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Each of these failures for me is a failure of communication, via a mode of communication that can be violent or meant to behave violently. Butler provides a way of thinking about how language becomes an instrument of violence. And why we feel it as such.

Claudia Rankine

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Claudia Rankine
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 1
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Writer
Kingston
Jamaica
Violence
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Language
Behave
Feel
Violent
Butler
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Butlers
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Communication
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Failure
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More quotes by Claudia Rankine

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I wanted a feeling of accumulation. I really wanted the moments to add up because they do add up. I wanted to come up with a strategy that would allow these moments to accumulate in the reader's body in a way that they do accumulate in the body.
Claudia Rankine
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Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.
Claudia Rankine
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I don't know about forgiving, but it's an I'm still here. And it's not just because I have nowhere else to go. It's because I believe in the possibility. I believe in the possibility of another way of being. Let's make other kinds of mistakes let's be flawed differently.
Claudia Rankine
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I also found it funny to think about blackness as the second person. That was just sort of funny. Not the first person, but the second person, the other person.
Claudia Rankine
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So you're just moving along and suddenly you get this moment that breaks your ability to continue, and yet you continue. I wanted those kinds of moments. And initially people would say, I don't think I have any. Their initial reaction was to render invisible those moments weaved into a kind of everydayness.
Claudia Rankine
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You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.
Claudia Rankine
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I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.
Claudia Rankine
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One of the things that I think about is: How do you make moments that float, transparent? Moments that could just float away. How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning? Why not make a body accountable for its language?
Claudia Rankine
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People expect black women to be angry, irrationally so, without reason. They think we are animals and we go around like the Wild Things.
Claudia Rankine
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I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.
Claudia Rankine
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You want to belong, you want to be here. In interactions with others you're constantly waiting to see that they recognize that you're a human being. That they can feel your heartbeat and you can feel theirs. And that together you will live - you will live together.
Claudia Rankine
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Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.
Claudia Rankine
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I don't think people want to look at problems. They want a continuous narrative, an optimistic narrative. A narrative that says there's a present and a future - and what was in the past no longer exists.
Claudia Rankine
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My tendency is to want to say to the person, Do you understand why I feel this way? I usually do say that. And sometimes it doesn't go well. By this I mean we hit an impasse again. Not that I need to hear exactly what I want to hear, but I need to know I am heard. Those moments make for a better friendship. But I can't let it go. For good or b
Claudia Rankine
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I asked a lot of friends and people I'd meet, Can you tell me a story of a micro-aggression that happened to you in a place you didn't expect it to happen? I wasn't interested in scandal, or outrageous moments. I was interested in the surprise of the intimate, or the surprise of the ordinary.
Claudia Rankine
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I'm not comfortable, for myself and for others. And yet, one has these people whom you trust, have faith in, whom you believe see what you see, and then you come up against a moment where you feel suddenly tossed out. So I was really interested in those moments.
Claudia Rankine
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Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?
Claudia Rankine
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If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.
Claudia Rankine
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I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.
Claudia Rankine
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I think having a term for a condition that is prevalent is useful, because then people understand it as something not particular to them. It allows you not to ask the question, What's wrong with me? and begin to ask the question, What's wrong with this place that I'm in?
Claudia Rankine