The Heads on 119

After "August 4, 2011 / In Memory of Mark Duggan" there is an image of a cabinet filled with identical, bone white heads. Near the bottom, the heads seem to talk, and look in one direction. Then as the rows go up, the heads become more numerous and seem to talk even more, all the while looking in two directions. At the very top, all the heads stop talking and look out of the cabinet, looking into the third dimension. According to this, the progression of heads is supposed to be a statement about the global social events. It also says that the cabinet is supposed to represent healing, as it is there where medicine and food is. Ironically, Rankine uses the cabinet as a place to store pent up frustrations in an earlier section.

As is expected from the other pieces in the book, it photo very well into the passage that it accompanies. In the situation video, the narrator compares the Hackney riots to the Rodney King-LA Riots. The Hackney riots were caused by the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot in 2011 for suspicion of carrying a gun (although Rankine says that it was drugs), but the media soon ignored the shooting and focused on the damages caused by the riots themselves. In contrast, during the riots caused by the beating of Rodney King, the media stayed firmly on the beating instead of the riots. The narrator poses the question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another? Are the tensions...that exploded in the riots too foreign?"(116). They wonder why, instead of seeing an injustice and using it as an opportunity to speak out and create change, like the black communities involved in the riots, the media ignored the problem. The head piece, then, becomes a symbol for the processes that the media misrepresented in the Mark Duggan case.