“Triage,” Claudia Rankine’s new book, opens at a scene of inquisition. At a podium, under a spotlight, a theorist is asked a gloomy question by someone in the audience. How do they feel, given “what’s going on in the world”? The theorist is an estranged friend of the narrator. The setting is a lecture being held on a grand stage. The time is—well, the time is now. But what is “now”? And what is the audience member referring to, exactly, when they gesture toward “what’s going on”?
“Toomuchness” is the phrase that the theorist deploys onstage to describe life in the present, a phrase that Rankine repeats throughout the book as a shorthand for psychic overwhelm, the knowledge of ongoing violence which precedes emotional and spiritual collapse. “Toomuchness” is endemic to the times: “We were all struggling with varying degrees of powerlessness and capitulation,” Rankine writes. The auditorium is quiet while the theorist decides how to sum up their feelings. “Sometimes,” they reply, “I want to throw myself in front of a speeding car.”
The narrator, a poet, is about to turn sixty. She watches the lecture from an obscured position in the audience. “Triage” tells the story of how she got there—quiet, middle-aged, and looking up at her former friend, who smiles through the pained confession of their suffering. “Why the drama?” the narrator thinks. “Their very presence at a microphone suggested they wanted to live.” The theorist, unlike the narrator, is inclined toward public speech. This inclination is dispositional (their “need was to raise the volume, a volume already at a screech”), political (the recognition of cruelty “seemed to propel them toward voice”), and professional (their career as an academic would flounder without it). But it’s a survival mechanism, too. The theorist’s propensity for dramatic speech functions as a lifeline: “They thought all the definitive talk would keep them upright.”
The narrator, though curious to speak herself, is finally repelled. “I’d thought to take one of the floating mics and have the spotlight find me in the back of the auditorium,” Rankine writes. “But I was not brave. If fear was a strength, I was furious with it.” The scene in the auditorium replays throughout the book, its choreography—the theorist at the microphone, the narrator contemplating her position in the audience—dramatizing their estrangement, which has arisen from conflicting responses to personal and planetary distress. They have not spoken to each other in decades. They live on opposite coasts. Between them, there has been no dramatic betrayal, only “a feeling, more or less, of disquiet; a feeling of never being able to live up to the expectations of another.” The theorist values speech, equating it with action; the narrator values quiet, viewing it as “a portal to the mystery of an interior life.”
“Triage” is divided against itself. It is a book whose subject is the failure to act, but whose narrator takes for granted that defeat is an inevitable condition of life. Indeed, the narrator is resigned to death—if not the declamatory death of her friend in the lecture hall, at least the fact of death happening elsewhere, on the global stage. “We are being asked to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language or policy for,” the narrator tells the theorist, upon their reunion, over sardines. “I’m not going to pretend there is anything I could or can or will do to reroute the dying.” Reading lines like these, in which the mind consigns the body to a state of fundamental uselessness, you get the sense that you’re in the presence of a dead woman talking.
And it’s true: the narrator has been playing at lifelessness since childhood. She enters college “dead on my feet,” and first spots the theorist in the library, surrounded by “tired couches,” tearing down posters of women in bikinis. The couches are important: they are the symbol through which the narrator will go on to process the “toomuchness” of now. But in that first instance they are just couches, and the narrator’s attention is with the theorist, whose actions remind her of Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s raised fists at the 1968 Olympics. “The theorist’s hand ripping paper away from the wall reminded me to swing out at life,” she reflects. “One might act despite the impossibility of change or one might act to spite the impossibility of change.”
Watching the theorist, the narrator begins to believe in resurrection—in a “way of returning to myself, one reconnected emotion at a time.” The pair are bound by language, an erotic pull toward the expression of ideas: they write side by side, memorize the same stanzas, and paraphrase Miles Davis in unison. Together, they enjoy a “fabricated sisterhood” facilitated by a ritual of collapse. Though they spend their days apart—the theorist in student encampments that protest South African apartheid, the narrator mulling over Yeats—whenever they encounter each other on campus, they fall to the ground, two bodies behaving as one. Playing dead helps them come alive, despite their differences.
The narrator tells the theorist that together they are going to rise up as one, too. But even as she speaks she senses the implausibility of her statement. “Our twinning occurred through our downward motion,” Rankine writes. “But given that both of us had been ravaged by violence, once we regained our footing distrust abounded.” The narrator was born to a mother who blamed her for the joint injuries of the near-fatal experience of giving birth to her, her grandmother’s death, and the rape by a stranger that preceded both. The theorist was born in Ramallah, into occupation. None of this becomes obvious until halfway through the book. Genocide is the weather, but Palestine isn’t named explicitly until it surfaces as a conversational afterthought, like a secret that clarifies the origins of a lifelong argument. The narrator has just suggested, facetiously, that someone should install a billboard-size digital counter in Times Square to keep track of Manhattan’s sinking. The two are walking on the High Line.
There exist more urgent places to put your urgency, the theorist added.
You mean wherever you are looking, I hazarded.
The theorist opened their mouth and then closed it.
“Triage” is Rankine’s first publication since the conclusion of her “American” trilogy, which comprised “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” (2004), “Citizen” (2014), and “Just Us” (2020). Like those books, “Triage” is written in the confessional admixture of prose and poetry for which Rankine has become widely known. Her language works by a logic of accumulation. Time is elastic. Her narrators are frequently caught in a flurry of interpersonal encounters, which happen and then achieve new significance as they accrue associations in memory. And yet Rankine’s subject is Rankine. When she writes, she seems always to be checking her own pulse.
“I feel like I am already dead,” the narrator of “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” says. She is witnessing the commencement of the war on terror from the heart of the American empire. “I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize.” Like the version of Rankine who appears in “Triage,” she is convinced of her fundamental uselessness; she feels like a sack of skin. And yet her resignation isn’t total. Her interior world is animated by an energetic sadness. “The sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter,” she writes. “Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness . . . I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel.”
In “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” Rankine has already deemed resistance a threat. “Resistance will only make matters more difficult,” she writes. “Any resistance will make matters worse.” She evades the imperative to speak by surrendering to her interior, a site of doubt, contradiction, and partial annihilation. In light of this retreat into the underbelly of waking life, it is surprising to encounter, in “Citizen,” Rankine’s ode to public encounters in which racism is made manifest, obvious, and incontrovertible. In “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,” the narrator is frequently at home, watching TV or else contemplating turning it off. But in “Citizen” she is out and upright, navigating conference rooms and airplane cabins in which she experiences a spate of interpersonal collisions, collisions through which she, as a subject, begins to come alive. In the words of the theorist Louis Althusser, she is interpellated: like a passerby hailed by a police officer yelling, “Hey, you!,” she is drawn into an awareness of the social circumstances that give rise to her existence.
“Citizen” deploys the second person, placing the reader in moments of corrosive identification originally experienced by Rankine. There is a knowing disbelief threaded throughout these scenes of negation, in which “your” presence, personhood, and profession are summoned in the same breath that they are called into question. The encounters (with acquaintances, strangers, friends) are always inevitable, usually identical, and yet described as if their cruelty is being experienced anew. Together, they read as something of a shock catalogue. Like a defibrillator, they incite a series of resuscitative gasps: “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth?” Rankine’s follow-up, “Just Us,” adds to the catalogue, but this time she’s dropped the second person, and she’s travelling first class.
