54 pages • 1 hour read
Claudia RankineCitizen: An American Lyric
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapter 7
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
The final chapter of Citizen is written again in the second-person perspective. However, in this chapter, the identity of the subject is ambiguous and shifts throughout the chapter.
Rankine explores disassociation from the self in this section. Though many of Rankine’s prose poems occupy only the top half of the page, as a block paragraph, the text of Chapter 7 takes up the entire page. The text floats down the page, as the narrator describes a feeling of serene detachment from their own existence: “Some years there exists a wanting to escape— / you, floating above your certain ache— / still the ache coexists. / Call that the immanent you— / You are you even before you/grow into understand you / are not anyone, worthless, / not worth you” (139). Rankine describes floating, feelings of worthlessness, and listlessness.
Chapter 7 also touches on invisibility and feelings of worthlessness in the black community. Rankine suggests that black people are rendered as less-than from childhood: "You are you even before you / grow into understanding you / are not anyone, worthless” (139). The next scene focuses on white privilege by recounting an
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