I cannot imagine a world where we get as much out of Citizen as we do without reading Beloved first. Claudia Rankine's collection is a statement on the black experience in America. Without using the pronoun "I" she makes it clear that the reader is supposed to understand the experiences she describes as ones with systemic roots and not personal anecdotes. The goal of her work is to force the reader to analyze their role in the systemic racism that makes being Black in America inherently laced with oppression and prejudice.
Toni Morrison employs the opposite technique of Claudia Rankine. Instead of making Beloved a novel about a generalized story of the black experience during Reconstruction, she fleshes out characters in a very specific situation. But, that is not to say she is not doing a service to the Black community with the way she writes her novel. Morrison makes the reader come to the conclusion that in the setting of right after slavery, one must look at every black person as an individual and not part of a larger. She does this to make the point that Black people were not only fighting racism. They were also fighting the right to be labeled as human. Focusing on one very specific story illustrates the fight Black people were in for their own humanity even after America abolished slavery.
Rankine and Morrison use opposite techniques to relay the meaning of their stories to the reader because of the scale of difference in the meanings. But, Rankine's goal works in connection with Morrison's because it is the environment and system that Morrison wrote about that affects the Black community and the oppression Rankine writes about today. A subtle reference to the slave trade occurs in one of Rankine's more "poetic" sections of Citizen:“Don’t lean against the wallpaper; sit down and pull together. Yours is a strange dream, a strange reverie. No, it’s a strange beach; each body is a strange beach, and if you let in excess emotion you will recall the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads"(Rankine 73). With this powerful imagery Rankine makes the reader remember what caused the system to be one of racism and oppression.
I agree, I think reading Beloved before Citizen gave us as readers a good starting point. I also think it was a good idea to read Beloved before Citizen just chronologically speaking, because Beloved is set in the Reconstruction Era, while Citizen is meant to show modern day events. The similarities between them still show how the problems of systemic racism still exist in our culture, and always will until we stand up to make positive change.
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