Citizen is a hard read, both language level and emotion wise. It's difficult to understand, easily because it's tough to unpack and about an experience that I am not familiar with.
Claudia Rankine does an amazing job at inviting the reader to be immersed into her experience through the words "imagine" and "you."
It covers an issue that is one of the most prevalent in our country today. Although racial discrimination dates back to the roots of US history, Citizen is a recent book, talking about more recent events that made have brought racial issues back to light.
Citizen lets us experience another perspective as best we can. I think that this will allow us all to become better citizens and allow us to be able to empathize with every perspective we can.
Nice post. It was interesting. It is kind of a hard novel to understand, but I thought it was really cool how it made you feel more than understand at points. I think this matches Pareen's definition of poetry really well since it conveys an experience so fully. Nice post again.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with how difficult it is to read this book because of the multidimensional language that Pareen discusses. I was really wondering about what else the author is going to discuss in terms of real life experiences that have occurred.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you. I don't think that I've ever read something that has "put me in someone else's shoes" the way Citizen does. This makes it an intense book to read, but I think it's so important to get a small amount of insight on the experiences Rankine writes about.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Rankine is really cleaver with her word choice. By adding "you" she puts you in the shoes of whoever is experiencing the situation. Although it's not perfect I think it gets pretty close and may be the closest some of us come to experiencing racism.
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