Little Girl

Citizen is filled with powerful, striking lines, but it was the image on page 19 that really caught my attention. The image is of a taxidermied deer with a human face instead of its normal deer face. My first thoughts upon seeing the picture were that it must've been some horrific creation by a crazy slave owner from the 1800s, but thankfully I was completely wrong. It's actually a sculpture by artist Kate Clark called Little Girl. She takes the pelts of animals that most taxidermists will not use because of damage to the face, and turns them into her surreal works of art. She doesn't use real human faces, of course, but instead shaves the hair off of the animal's face and reconstructs it to mimic a model's face. In the artist's statement on her website, Clark says, "When encountering my sculptures, the viewer is faced with a lifelike fusion of human and animal that investigates which characteristics separate us within the animal kingdom, and more importantly, which unite us. The sculptures visually, emotionally and intellectually explore this overlap that exists across cultures, along histories, and within societies."

              

So why did Claudia Rankine include this unsettling piece of artwork in Citizen? Based on the content of the book, I think it's safe to say that she saw the artwork as a visual representation of the way that black people were (and sometimes still are) treated as animals in our culture. In an interview, Rankine said, "In the particular piece I used in Citizen, she attached the black girl’s face on this deer-like body—it says it’s an infant caribou in the caption—and I was transfixed by the memory that my historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal." For Rankine, the work holds a deeper meaning than just the relationship between human and animal. It represents the way her race was systematically oppressed and treated like livestock. She may have included the piece both as a reminder of the past and a warning for the present.