Abstract
This essay considers Jamaican-born American poet Claudia Rankine’s 2004 multimedia prose poem, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, as an exploration of both the individual and the collective traumas of living in a society that has been deeply wounded by the attacks. Tabone discusses both the content and the form of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely through an interpretive framework based on sociologist Arthur Frank’s conceptualization of the “illness narrative”, as outlined in The Wounded Storyteller. He argues that the fragmentary structure of Rankine’s fictional autobiography embodies the “narrative wreckage” that Frank argues must be worked through in order to heal, especially from traumas of post-9/11 America that Rankine connects to deeper, longer-running social ills arising from racial tensions and late capitalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
See Simon Stow’s “Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief”. Stow’s forceful essay links the “pornography of grief” to such pathologies as voyeurism, melodrama, addiction, manipulative “patriotic” jingoism, and “empty nationalism” (238).
- 2.
Creeley’s words appear in the back matter of Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.
- 3.
Emma Kimberley observes that the Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s dimensions mimic those of a miniature newspaper (782).
- 4.
Frank’s description, of course, shares a kinship with the classic structure of trauma. Bessel Van der Kolk and Onno Van der Hart describe “traumatic memories” as “unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experiences, which need to be integrated with existing mental schemes, and be transformed into narrative language” (Caruth 176).
- 5.
The term “biopsychosocial” was first used by George Engel in 1977’s “The Need for a New Medial Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine”.
- 6.
Bush famously said, “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” (qtd. in Kimberley 779).
- 7.
See Nadine Naber’s “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11”, 235–67.
- 8.
For more about race and the representation of police in post-9/11 culture, see Jeffrey Melnick’s 9/11 Culture, 103–106.
- 9.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’s approach to embodiment can be understood as aligned with the political projects of material feminists who would “re-enflesh” the Cartesian subject of modernity to retrieve “the ineliminable dependence of the inside and the outside, mind and matter, on each other” (Grosz 28), and materialist feminists who insist on “inserting the social subject […] into the historical contest over meaning and resources” in ways that learn from but surpass postmodern and poststructuralist constructivisms in historicity, scope, and most importantly, agency (Hennessy xviii).
- 10.
These statistics on antidepressants can be found in “A Glut of Antidepressants” by Roni Caryn Rabin in the online New York Times’ blog, The Consumer, 12 August, 2013.
- 11.
See Rankine’s endnote about Prozac Weekly (141).
- 12.
The 400 % increase in antidepressant use since 1988 is documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. See Pratt, et al., NCHS Data Brief Number 76, October 2011, “Antidepressant Use in Persons Aged Twelve and Over: United States 2005–2008”, at CDC.gov .
- 13.
See Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, 195–201.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 83–109. Print.
Berger, James. “There’s No Backhand to This.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 52–9. Print.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Print.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1995. Print.
Engel, George. “The Need for a New Medial Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine.” Science 196 (1977): 129–36. Print.
Fracassa, Moira. “Medicating the Self: The Roles of Science and Culture in the Construction of Prozac.” Journal of Popular Culture 32.4 (1999): 23–8. Print.
Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Print.
Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia, 2005. Print.
Greenberg, Judith. “Introduction.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. xvii–xxiv. Print.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1994. Print.
Hennessy, Rosemary. Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
Herndl, Diane Price. “Critical Condition: Writing about Illness, Bodies, Culture.” American Literary History 10.4 (1998): 771–85. Print.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.
———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.
Keniston, Ann, and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. “Introduction. Representing 9/11: Literature and Resistance.” Literature after 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 1–15. Print.
Kimberley, Emma. “Politics and Poetics of Fear after 9/11: Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.” Journal of American Studies 45.4 (2011): 777–91. Print.
Kleinman, Arthur. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Print.
Laub, Dori. “September 11, 2001—An Event without a Voice.” Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Ed. Judith Greenberg. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 204–15. Print.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969. Print.
Melnick, Jeffrey. 9/11 Culture. Cinchester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1995. Print.
Naber, Nadine. “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11.” Cultural Dynamics 18.3 (2006): 235–67. Print.
Ogbuagu, Buster C. “Constructing America’s ‘New Blacks’: Post 9/11 Social Policies and their Impacts on and Implications for the Lived Experiences of Muslims, Arabs, and Others.” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 4.1 (2013): 469–80. Web. 20 Jul., 2014.
Pratt, Laura A., Deborah J. Brody, and Qiuping Gu. “NCSH Data Brief Number 76: Antidepressant Use in Persons Aged 12 and Over: 2005–2008.” CDC.gov . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Oct. 2011. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.
Rabin, Roni Caryn. “A Glut of Antidepressants.” The Consumer. The New York Times. 12 Aug. 2013. Web. 27 Dec. 2014.
Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul: Graywolf, 2004. Print.
Rettalack, Joan. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. ebrary. Web. 28 Dec. 2014.
Rothberg, Michael. “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art.” Literature after 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 123–42. Print.
Sadoff, Ira. “On the Margins: Part Two.” American Poetry Review 35.2 (2006): 51–5. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 18 Jul. 2014.
Stow, Simon. “Portraits 9/11/01: The New York Times and the Pornography of Grief.” Literature after 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 224–41. Print.
Versluys, Kristiaan. Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Print.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tabone, M.A. (2016). Narrative Wreckage: Terror, Illness, and Healing in the Post-9/11 Poethics of Claudia Rankine. In: Fragopoulos, G., Naydan, L. (eds) Terror in Global Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40654-1_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40654-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40653-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40654-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)