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Poetry is probably the last gift economy. Part of the negotiation is to understand that you're going to do something you really want to do, so you're going to take whatever life comes with that.
Claudia Rankine
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Claudia Rankine
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: January 1
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Writer
Kingston
Jamaica
Understand
Negotiation
Comes
Gift
Part
Poetry
Take
Probably
Going
Economy
Something
Whatever
Really
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Life
Last
More quotes by Claudia Rankine
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
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
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
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
I always took note of them, because I think if you're in the black or brown body, you're negotiating them all the time. It's like women taking note of sexism. It's a kind of incoherency that you are constantly negotiating.
Claudia Rankine
I am invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies.
Claudia Rankine
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
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
You become a role model because of what you do as a person. There's a certain point where being a role model might come from standing up for yourself and getting rid of emotion that doesn't belong to you, emotion that is being brought on because of racist actions of others.
Claudia Rankine
Where is the safest place when that place / must be someplace other than in the body?
Claudia Rankine
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
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
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
If you make a mistake, then you should own that mistake.
Claudia Rankine
Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.
Claudia Rankine
Define loneliness? Yes. It's what we can't do for each other.
Claudia Rankine
If you admit to being racist, it says you acknowledge that you are being driven by projections and stereotypes that were formed in the creation of our country. Racism is deeply rooted in America.
Claudia Rankine
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
The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.
Claudia Rankine
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
