Skin as Wallpaper

Citizen is full of literary gems that need to be remembered, but I think my favorite is on page 71, where Rankine writes that "someone claimed we should use our skin as wallpaper knowing we couldn't win." The context of this thought comes from her thoughts on the word "I", and the power that it holds. This quote supports her idea that I is a pronoun that "barely [holds] the person together" (71), and later on that "the first person can't pull you together" (71). She is using this idea of skin as wallpaper to enunciate that self-identity cannot be held together under racism, and instead is splayed across the four walls of a home for all to see like wallpaper.

The person she denotes as "someone" is John Berryman, and his actual quote is "and Gottfried Benn said: -We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win" (Dream Song 53). Here is some necessary context: Berryman wrote about Nazi atrocities in some of his poems and Gottfried Benn was a German poet and known Nazi sympathizer. This quote from Dream Song 53 is obviously about the Holocaust, and specifically, the use of the skin from dead Jewish people in household items such as soap or wallpaper.

Rankine takes this quote - an incredibly powerful and evocative image - and twists it to fit her needs. This begs the question, of course, of whether or not this damages the meaning of this passage. She is essentially taking someone's quote which has no position on race relations in America, not attributing it to them, and then changing it to fit her story. I think that it strengthens it all the more, because it doesn't lose the meaning or intention. The intention of this is not to expose Nazi war crimes - by its publication date of 1964 the atrocities committed during the Holocaust were well known and documented - but to articulate the injustice and wrongness of it. Rankine keeps that meaning in her revised use of the quote, and still maintains its power while applying it to a new topic, making it incredibly meaningful.