Saturday, October 3, 2015

My hero / Claudia Rankine by Sandeep Parmar

Claudia Rankine


My hero: Claudia Rankine by Sandeep Parmar

The Forward prizewinner’s portrait of racism in the US is not just realistic, it captures a poetic truth beyond facts


 Sandeep Parmar
Sat 3 Oct 2015


C
laudia Rankine’s collection of tense lyric essays Citizen this week won the Forward prize for best collection. The book recounts both quotidian racist “microaggressions” and internationally reported police brutality and violence targeting black Americans. I teach a course on women’s writing, and we read Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Adrienne Rich, and CD Wright’s One With Others, but it is Citizen that sticks with my students.


I’ve long admired Rankine’s work as a poet and anthologist. Her innovation of form – extending a tradition of prose poetry into visual and textual collage – is a challenge to any poetic avant garde (on either side of the Atlantic) that believes so-called identity politics is incompatible with aesthetic experimentation. Her 2004 book, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, also comprises lyric essays which, like those in Citizen, paint a grim but realistic picture of post-9/11 America.
What Rankine uncovers is a poetic truth beyond facts, one that makes space for outrage – and for grief. It haunts me still, as it did when I was first drawn repeatedly into the second-person “you” throughout Citizen. I was reminded of crossing a bridge at night in York many years ago when a group of young white teenagers hissed “I can see you, Paki”.
It is painful to be seen; it is painful not to be seen. Rankine writes “there exists the medical term – John Henryism – for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure.” In Britain, we don’t talk about race and poetry enough. Citizen gives me hope.
Sandeep Parmar’s Eidolon is published by Shearsman



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




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