The Historical Self

Dear Claudia Rankine,

As I was reading you book Citizen: An American Lyric, I was interested by the way you characterized the black body as historically tied and unfiltered from the outside world.  You mention that “you take in things you don’t want all the time”, and “the outside comes in” without provocation. This seems to be a defining aspect of the black experience in America as your words reminded me of a part from Theme for English B. In the poem, Hughes defines his identity by his external experiences saying, “I guess I’m what I feel and see and hear”, and for him, “It’s not easy to know what is true” about his identity, as it is constantly defined by outside forces and historical precedent. You say that “the past” is “buried in you” to the point where your body becomes a “public place”, trapped and defined by the racial imagination of others so that “you don’t belong so much to you”. I never knew a person could be so inextricably tied to the past and their historical self. In that way, it seems as though people living in a black body are trapped or enslaved, or as Logic puts it in his song ‘Black SpiderMan,’ “a slave to the stereotype”, as “the past is a life sentence”. I realized my ability to be closed off the world and the past is a privilege. We have to break down the systems of oppression that still persist. I don’t know how yet. You are a genius. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Sophie Devincenti

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