microagressions that have occurred to Rankine and her friends. The second chapter discusses the YouTube character Hennessy Youngman created by Jayson Musson, and discusses racial incidents in the life of Serena Williams and her public image. The third chapter features more microagressions and the nature of racist language. In the fourth chapter Rankine writes of the transition of sighs into aches, the nature of language, memory, and watching tennis matches in silence. Chapter five is a complex poem on self-identity, interspersed with more microagressions. Chapter six is a series of scripts for "situation videos" created in collaboration with John Lucas on Hurricane Katrina, the shootings of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, the Jena Six, the 2011 England riots in the wake of the death of Mark Duggan, Stop-and-frisk, Zinedine Zidane's headbutt of Marco Materazzi in the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final, and the verbal error during Barack Obama's first inauguration as President of the United States. The seventh chapter ends with "Making Room", a script for a "public fiction" about finding a seat on the subway, and a list of African-American men involved in recent police shooting incidents that concludes with the phrase "because white men can't police their imagination black men are dying". The seventh chapter is a complex meditation on race, the body, language and various incidents in the life of the author. The book is interspersed with images of various paintings, drawings, sculptures and screen grabs. == Chapter 1 == Claudia Rankine’s lyric opens with an introductory paragraph that is ironically a more formal “closing” to a long day.Rankine prescribes melancholia with an overall sense of exhaustion that leads the reader directly into a very familiar place: “bed”. It is here, in the beginning of the book that Rankine masterfully weaves “prose, poetry and visual image pervasively into the daily American social and cultural life, subtly foreshadowing and boding its readers to the challenges certain citizens must overcome in order to not become invisible (National Book Award Judges’ Citation).” “Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor." (Citizen, pg.1) Moreover, Rankine’s first paragraph offers the oppressed citizens, Blacks, a subtle solution even before delivering her readers the very contents of her book. The book is lyrically written, in of itself, as an extended metaphor of the extreme color distinction between white and black. Only people’s perspectives regarding race allows society to identify the difference when regarding humanity and therefore equality. Throughout the lyric this racial divergence becomes more apparent as Rankine conveys each experience. The crux of the metaphor is the subsiding factor of grey; a color degree between that of white and black that implies patience and hope. These factors, subtly and metaphorically penned in the first paragraph grants these citizens a means to press forward against the subtle microaggressions, which, metaphorically speaking, is a wake for them in the very wake of the book. “There are billions of souls in the world and some of us are almost to be touching the depths of how it is and what it is to be human. On the surface we exist but just beyond is existence. I write to articulate that felt experience."(Rankine) 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Citizen: An American Lyric」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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