Stocks● Neutral
Rankine's 'Triage' Examines Collapse and Quiet Resistance
Rankine's 'Triage' follows a poet who chooses quiet over action as a friend pushes for more. The book rejects easy resistance and ends on a refusal to host a Gaza family.
Continue with
Claudia Rankine's new book, 'Triage,' opens at a lecture where a theorist is asked how they feel about 'what's going on in the world.' The theorist replies: 'Sometimes I want to throw myself in front of a speeding car.' The narrator, a poet nearing sixty, watches from the audience. She has not spoken to the theorist in decades. Their estrangement stems from conflicting responses to personal and planetary distress. The theorist values speech, equating it with action. The narrator values quiet, viewing it as 'a portal to the mystery of an interior life.'
'Toomuchness' is the phrase the theorist uses to describe life in the present. Rankine repeats it as shorthand for psychic overwhelm. The narrator has played at lifelessness since childhood. She enters college 'dead on my feet.' She first spots the theorist tearing down posters of women in bikinis. The theorist's actions remind her of Tommie Smith's and John Carlos's raised fists at the 1968 Olympics. 'One might act despite the impossibility of change or one might act to spite the impossibility of change,' the narrator reflects.