Your September Shelf Improvement choice is…

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

The book:

As our 2015 year of Shelf Improvement

draws towards a close, we thought we’d try
something a little unusual (bear with us!). It
stretches some definitions of non-fiction a
little, of that we are aware, but Citizen: An
American Lyric is such a powerful and
unique work, and is engaged with such a
meaningful subject - contemporary racism
in Western societies, including the UK - that
we hoped you would appreciate our attempt
to bring something different but special to
the non-fiction table.

Bringing essays and images together with

poetry, Citizen is a blend of voices from the
heart of what race and racism means today.
A meditation on the violence experienced
by Mark Duggan meets sharp vignettes of
everyday prejudice.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle

Award for Poetry in America, Citizen was
also simultaneously a finalist in the criticism
category, the first book ever to be
considered under both labels. Our aim is to
give you books you love, as well as open you
to surprises. We hope that Citizen delivers
on both accounts.
What the Guardian thought:

Claudia Rankine’s achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own
space powerfully, an unsettled hybrid – her writing on the hard shoulder of prose.
Through brief encounters and troubling retellings of recent news, Rankine puts one, as a
white reader, on constant alert for any unconscious racism in oneself. Rankine reminds
us there is nothing black and white about black and white.

And there is nothing slight about the slights described here. They have the force of body
blows. A scene on an aeroplane is a particular shocker. It involves no noisy spoken
insults but the sickening, faux tact of a whispering mother who spares her daughter from
having to sit next to a black passenger. If she is going to be racist, the mother knows she
must be what she believes to be discreet.

But a need for specificity is satisfied in the horrific stories she tells of the racism suffered
by tennis champion Serena Williams: “Neither… God nor NIKE camp could shield her
ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their
world.” She gives a powerful account of what Williams suffered at the hands of unsound
umpires and a bigoted press. The question about whether – and how – to speak out
persists. There is an equally shocking piece about hurricane Katrina in which the
emergency services are less than urgent. She reports that the lives of black people in the
disaster were less valued than those of the rescuers.

There is so much anger and anguish here that you wonder how it can be contained. But
what is wonderful about Rankine’s writing is that it works like an out-of-body
experience: she encounters her subject full-on and rises above it. And she never loses her
wide-angle reach. Above all, she shows how racism itself gets relegated. In a piece about
Mark Duggan, killed by police in Tottenham in 2011, she describes meeting a novelist in a
house in Hackney. He has “the face of the English sky – full of weather, always in
response, constantly shifting, clouding over only to clear”. But they have the following
exchange. He asks: “Will you write about Duggan?” She throws the question back: “Why
don’t you?” He says: “Me?” and looks “slightly irritated”. She could not make it plainer:
racism is everyone’s problem. Until this is understood, she will be forced to keep writing
as she does here: “I don’t know how to end what doesn’t have an ending.”

Kate Kellaway

Read the full review:

www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/30/claudia-rankine-citizen-american-lyric-
review

If you liked this, then try:

• Ghettoside: Investigating a homicide epidemic by Jill Leovy

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
• The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan

We hope you enjoyed Citizen. If you’d like to be kept up to date with Shelf Improvement and
the books we’re talking about each month, please email us at
shelfimprovement@theguardian.com to be added to our mailing list.