She continued to experience marginalization and its attendant isolation being a Black woman in America still led to an endless amount of “ethical loneliness,” a term coined by Jill Stauffer in her 2015 book by that name (and cited by Rankine) to describe “the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities.”
Yet as Rankine tells us in her new collection, Just Us, the inclusion of her words did not lead to the inclusion of her person. The perennial stranger suddenly became a household name. She received a MacArthur grant and an endowed professorship at Yale University. Critics lauded the collection, which became a New York Times best seller. Published two months after Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Rankine’s Citizen, with its long poem about police violence, among other things, answered the public’s call for a book that captured the Black experience of racist violence in contemporary America. Rankine’s representation of loneliness was always political as well as personal, which primed her work for mass appeal when nationwide protests against police violence erupted in 2014. Her friends and family treat her poorly or die, both of which, she tells us in painful detail, leave her feeling even lonelier. Her poems are riddled with encounters with strangers who seem to walk into her, who misunderstand her, who make her feel unknown. In books that combine visual art, lyric verse, and prose poems that are a mix of diary and essay, she has recorded memories of her childhood alienation as well as her more recent experiences as a professor and writer. Since the publication of her first book of poetry, Nothing in Nature Is Private, in 1994, Claudia Rankine has been among the best chroniclers of the isolation that stems from this exclusion.
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