The Power of Words

Dear Claudia Rankine,
While reading your book Citizen: An American Lyric, I became acutely aware of your focus on the power of words. Names and terminologies all have immense weight and often contain entire identities in a single word. In your stories and poems, you recount experiences in which your name was taken from you and you were mistaken for another person solely because of your race - that it’s a “all black people look the same” moment; experiences in which others’ sentences have the ability to physically affect you; experiences in which your words were discredited because of your identity. You often repeat phrases such as, “What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my  mouth, his mouth, your mouth?”

Where does this power originate? How did words come to hold such strength and meaning? And how does one find the ability to break free of the constraints of words?
Sincerely,

Lucy Sandeen

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