There’s an early moment in Claudia Rankine’s new hybrid memoir “Triage” that’s more than an incitement to keep reading, its an “ars vivendi” as she describes her frequent and artful falling to the ground with a friend:
“There, on the ground, we were as free as we would have ever been—that breathlessness.”
I’ve never had a friend with whom I could fall to the ground. I’m not even certain I would know how to fall. I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s line in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson: wrote: “I would like to learn — Could you tell me how to grow — or is it unconveyed — like Melody — or Witchcraft?”
With Rankine’s falling there is both. Her friend with whom she falls she calls “the Theorist”. They meet first in college. Rankine is Jamaican, the Theorist comes from Ramallah:
“Assaulted by settler forces forcing their will at every checkpoint, the theorist was alive to the randomness of cruelty, the injustice of militarized injustice, the mandate of colonizing rage. They ran at eighteen from Ramallah but weren’t saved by the running. One is always in danger. One is either prey or waiting to be prey, they once said flatly. We were born into occupation, apartheid, war, we are at war, there is war on us. Later, running allowed them to lament, distances contract, running can take you only so far before everywhere is here. No way is out.”
No way is out but falling and witchcraft. The melody of it. One can’t be saved by this, but merely given more time.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University