“What would it mean to remain in devastation?”
On Oct. 15, acclaimed poet, playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine posed this question to an audience at Pitzer College’s Benson Auditorium. There, students, faculty and Claremont community members attentively listened as Rankine read sections of her upcoming book, “Triage,” which follows a relationship between a narrator and “the theorist,” reconciling with the despair of worldly decay.
Rankine, a former professor at Pomona College, is the author of a number of poetry books, including “Citizen: An American Lyric” and “Just Us: An American Conversation.” Additionally, she is a recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize. Her work continues to speak to the intimate fault lines of American political systems and social injustices.
Old colleagues, aspiring writers and friends were scattered throughout the rows of seats. Under the low lights of the auditorium, Rankine took to the podium. After prefacing the night, her voice became soft and deliberate as audience members leaned into her words.
Her chosen passages captured the exhaustion that comes with a political and environmental world collapsing in on itself, threatening to implode.
“Pitzer has a tradition of engagement with social and political issues, so [this] seemed like a great place to do one of my first readings from my new book, which addresses issues like climate change and what it means to be in a moment like this one, where so many of our constitutional rights are being challenged or reversed,” Rankine said in an interview with TSL. “Where things we have taken for granted, like the rule of law … an openness to everyone, voting rights … all of them are under attack.”
Rankine’s lyrical and sorrow-ridden words carried across the auditorium, met by a silence that became a testament to the hurt she spoke of. It was evocative of the tension between action and hopelessness when faced with the world’s injustices — a feeling many in the audience knew intimately.
“I love the hybridity in her work,” Pitzer Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Melissa Chadburn said. ”Rankine seems to resist easy compartments, which I think speaks to how complicated our times are.”
Rankine incorporated a series of photographs of reconstructed couches that had challenged the notion of comfortability, making their inherent plushness seem undesirable, through mutilation or by impaling them with sharp objects.
Images of destroyed, repurposed or otherwise sculptural couches flashed across a screen behind her, as her sentences continued to sink into the audience. Rankine explained how the image of the couch represented a wider theme within “Triage.”
“I especially appreciated how Rankine spoke of the couch, particularly the mutilated couch or the metal couch that was more a couch in its aesthetics, then there was the knotted couch, all as a thing refusing its function,” Chadburn said. “I believe she later stated that the sofas are a ‘space to collapse,’ ‘a soft landing before you reach the ground.’”
Rankine said that we are a world of people sitting on couches, oftentimes with no sense of what to do next. For her, instead of being comforting, the couch becomes precarious and a sign of cultural defeat.
“This book explores the difference between surrendering and collapsing,” Rankine said. “I am interested in looking at what it means to recognize that grieving is an appropriate reaction to this moment.”
For many student attendees, who are growing up in an era marked by climate catastrophe and political shifts, this idea felt exceptionally pertinent.
After the reading, students expressed experiencing the very conflict that Rankine’s work spoke to, resonating with her answers to the question of staying hopeful and active when the state of the world feels hopeless.
“Hearing her read in person brought the writing to life in a way I wouldn’t have expected,” attendee Sanja Greenawalt PO ’28 said. “She spoke with a strong, lasting voice that sharpened the words and the piece’s urgency, but also gave her an authority and timelessness.”
Rankine pointed out how quickly we are to assume regeneration, but especially with issues of climate change that she discusses in “Triage,” some of these problems that we now face are nearing a place of irreversibility. She posed the question of what it would mean, for progress, if we embraced the full weight of deeply rooted issues, such as these, without giving up entirely?
For many, her remarks framed the evening around how individuals respond to urgency and precarity. Amidst the rapidity of social media and its culture towards rally and recovery, it was almost sobering to sit with a collective sadness.
“I had to reconcile the facts and feelings of sitting on these comfortable stuffed chairs in the auditorium to receive Rankine’s call for us to get off the couch,” Chadburn said. “Meaning, the main way to consume this text is through stillness and sitting, but then, yes, a sense of urgency does follow.”
As the night concluded, the audience reflected on how to take Rankine’s words when envisioning our future and how to accept devastation with the kind of steadiness that allows for responsible and worthwhile action.
“The text and the reading required some stillness, some thoughtfulness, so our actions that we were then inspired to take were hopefully not hasty,” Chadburn said.
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