Upon Seeing the Invisible Man: The Hypervisibility of Black Women in the Not-Telling of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
Chasia Elzina Jeffries
Chasia (ka-SIGH-ya) Elzina Jeffries is a senior at the University of Southern California. She is majoring in Law, History, & Culture and minoring in Gender & Social Justice. She is the oldest of three and was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Her research currently focuses on global Black feminine resistance and the interpretation and preservation of Black feminine existence, performances, intellectualism, and embodiment. Upon graduating from USC, Chasia hopes to enroll in a JD/PhD program focusing on Cultural Theory. She plans to pursue a career as a scholar-activist, becoming a lawyer specializing in civil rights and human rights, while teaching and conducting academic and community-based research. She plans to work alongside and within marginalized communities and grassroots organizations to strengthen demands, amplify voices and prevent further abuses, making law, knowledge, justice, and society accessible to everyone, particularly, Black women and communities who have long been neglected.
Introduction
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is a gallery of images and text curated to illustrate the everyday moments of unbelonging faced by Black women in American society. Citizen’s lyric nature allows for an emotional and introspective collection of moments, which all could exist independently, but are also very related. Uniquely, rather than direct introspection and a narrative of the life and experiences of Rankine, the protagonist of these moments is “you.” You are living this pain. You are in every moment. By implicating the reader, Rankine forces their introspection and allows them to embody the text, a lived experience of Black femininity, to better understand the pervasiveness of racialized gender.
In addition to forcibly granting the reader an unchallengeable identity, similar to Blackness in society, addressing “you” invites the reader to be an active participant in these performances of racialized gender and to feel Black femininity in a way that traditional prose cannot accomplish. One scene in particular that highlights the complexity of racialized gender is a poem or script titled “Making Room.” “Making Room” not only engages with and makes tangible the invisibility of Black masculinity, a concept made popular by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and W.E.B. DuBois’s ideas of double consciousness, but “Making Room” also challenges this invisibility as a universal element of Black existence by juxtaposing it with the hypervisibility of Black feminine existence, “yours.”
You Exist in a Constructed Space
“Making Room” is labelled as a script in Citizen and was written for Public Fiction at the Hammer Museum. In 2014, Public Fiction, a performance and exhibition space, created a two-part exhibition in which Rankine participated. According to co-curator Lauren Mackler, the exhibit in the Hammer Museum, titled A Public Fiction, was meant to be a deconstruction of fiction, while the performances at Public Fiction, titled Tragedy + Time, were to be a deconstruction of comedy.[1] A Public Fiction enlisted six artists and six writers to take turns filling a room at the Hammer with objects and words in response to a shared prompt, the room’s description.[2] This piece, “Making Room,” is Rankine’s contribution: a poem or script, printed in mass as a red-covered pamphlet, stacked on a corner of an office desk, in a room filled with objects by artist Leslie Hewitt, episode and chapter 4 of A Public Fiction.[3]
That “Making Room” is intended to be a reconsideration of fiction makes its nod to Invisible Man a conversation rather than a coincidence or a name that could have been replaced with any other Black male writer and his work.[4] Further, the lyric nature of Citizen allows “Making Room” to stand alone, as a pamphlet to an exhibit and commentary on fiction, and work beautifully in the collection of moments that is Black feminine existence, that is Citizen.
You are Made to Understand Invisibility
The poem, “Making Room,” begins with a woman who “makes you understand”[5] that all the seats on the train you both find yourself on are full. While this is not the truth of the situation, you see an unfilled seat, it is her truth. A shared experience of womanhood allows you to understand the potential threat of sitting in the open space. She wants to protect you. However, the racial dynamics which would allow the woman to sit by a white man, but not this man, allow you to defuse the threat, and sit. You see the humanity of the man, she sees only his skin and her projection of potential violence. Or maybe, she doesn’t see him or the seats he fills at all and genuinely believes there are no available seats. Regardless, “she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.”[6] Rather than acknowledge the existence of this man, the woman has made the choice to uncomfortably, stubbornly stand.
The race of the man is never mentioned, but the reader can fill in the blanks based on their life experiences, outside of Citizen. The criminality of Black existence has left many seats unfilled on the LA Metro. By utilizing “you,” Rankine encourages the reader to incorporate their prejudices and experiences in the moment, allowing her to tell a story without explicitly outlining every detail, forcing the reader to consider their actions and experiences. Additionally, in the “not-telling” of race, in deliberately removing all explicit references to the Blackness of bodies in this moment, the subtleties of racial violence in everyday interactions are allowed to shine.[7] Rather than telling her story, Rankine presents a situation and allows the reader to experience it.
In “Making Room”, there is no conclusion or resolution, similar to Zong!’s rejection of Western narrative structure.[8] There just is. The story told is the reader’s, not the 150 murdered Africans of Zong! nor Phillips’s nor Rankine’s nor whoever lived or inspired the situation of “Making Room.”[9] Black existence in a “post-racial” society is an “untellable story”[10] of experiences laced together to form a life. Rankine documents one of these lives through Citizen and invites “you” to enter and make meaning of the experience or just experience it. The race of the man is confirmed in the last lines of the poem. You, throughout Citizen, are a Black female-presenting subject. The poem closes, “you’ll tell them we are traveling as family,”[11] a tale believable because of shared racial presentation, Blackness.
You Mind the Gap and Exist in This Space
“The space next to this man is the pause in the conversation/you are suddenly rushing to fill,”[12] Rankine continues. You are called and obligated to end the awkward silence that results from the ignorance of this man’s existence, though you are the only one who feels the awkwardness. The woman seeks to share her blindness, while the man is unmoved by your kind gesture.[13] The silence of this moment is not only captured in the empty seat of the train. The silence is literally present in the moment. There are no words shared by the characters, only the overheard background noises of a woman requesting a seat change from another passenger. Everything is told in the shared glances of the woman who “makes you understand”[14] or the unspoken agreement between you and the man.[15] Phillips explains
we who have language—humans—find silence very difficult. We have this desire to fill the space of silence with sound. There is this belief that if we can only talk long enough, hard enough, strongly enough, and articulately enough, we will be able to express that silence. But I think the silence is that which can never be told, but which, because of who we are—that is, humans—generates within us this longing to express the inexpressible.[16]
The not-telling of a story requires silence. Zong! has an absence of recorded words. The not-telling of modern Blackness, as seen in “Making Room” and Citizen as a whole, is in the silence of shared side-eyes and untold moments, in the silent refusal to acknowledge our existence or the possibility of an existence like ours, in crossing the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk or leaving open train seats.
The humanity of Blackness is also presented by both Rankine and Ellison’s Invisible Man in the silence of this moment. In Phillip’s claim—that humans seek to fill the silence—your calling to fill the seat, or the invisible protagonist’s urge to fill his hole with 1,369 lights and 5 radio-phonographs,[17] is very human. The silence of both not-told stories, Rankine’s and Phillips’s, is captured in spaces, be it the placement of text with space to breathe around it[18] or the space surrounding this Black man on the train, that is “more like breath than wonder.”[19]
You Are Not an Invisible Man
However, this treatment of silence and the namelessness of every character in this moment are not the only similarities between “Making Room” and Ellison’s Invisible Man. The unnamed man on the train is “an invisible man. No … not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor … one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. [He is] a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids.”[20] Your presence confirms this. The “soft gray-green of your cotton coat touch[ing] the sleeve of him … shoulder to shoulder.”[21] The possibility that this man, “might even be said to possess a mind,”[22] is presented in your analysis that, “he has had to think about it so much/you wouldn’t call it a thought.”[23] Seeing as “history is like a boomerang,”[24] Rankine’s man is Ellison’s invisible man today.
Jennifer DeVere Brody strengthens this connection, explaining that in Invisible Man,
the concept-metaphor of blackness is played out against an idea of illumination; … the action is “circular,” … bracketed as if in a black hole, the blackness of blackness is performed viscerally for an audience … both texts are exemplars of experimental (black) performative conditions. In both Bullins’s play and Ellison’s novel … blackness is simultaneously visceral and elusive, enveloping and intangible, material and conceptual. Both texts let us see in the dark, hear in the silence, feel in an empty arena the blackness of blackness.[25]
Where it is done on the level of text on the page in Invisible Man, the blackness of Blackness is portrayed in the experience of “Making Room.” While one could argue that the man is a point surrounded by space, similar to the ellipses of Invisible Man on which Brody focuses, the relationship is much stronger than just this.
The relationship between darkness and light which allows for the visualization of the blackness of Blackness is constant in “Making Room.” Not only can it be seen in the white space separating the text of your circular thoughts in the otherwise still movement of the moving train, but also in the constant reference to the darkness surrounding the train. The man is “gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.”[26] The light of the inside of the train which illuminates the scene is in direct contrast with the darkness surrounding it as the train goes through a tunnel and “the darkness allows you to look at him.”[27] The darkness of the train allows the Blackness of Rankine’s invisible man to be seen in an underground black hole before returning to the impending illumination of the outside world.
The blackness of Blackness is performed by this invisible man for the audience of you, the only one who sees him. Blackness is visceral, an unnamed pull to fill a seat and elusive, in the man's refusal to acknowledge your existence until his position is threatened. It is enveloping, in the tunnel’s darkness surrounding the train, and intangible, in the silence of the characters and Rankine. It is material in the darkness of the train and the skin of the characters and conceptual in the space of the empty seat. The train lights allow us to see in the dark of the tunnel. The unspoken body language and text on the page allow us to hear in the silence, making us feel the discomfort and pain in this performance of everyday Black existence.
You Are a Hypervisible Body That is Black and Woman
Even though there are similarities between “Making Room” and Invisible Man, “Making Room” explores ideas of racialized gender in ways that Invisible Man fails to. Despite ignoring Black women in its analysis of race in America, Invisible Man became an iconic novel of a universalized Black experience. Similar to Lorna Simpson’s work, Rankine works to “end the innocent notion of the essential black subject,”[28] which is the entirety of Invisible Man. She does so by complicating the concept of Blackness with the existence of Black women, which Ellison acknowledges, but doesn’t truly address. “Making Room” confronts the invisible man and Invisible Man with the hyper visibility of Black womanhood and “what a tangled and terrifying thing it is to be a black woman.”[29]
Your tangled existence begins the moment you step on the train. The assumed white, or at least not Black, woman sees you where she refuses to see the man. Black women are not allowed the protection of invisibility, or at least not in the same way it is granted to Black men.[30] Further, this woman wants to protect you. Your tangled existence is one where your womanhood links you to this stranger, where you might be sitting, not to “let her have it,”[31] this fear, but because you hope to defuse this “fear she shares,”[32] by challenging the perceptions she is forcing upon the man.
However, the man’s existence and potential threat felt and shared as a woman is tangled with your Blackness and your obligation to confirm the existence of Black men “on the train, bus, in the plane, wait-/ing room, anywhere he could be forsaken.”[33] It is your duty to confirm his existence, so you sit. This tension is felt throughout the poem, in the timing of glances, in the paranoia of repetitive rhetorical questions which do nothing to clarify the situation at hand, in the anticipation of having your positionality questioned or threatened both by the man or “anyone.”[34] Your hyper-awareness of your tangled existence goes beyond traditional ideas of double-consciousness destroying its universality.
You Render the Invisible Man Visible
Further, in addition to exploring the relationship between white society and Black individuals, as the Invisible Man does, “Making Room” explores the relationship between Black men and Black women in American society. The hypervisibility of Black women renders the invisible man visible, not only in your ability to see him, but in that simply by sitting next to him, you have rendered him visible to others. Now his seat is threatened and an excuse of familial ties is needed to protect you both. The script imposes the exhaustion of placing yourself in a potentially dangerous situation, where “standing you could feel shadowed”[35] and molding yourself to “repair whom who?”[36] Not you. This “precarious adjustment … [that] must be made … must be attempted”[37] is captured in the circular nature of the poem met neither with resolution nor appreciation. The man is given form in white society by your presence, by the “soft gray-green of your cotton coat touch[ing] the sleeve of him … shoulder to shoulder,”[38] yet he “doesn’t acknowledge you.”[39] Because you exist, he does. It is not “the White Man who creates the black man.”[40] It is you, the Black woman, who grants him humanity, without which, he would be invisible.
Historically, though hypervisible, Black women aren’t truly seen. Instead, we are made useful in validating the existence of others.[41] By sitting in the seat, you “fill in the gap”[42] created by Blackness preventing this man from performing masculinity. You “don’t speak unless spoken to,”[43] making yourself as small as possible, as not to infringe on this man, whom your existence bestows humanity upon,[44] a relationship which reinforces patriarchal norms within a unified racial existence,[45] further tangling your existence and position in society. Rankine does not seek to untangle your existence or explain the situation to the point of crafting a moral, but presents it and invites the reader to sit in the moment and feel the often ignored knots that cannot be spoken or when spoken are usually ignored.
You also put your body “there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within,”[46] this man. You deny your subjectivity so that he may exist. You support and arguably fight for the existence of this man, only for him to continue gazing out the window, until he needs you again.[47] Your body exists to fill this space,[48] even though this space isn’t yours and actually has nothing to do with you.[49] We are seen in these gaps, in our relationship to the non-Black woman or Black man. We are projections of perceptions, signs to support white femininity or Black masculinity, preventing us from gaining a “real” subjectivity in society.[50] We are a bridge that fills gaps in the identities of others, not independent beings in ourselves,[51] just as this poem fills the gap between two pieces, both of which speak of universal violence faced by Black bodies, but neglect the names or subjectivity of Black women. You are not there.[52] You are an erased thought.[53] You are simply a tool to highlight his predicament.
Conclusion
Rankine is not-telling you of this complicated Black feminine existence. She creates a scenario in which said confliction and the pain of ignorance for your obligatory service of perceiving and “suddenly rushing”[54] to the man’s needs are felt, even if they aren’t fully understood by the reader. She complicates the historical universality of Invisible Man, “the site of invisibility and projection so firmly fixed in within the American cultural imaginary,”[55] and “restage[s] … the universal,”[56] by introducing the presence of a silent Black woman sitting, who is “simply … a person/in a seat on the train.”[57] By existing, Black women “make … room,”[58] for the existence of others.
Notes
[1] Hammer Museum, “Public Fiction.”
[2] Public Fiction, “A Public Fiction & Tragedy + Time.”
[3] Hammer Museum.
[4] Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric, 123.
[5] ibid, 131.
[6] ibid.
[7] Saunders, “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip,” 72.
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid, 73.
[11] Rankine, 133.
[12] ibid, 131.
[13] ibid.
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid, 134.
[16] Saunders, 74.
[17] Ellison, Invisible Man, 7.
[18] Saunders, 72.
[19] Rankine, 131.
[20] Ellison, 3.
[21] Rankine, 132.
[22] Ellison, 3.
[23] Rankine, 131.
[24] Brody, “Belaboring the Point….,” 65.
[25] ibid, 63.
[26] Rankine, 131.
[27] ibid, 132.
[28] Copeland, “‘Bye, Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat.,” 67.
[29] ibid, 66.
[30] Rankine, 131.
[31] ibid.
[32] ibid.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid, 133.
[35] ibid, 132.
[36] ibid.
[37] ibid, 124.
[38] ibid, 132.
[39] ibid, 131.
[40] ibid, 128.
[41] Rushin, “The Bridge Poem,” 33–35.
[42] ibid, 33.
[43] Rankine, 131.
[44] ibid, 131.
[45] Rushin, 34.
[46] Rankine, 131.
[47] ibid.
[48] ibid.
[49] ibid.
[50] Copeland, 64.
[51] Rushin, 33–35.
[52] Rankine, 120–35.
[53] ibid, 132.
[54] ibid, 131.
[55] Copeland, 68.
[56] ibid.
[57] Rankine, 132.
[58] Rankine, 130.
Bibliography
Brody, Jennifer DeVere. “Belaboring the Point …” In Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Copeland, Huey. “‘Bye, Bye Black Girl’: Lorna Simpson’s Figurative Retreat.” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (2005): 62–77.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. Second Vintage International. New York City: Random House, 1995.
Hammer Museum. “Public Fiction.” Made in L.A. 2014 (blog), 2014. https://hammer.ucla.edu/made-in-la-2014/public-fiction.
Public Fiction. “A Public Fiction & Tragedy + Time.” Public Fiction (blog), 2014. http://www.publicfiction.org/apublicfiction.html.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.
Rushin, Kate. “The Bridge Poem.” In The Black Back-Ups. Ithaca: Firebrand Books, 1993.
Saunders, Patricia. “Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive: A Conversation with M. NourbeSe Philip.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 63–79.