Claudia Rankine Plays Dead

The scholar Kevin Quashie has argued that the Black subject gets read primarily through her capacities for resistance: she is presumed to exist in order to produce social meaning, rather than for herself and in alignment with her humanity. For the narrator, that sacrifice is terrifying. She has survived by keeping quiet, by protecting, in the words of Quashie, “the right to be nothing to anyone but self.” “In what world,” she asks the theorist, “is a Black person existing up against the wishes of the state a small thing?” And yet she also knows that just because something isn’t small doesn’t mean it’s also enough. And, indeed, she is asked to do something more: the theorist, who may be “too bereft for generosity,” has asked the narrator if she will host a couple that has fled Gaza in her spare apartment in Berlin. The narrator decides it is not her “place”; surely, there are other things she can do. There aren’t. This is it. The book concludes on a deflation; her final judgment is no.

“Triage” has been labelled as nonfiction, and it opens with a disclaimer: “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Unless it isn’t.” The statement wouldn’t be so condescendingly winking if the theorist’s contributions to their field weren’t drawn, word for word, from the academic work of the late Lauren Berlant, the first person thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. Quashie is thanked in the first paragraph. Judith Butler, thanked in the same place, has twinned cameos as an anonymous friend, whose name has been “turned over to our government along with 160 others in a McCarthy era-type move,” and as a reference, their name attached to a quote from a lecture on grief they delivered in 2014. One of the pleasures of reading Rankine is reading her through the contemporaries with whom she is clearly in dialogue; “Triage” ’s most compelling story of friendship is told through its citations. And yet this metafictional doubling—in which people appear simultaneously as themselves and with a set of fictional flourishes—has the side effect of undermining the discursive conceit of the text. You feel, while reading, that Rankine is first and foremost in conversation with herself, or else in conversation with the version of herself that she has brought to life through the act of writing, a character who collides with her peers only to determine the outer limits of her own thinking.

Something similar can be said of the patient who speaks about her life from her position on the couch: by marshalling a cast of characters—her lovers, her family, her friends—and, through the act of speech, bringing them into the room, she becomes convinced that she is a character herself, a person with qualities mirrored in others. The theorist may be a version of Berlant, or else a shadow figure, who either trails behind Rankine’s narrator, marking where she’s already been, or anticipates her footsteps, pointing her toward the unknown places she is likely to go. How convenient, I thought, that this apparition, who seems always to be teetering on the edge of reality, and therefore death, should be figured as Palestinian; and how devastating that even a fictional Palestinian should be figured as a prop. Characters, of course, need not act ethically, or even realistically. But it’s striking to encounter, in the theorist, a character so flat, so devoid of interiority, in a book so invested in mounting a defense of quiet embodiment, and by an author whose previous works compelled writers of fiction and nonfiction alike to take notice when their imaginative sympathies “line up, again and again, with the lines drawn by power.”