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Claudia Rankine Biography

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine (/ˈræŋkɪn/; born 1963) is a poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.

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Claudia Rankine Quotes

I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Experience, Mirrors, Music, Onto, Thinking, Writing

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.

Everything, Flesh, Past, Remembered, Stored, World

Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.

Economy, Gift, Lasts, Probably, Take, Want

I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, "What's wrong with me?" and begin to ask the question, "What's wrong with this place that I'm in?"

Condition, People, Place, Term, Thinking, Understand

One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?

Away, Body, Moments, Things, Thinking, Why Not

The idea that when one reacts, one is not reacting to any one of those moments. You're reacting to the accumulation of the moments. I wanted the book, as much as the book could do this, to communicate that feeling. The feeling of saturation. Of being full up. I wanted it to be simulacra.

Book, Feelings, Idea, Ideas, Reacting, Saturation

We are invested in being together. In having friends. In joining our lives. And yet these are the people who also fail you. And when they fail you in these ways, it signals a larger understanding about who you are as a black person in the world. It's not just a little failure for me. Its something exposed.

Black, Lives, People, Understanding, Ways

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.

Ideas, Important, Know, Separating, Systemic, Thinking

Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

Butler, Communication, Failure, Failures, Thinking, Way

The subject who speaks is situated in relation to the other. This privilege of the other ceases to be incomprehensible once we admit that the first fact of existence is neither being in itself nor being for itself but being for the other, in other words, that human existence is a creature. By offering a word, the subject putting himself forward lays himself open and, in a sense, prays.

Facts, Firsts, Lays, Offering, Open, Sense

I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.

Add, Body, Come, Feelings, Moments

Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.

Define, Loneliness, Yes

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.

Driven, Everybody, Men, Taken, Thinking, Upset

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.

Equal, Forgive, Forgiving, Letting, Letting Go, Waiting

In the future, we've forgotten it. It's disappointing to find out that the past is the present is the future. Nobody wants that. And yet, that's what it is. Maybe it's a kind of surrealist move, to use language like "post-racial" - thinking that if you create the language for it, it will happen. I wish it worked that way. But that's not our reality.

Forgotten, Happen, Kind, Moving, Past, Thinking

If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.

America, Country, Deeply, Driven, Racism

My tendency is to want to say to the person, "Do you understand why I feel this way?" I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or bad.

Impasse, Let It Go, Mean, Needs, Understand, Usually

I don't know about forgiving, but it's an "I'm still here. " And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes; let's be flawed differently.

Believe, Forgiving, Make, Mistake, Way

People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.

Animal, Animals, Black, People, Reason, Thinking

I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.

Bodies, Body, Forgotten, Invested, Keeping, Present

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