I'm very honored, actually, to introduce Claudia.
She's a wonderful poet and wonderful person.
Claudia Rankine is the author of four collections of poetry,
Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Plot, The End of the Alphabet,
and Nothing in Nature is Private.
She is also co-editor, with Juliana Spahr, who
we're going to try and get very soon,
of American Women Poets in the 21st Century:
Where Lyric Meets Language.
Recently, she was awarded the prestigious Academy Fellowship,
and Don't Let Me Be Lonely was a finalist for the 2005 Lenore
Marshall Poetry Prize.
On top of all of this, she teaches in the writing program
at the University of Houston.
Rankine's books have used personal lyric, form, image,
and objective lyric to examine the self and society.
Her latest book, Don't Let Me Be Lonely-- in her latest book,
Rankine uses a magnifying, mirrored television.
At the same time this glass reflects
our own narcissistic gaze, we are apart from
and a part of the speaker who says,
there was a time I could say no one I knew well had died.
Timothy McVeigh never asked to be forgiven,
and overnight, Osama bin Laden became a household name.
We are given the choice to stare indefinitely
or to turn the thing off.
This Mobius continuum seems to state, or has us state,
don't let me be lonely.
This is a declarative.
Or is it?
It seems more an interrogative asking,
why lonely in the first place?
Or, where to go from here?
Difficult questions and a difficult declarative.
We listen, and in the end we utter the same thing.
Don't let me be lonely.
And by becoming active participants,
we do become less lonely.
Please welcome Claudia Rankine.
Good evening.
I want to thank Michael for that introduction.
That could be part of the book.
I could have used some help from you.
And I'd like to thank Al and Austin, wherever you are back
there.
I want to start the reading with a quote
by the critic Homi Bhabha from his book,
The Location of Culture.
He says, "remembering is never a quiet act of introspection
or retrospection.
It is a painful remembering, a putting together
of the dismembered past to make sense
of the trauma of the present."
For me, Don't Let Me Be Lonely attempts
to chronicle the time and times that we're in presently,
in an attempt to make sense of those times.
Cornel West makes the point that hope
is different from American optimism.
After the initial presidential election results come in,
I stop watching the news.
I want to continue watching, charting,
and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts,
but I cannot.
I lose hope.
However Bush came to have won, he would still
be winning 10 days later, and we would still
be in the throes of our American optimism.
All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself--
the same Bush who can't remember if two or three people
were convicted for dragging a Black man to his death
in his home state of Texas.
You don't remember because you don't care.
Sometimes, my mother's voice swells and fills my forehead.
Mostly, I resist the flooding.
But in Bush's case, I find myself talking
to the television screen.
You don't know because you don't care.
Then, like all things impassioned,
this voice takes on a life of its own.
You don't know because you don't bloody care, do you?
I forget things, too.
It makes me sad, or it makes me the saddest.
The sadness is not really about George W
or our American optimism.
The sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot
matter.
Or, as there are billions of lives,
my sadness is alive alongside the recognition
that billions of lives never mattered.
I write this without breaking my heart,
without bursting into anything.
Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness,
or perhaps Emily Dickinson, my love,
hope was never a thing with feathers.
I don't know.
I just find when the news comes on, I switch the channel.
This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening
personality flaw.
IMH, the inability to maintain hope,
which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that
govern us.
Cornel West says this is what is wrong with Black people today.
Too nihilistic, too scarred by hope to hope,
too experienced to experience, too close to dead
is what I think.
I lived for a while in London.
And while I was there, there was a thing called the Museum Of.
And it rotated, so sometimes it was the Museum of Circles.
Sometimes, it was the Museum of Hate.
And while I was there, it was the Museum of Emotions.
And it was, appropriately enough,
sponsored by The Body Shop.
The Museum of Emotions in London has a game
that asks yes and no questions.
As long as you answer correctly, you can continue playing.
The third question is, were you terribly upset
and did you find yourself weeping
when Princess Diana died?
I told the truth and stepped on the no tile.
I was not allowed to continue.
The museum employee, who must have had a thing with shame,
looked away as I stepped down.
Walking out, I couldn't help but think,
the question should have been, was Princess Diana
ever really alive?
I mean, alive to anyone outside of her friends and family,
truly.
The English were very distraught after her death.
On the television, they showed thousands of mourners leaving
flowers in front of the palace.
Weren't they mourning the protection
they felt she should have had, a protection they'll never have?
Weren't they simply grieving the random inevitability
of their own lives?
My mother tells me, I'm just biding time.
She means it as a push toward not biding time.
She wants me to lead a readable life, one
that can be read as worthwhile and successful.
My mother is not overly concerned
with happiness, its fruitless pursuit or otherwise.
As far as she can remember, there
is only pain connected to the joy of childbirth.
She remembers the pain and wants it to have been worthwhile
for a reasonable life.
As I watch my mother's mouth move, I ask myself,
am I often troubled by constipation?
Have I ever vomited love or coughed up blame?
Is anything wrong with my mind?
That usually gets a laugh.
[LAUGHTER]
Maybe yours is the more appropriate response.
Or maybe we have some mother sympathizers.
[LIGHT LAUGHTER]
In the night, I watch television to help me fall asleep,
or I watch television because I cannot sleep.
My husband sleeps through my sleeplessness and the noise
of the television.
Eventually, it is all a blur.
I never remember turning the TV off,
but always when I wake up in the morning, it is off.
Perhaps he turns it off.
I don't know.
Some nights, I count the commercials
for antidepressants.
If the same commercial is repeated, I still count it.
It seems right that pharmaceutical companies
should advertise in the middle of the night
when people are less distracted and capable of tuning in more
and more, and most precisely to their fearful bodies
and their accompanying anxieties.
One commercial for Paxil says simply, your life is waiting.
Parataxis, I think first, but then I wonder, for what?
For what does it wait?
For life, I guess.
Across the screen, this time minus audio flashes,
your life is waiting.
It remains on the screen long enough so
that when I close my eyes to check if I am sleeping, instead
of darkness, your life is waiting stares back at me.
[NO AUDIO]
And I am not exactly a crying person,
though my eyes tear up frequently
because of my allergies.
In any case, the other tears--
the ones that express emotions, the ones that
recognize and take responsibility for the soul--
don't come.
Instead, I get a sharp pain in my gut.
And though heart disease is the leading
killer of American women, the pain
has nothing to do with that.
I've had it all my life.
Not quite a caving in, just a feeling of bits of my inside
twisting away from flesh in the form of a blow to the body.
Sometimes, I look into someone's face,
and I must brace myself, the blow on its way.
For instance, I go into my bedroom
to put on socks because my toes could be cold,
and on the TV is Abner Louima.
I hope what comes out of my case is changed.
What happened to me should not happen
to any human being, to my children,
or anybody else's children.
It's been four years since he was
sodomized by a broken broomstick while in police custody.
It was two months and three surgeries
before he could leave the hospital.
He has just agreed to a settlement
with the city and the police union for $8.7 million.
Louima's lawyer, Johnnie L Cochran, Jr,
is standing next to him.
Louima looks OK.
A reporter asks him how it feels to be a rich man.
Not rich, says Louima, lucky--
lucky to be alive.
Instinctively, my hand braces my abdomen.
I've felt it, too, the loneliness.
I let it happen by feeling, by not, not feeling.
That's too much, like dying maybe, or death is second.
Second to what?
To loneliness.
Define loneliness.
Why are we alive?
My sister had a daughter and a son.
Is she dead?
Is he dead?
Yes, they're dead.
My sister's children and her husband died in a car crash.
She's a psychiatrist, but she cannot help herself.
She does not, probably cannot legally prescribe herself any
drugs.
Her world-- she's letting it--
is crumbling.
Why?
What?
I listen, but I do not speak.
I look into her eyes.
We sit on the floor of public places, our faces wet.
Then, like that, I'm in my car, turning
the key in the ignition, my own quotidian affairs breaking in.
Who will she be when she's too tired to cry?
Where does her kind of grief go?
Paul Celan whispers in my ear, all those sleep
shapes, crystalline, that you assumed in the languid shadow,
to those I lead my blood.
Those image lines-- them I'm to our harbor in the slit arteries
of my cognition.
My grief, I can see, is deserting you.
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It's what we can't do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here, if not for each other?
Or a friend's mother dies when she's on her way home
from her father's funeral in Switzerland.
While her plane crosses the Atlantic,
her mother dies of a heart attack in New Hampshire.
I run into this friend in Soho at the Cupping Room.
She is wearing a long fur coat.
It was my mother's.
She died.
This woman, a college friend, seems fine.
Perhaps we are not responsible for the lives of our parents,
not in our pores or our very breath.
We can expect.
We can resolve.
We can come to terms with.
Afterwards, we wear their clothing, sit in their chairs,
and remember them, profoundly remember them.
But we are not responsible.
The construct of my sister, this character, feels erased.
Anything, I tell her.
I write in my notes, I will do anything.
In truth, I can do nothing but see
in the activity of her grief three people's death.
The end of each day is followed by mourning.
A husband wakes up beside me, stretching, asking
sweetheart, honey, dearest, how did you sleep?
[CELL PHONE DINGING]
We have musical accompaniment.
I love these little fantastic ironies in life.
But the guy who was the first guy
to get the first artificial heart, his name was Mr Tools.
Mr Tools, for a while the only person
in the world walking around with an artificial heart,
said the weirdest thing was being without a heartbeat.
His was a private and perhaps lonely singularity.
No one else could say, I know how you feel.
The only living being without a heartbeat,
he had a whir instead.
It was not the same whir of a siren,
but rather the fast, repetitive whir
of a machine whose insistent motion might eventually
seem like silence.
Mr Tools had the ultimate tool in his body.
He felt its heaviness.
The weight on his heart was his heart.
All his apparatus-- artificial heart,
energy coil, battery, and controller--
weighed more than four pounds.
The whir, if you are not Mr Tools,
is detectable only with a stethoscope.
For Mr Tools, that whir was his sign that he was alive.
[NO AUDIO]
In a taxi, speeding uptown on the West Side Highway,
I let my thoughts drift below the surface of the Hudson
until it finally occurs to me that feelings
fill the gaps created by the indirectness of experience.
Though the experience is social, thoughts
carry it into a singular space, and it
is this that causes the feelings of loneliness.
Or it is this that collides the feeling with the experience
so that what is left is the solitude called loneliness.
And from that space of loneliness,
I can feel the cab driver watching me
in the rear view mirror.
He wants to know if I attend Columbia University.
Years ago.
Now, I just live in the neighborhood.
You seem like a smart lady.
What do you do for your living?
I write about the liver.
The liver, really?
You're a doctor?
No, no.
I write about the liver because I'm
thinking as if trying to weep.
Excuse me?
You think the liver is connected to thoughts?
Well, not exactly.
Anyway, tell me something.
You have lived in this country many years?
Over 30.
Well, yes, then.
So, tell me this.
Have you noticed these white people?
They think they are better than everyone else.
Have I noticed?
Are you joking?
You're not joking.
Where are you from?
Pakistan.
I see.
It's only a few months since 9/11.
They think you're al-Qaeda.
I know.
But the things they say to me, they don't know anything.
Be happy you can't read their thoughts, I want to say to him.
I smile into the rear view mirror instead.
Why, with such a nice smile, are you
trying to weep he asks, as we pull up to my building.
To roll over, or not to roll over, that IRA.
To have a new iMac, or not to have it.
To e-trade, or not to e-trade.
Again and again, these were Kodak moments
full of individuation.
We were all on our way to our personal best.
America was seemingly a meritocracy.
I I, I am Tiger Woods.
It was the '90s.
Now, it's the 21st century, and either you are with us
or you're against us.
Where is your flag?
It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade
Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex.
Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us
is that we were never complex.
We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love
and we can condemn because we love our country.
But that's too complex.
Over lunch, someone says, what's all this
about detaining hundreds of people
and monitoring lawyer client conversations?
Who do we think we are, China?
Inside the space of the constructed joke,
everyone laughs and laughs.
My flushing toilet, my hot water, my air conditioner,
my health insurance, my my, my.
All my mys were American made.
This is how I was alive.
Or I wasn't alive.
I was a product, or I was like a product--
a product of and like Walt Disney's cel animation,
stylishly animated, somewhat comic.
I used to think of myself as a fearless person.
[NO AUDIO]
In my dream, I apologize to everyone I meet.
Instead of introducing myself, I apologize
for not knowing why I am alive.
I'm sorry.
I am sorry.
I apologize.
In real life, oddly enough, when I'm fully awake
and out and about, if I catch someone's eye,
I quickly look away.
Perhaps this, too, is a form of apology.
Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life.
In real life, the looking away is the apology,
despite the fact that when I look away,
I almost always feel guilty.
I do not feel as if I have apologized.
Instead, I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize.
I feel the guilt of having ignored
that thing, the encounter.
I could have nodded.
I could have smiled without showing my teeth.
In some small way, I could have wordlessly said,
I see you seeing me, and I apologize
for not knowing why I am alive.
I am sorry, I am sorry.
I apologize.
Afterwards, after I have looked away,
I never feel as if I can say, look.
Look at me again so that I can see you,
so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you,
so that I can see you and apologize.
[NO AUDIO]
At the airport security checkpoint
on the way to visit my grandmother,
I'm asked to drink from my water bottle.
This water bottle?
That's right.
Open it and drink from it.
At the airport security checkpoint
on the way to visit my grandmother,
I am asked to take off my shoes.
Take off my shoes?
Yes.
Both, please.
At the airport security checkpoint
on the way to visit my grandmother,
I am asked if I have a fever.
A fever, really?
Yes, really.
My grandmother is in a nursing home.
It's not bad.
It doesn't smell like pee.
It doesn't smell like anything.
When I go to see her, as I walk through the hall
past the common room and the nurse's station,
old person after old person puts out her hand to me.
Steven, one calls.
Anne, another says.
It's like being in a third world country,
but instead of food or money, you are what is wanted.
In third world countries, I have felt overwhelmingly American--
calcium-rich, privileged, and white.
Here, I feel young, lucky, and sad.
Sad is one of those words that has given up
its life for our country.
It's been a martyr for the American dream.
It's been neutralized, co-opted by our culture,
to suggest a tinge of discomfort that
lasts the time it takes for this and then for that to happen,
the time it takes to change a channel.
But sadness is real, because once it meant something real.
It meant dignified, grave.
It meant trustworthy.
It meant exceptionally bad, deplorable, shameful.
It meant massive, weighty, forming a compact body.
It meant falling heavily.
And it meant of a color, dark.
It meant dark in color, to darken.
It meant me.
I felt sad.
[NO AUDIO]
Homi Bhabha, also in The Location of Culture,
says that certain absences are so stressed that they arrest us
with their intentionality and purpose,
like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held
away from them.
The shadow of the presence-- where
is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled?
The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of South
Africa, Alcon Laboratories Limited, Bayer Limited,
Bristol-Meyers Squibb Limited, BYK Madras Limited,
Eli Lilly Limited, Glaxco Welcome Limited,
Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Limited,
Janssen-Cilag Pharmaceutical Limited,
No Pharmaceuticals South Africa Limited, Lundbeck South Africa
Limited, Merck Limited, MSD Limited, Novartis South Africa
Limited, Pharmaceutica and Upjohn Limited,
Roche Products Limited, SA Scientific Pharmaceuticals
Limited, Universal Pharmaceuticals Limited,
WIAT Limited, Bayer Limited.
Or over breakfast, the New York Times
is barely visible between the boxes of cereal juice and milk.
But because I have been waiting for this day
without realizing I was waiting, I
see the story at first glance.
President Mbeki has decided antiretrovirals
will be made available to the five million
South Africans infected by the HIV virus.
My body relaxes.
My shoulders fall back.
I had not known that my distress over Mbeki's previous position
against distribution of the drugs
had physically lodged itself like a virus within me.
Before Mbeki, 39 drug companies filed suit
in order to prevent South Africa's manufacture
of generic AIDS drugs.
Possible trade sanctions were threatened,
then President Clinton did an about face and the lawsuit
was dismissed.
But like an absurdist dream, Mbeki
stood between the now available drugs and the dying.
It is not possible to communicate how useless,
how much like a skin sack of uselessness I felt.
I am better than thou art now.
I am a fool, the fool said.
Thou art nothing.
Is she dead?
Is he dead?
Yes, they're dead.
One observes.
One recognizes without being recognized.
One opens the paper.
One turns on the television.
Nothing changes.
My distress grows into nothing.
Thou art nothing.
Such distress moved in with muscle and bone, its entrance
by necessity slowly translated my already
grief into a tremendously exhausted hope.
The translation occurred unconsciously, perhaps occurred
simply because I am alive.
The translation occurs as a form of life.
Then life, which seems so full of waiting,
awakes suddenly into a life of hope.
Life is a form of hope, if you are hopeful.
Maybe hope is the same as birth, part of what
it means to be human and alive.
Or maybe hoping is the same as waiting.
It can be futile.
Waiting for what?
For life to begin.
I am here, and I am still lonely.
And I will close with this.
[NO AUDIO]
I would have to drink five more cups of coffee a day
to reduce my chances of getting type 2 diabetes.
I usually have one cup in the morning.
Today, I'm staring into a possible second cup,
and I do not see my husband's expression
when I tell him about the darkness and the curtain.
I have a dream.
Or rather, in my dream, the lights
are out in New York City.
They're out because they were out.
Even inside the dream, I know I am dreaming.
The events of my dream are a form of my basis.
The darkness that accompanied the blackout
existed, but does not now in the world outside the dream.
In my dream, the lights are out because I cannot see ahead
of me.
Or in this dark dream, I am looking for a chance.
My chance to or my chance for, it is not clear.
Then, where I am going or what I want is behind a black curtain.
But it is so dark, the curtain becomes the night.
I want to fall asleep inside my dream.
This wish for further paralysis wakes me.
You think voting won't make a difference, says my husband.
This might be a wise thing to think.
He says all this without lifting his gaze from the morning
paper.
My dream is about a voting booth?
I am not convinced.
He is not interested in convincing me.
He is reading about the candidates for the presidency.
He is wondering if voting against someone
is enough to drag a country away from its inevitable course.
Sometimes, you read something and a thought that
was floating around in your veins
organizes itself into the sentence that reflects it.
This might also be a form of dreaming.
Or I remember that the last two sentences
I read in Fanny Howe's Tis of Thee
before falling asleep the previous night were,
"I learned to renounce a sense of independence by degrees
and finally felt defeated by the times I lived in,
obedient to them."
Or, well, I tried to fit language
into the shape of usefulness.
The world moves through words, as
if the bodies the words reflect did not exist.
The world like a giant liver receives
everyone and everything, including these words.
Is he dead?
Is she dead?
The words remain an inscription on the surface
of my loneliness.
This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness.
Then, Coetzee's Costello says in her fictional lecture,
for instance, at a time, I know what it is like to be a corpse.
Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different
from a handshake.
I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake
and a poem, is how Rosmarie Waldrop translated his German.
The handshake is our decided ritual
of both asserting I am here and handing over
here a self to another.
Hence, the poem is that.
Here, I am here.
This conflation of the solidity of presence
with the offering of this same presence
perhaps has everything to do with being alive.
Or one meaning of here is in this world, in this life,
on Earth, in this place or position, indicating
the presence of.
Or in other words, I am here.
It also means to hand something to somebody.
Here you are.
Here, he said to her.
Here both recognizes and demands recognition.
I see you, or here, he said to her.
In order for something to be handed over, a hand must extend
and a hand must receive.
We must both be here in this world,
in this life, in this place, indicating the presence of.
Thank you.