The Brooklyn Rail

“I was writing in a notebook what seemed to me to be episodic meditations on what it means to live simultaneously in community and in isolation,” Claudia Rankine writes in the thoughtful new preface for the twentieth-anniversary reissue of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf Press 2024). Though Rankine might not have imagined—nor we—the momentous isolation and divisive environments we would be living through decades later, this American lyric is not only of its time but our time.

What does it mean to be in community—more virtual, more bifurcated—now?

And in the wake of COVID-19, what does isolation, whether chosen or imposed, do to the human spirit? Have we evolved into different creatures from what we once were, with shorter attention spans, greater grievances, lonelier in tighter quarters? In this new edition, Rankine of today converses with Rankine of the nascent twenty-first century. Similarly, I wonder how much of the Chaffa of 2004, still remains. Have I sloughed so much psychic skin in the last twenty years, the last five years, the last ten months, that I am no longer related to who I was—or thought I was—two decades ago?

•••

It’s taken me weeks, more, to finish this essay—writing and cutting words like Edward Scissorhands at a hair convention—because of self-doubt, imposter syndrome, many months of hesitation about whether or not I am a critic, or a writer, or whether I belong in such heady climes. As the deadline started knocking insistently on my door, disturbing the neighbors through thin walls, it occurred to me that Rankine purposely elected to call her trilogy “an” American lyric. That “an” nudges me to lean into what my lyric might be, and how Rankine’s landmark volume speaks to and for and about us.

Rankine’s interiority is powerful; and her vulnerabilities a secret weapon. I don’t mistake it for knowing her; we all create an assumed self, a narrative soundtrack of where we’ve been, perhaps an attempt to explain how and why, perhaps to justify this one life we’re given, and what we’re doing with it. Or as she writes: “Lonely was fictive though everything had happened.”

How much of me is fictive, and how much is real? How can I possibly know?

•••

Even as I scroll through Twitter (now X), Instagram, Slack, all the rest, with slightly different screen names in each, what is the geometry of the self, spread across so many vehicles that disembody us, perhaps disintegrate us? A piece of me on this paper, on social media, in my relationships, a fragmented scattering that doesn’t alight anywhere deeply enough to flower. I’ve been Xeroxing myself for so many years now that the original map no longer indicates direction nor location.

Claudia—may I call her Claudia?—writes in the new preface: “The use of the first person throughout Lonely  functions as a strategic decision I came to in an attempt to maintain a form of intimacy and agility within the prose poems themselves. The first person seemed more a rudder than an authentic self as I had been schooled to believe it should be by the traditional lyric.… Anybody could embody the first person and be our guide through the text.”

Authentically or not—deservedly or not—here I am acting as a guide, as well as the guided.

When Lonely was released, I was still sharply black-suited, resolutely heeled and tethered to financial America, where I contemplated corporate strategy more than contemporary poetry. I was living an imagined life: a workaholic immersed in Japanese language, West African dance and other disparate activities as a way to hedge against disbelonging, which had been my steady shadow since we moved to the United States. With English as a second language, I have been translating—in translation—since I was five years old. Never American enough nor Iranian enough (or corporate enough or literary enough), I shifted and shimmied to be a good citizen, to be accepted and not stand out. Standing up, standing out makes one a target.

•••

Twenty years ago, for a variety of medical reasons, I left that corporate life. I always term it that way—my corporate life—as if it were a physical existence, and there was a precise time of death to it. It was a lingering passing though, because for a long while, I couldn’t imagine not returning to those thinner-aired offices. Ultimately, it became clear that there was no going back. The bridge had collapsed, and I along with it.

Without that ending, I wouldn’t be writing this. Here now, as Rankine might say. Twenty years later—twenty years after Lonely was published—2024 has been a year of madcap medical misadventures that sequester me, literally and figuratively, impacting my ability to think and to communicate. Isolated and isolating, I miss the myself-that-was, even as I am forgetting her.

•••

May Sarton wrote “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.” Rankine’s “I” is all the more mighty for its variations—all the more powerful because she allows her identity—her fictive identity—to express what others might secret away. What I have secreted away. I don’t have her talent, her courage, but re-reading this book now, writing about this book now, demands some revealing, if not revelation, some skin in the game, if not entirely Salomé-like.

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is also a commentary on contemporary poetry, “positioned between the theory-driven Language poetry and the tradition of inward-turning writing often described as overheard emotion”—the divide between “lyric tradition and language poetry.”

So here I am, uncredentialed in post-graduate literary education—though when Ms. Maurer the guidance counselor mentioned to sixteen-year-old Mandy that I might think about applying to the Wharton School, I did ask if its founder Joseph was related to Edith. Forty years later, I bet she’s still laughing. It’s that kind of naivete or desire to smash horizon-stifling silos—STEM or the arts—or perhaps clueless hubris that made me think I might have something of value to share in the critical realm, merely five years ago.

The critical landscape also has sharp, spiky silos, with many zip codes that I will not be invited to enter, lyrically or otherwise. The same way that I didn’t belong in the reindeer games in school, how I have never been entirely Iranian, nor entirely American. I’ve contorted myself to fit into capitalism, into the literary sphere, everywhere, employing a poor man’s Cirque du Soleil acrobatics of code-switching and shapeshifting to belong (not really, honey).

An island living on a bustling, anonymous island.

•••

When C-suite clients would ask me about my background decades ago, I’d say “I’m an Iranian Jew. It’s a wonder I don’t hate myself.” Break the ice with a laugh and make them comfortable with my otherness. As I write this, with the ink barely dry on papers of record about barrages of missiles destroying lives everywhere, everywhere, that response feels far too on the nose, less a laugh than a wail. Do I hate myself? Should I?

•••

Here’s a veil or two in honor of Salomé:

My literal isolations began before COVID-19—ironically right when Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was published—as my body inexplicably began to fight itself. A flurry of autoimmune disorders arose like a strange mash-up of Operation and Whac-A-Mole, exacerbated in the last four years by the pandemic into newer immunity challenges. No more sharp black suits and heels. No more West African dance. No more Nihongo. Yet, I still was what I imagined I had been: the one who wasn’t pretty or popular, but was smart, or at least, smart enough.

My underlying issues, chronic fatigue, and their various cousins who have moved in, uninvited, squatters who refuse to depart, leave the lights on and eat all the leftovers, have been especially active the last dozen years. I—who focused on numbers and logic, on metrics, on the provable—am now encamped in an “invisible kingdom,” to use Meghan O’Rourke’s perfect phrase, in a space that can’t be found on a map, that moves and transmutes. I am lost in my own unprotected skin. (“Fail again,” said Beckett. “Fail better.”)

I am an island. Living on an island.

•••

2024.

By the first day of the year, the COVID cherub arrowed me after nearly four years of masked dodging. The duality of masking as a preventative medical practice, and “masking” as an immigrant to gain entry into society isn’t lost on me. The masks did not save me in either event.

(Audre Lorde reminds me: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you … What are the words you do not yet have? … What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”)

•••

Soon afterward, in the wake—apparently as a result—of a new and hopeful immunotherapy treatment, I experienced aseptic viral meningitis twice in four weeks. A kind of reverse lottery with prizes no one wants (second place, a week in Camden. First place, two weeks in Camden!) My brain as I knew it seemed to have left the building with Elvis. There’s enough of that cognitive ghost still echoing about so that I look and sound mostly like “myself,” except when I struggle for the right word, or lose my train of thought, absurdly, which happens constantly. Most of the time, I feel like a Cylon who has just discovered she’s a Cylon, and doesn’t know how to consolidate that lessness with the life she used to lead. Who is the fictive self now?

Every day, I wake into a physical vehicle that looks the same, though it’s more exhausted, more broken, trying to function as I did even a year ago (fail again, said Beckett, fail better), and by moonrise I wonder where the day went and if I accomplished anything. (The answer: no). Accomplishing had always been my way of being allowed—imagining I was welcomed—in the collective.

I’m lonely for myself, the self I used to be. When illness, fatigue, and chronic pain first revised my body and the game plan, like an uncaring editor with a cruel ballpoint, it was manageable. I was always more in my brain than in my body anyway. But now that cognition has been enflamed and ashed like the remnants of a Salem witch trial, I see there was more to lose.

How do I say this so you can understand? I am unlanguaged. Words—my only companions, my steady compatriots, refuse to come to me easily, refuse to be comprehended as they once were. I am no longer guided by your chronology; hours and days lose their clear edges. I have lost my shiny edges.

I have ghosted myself. And when I am in community, whether on Zoom or, more rarely, in person, the energetic dissolution once I’m off, once I’m alone, is almost shocking, because no one sees—and I don’t want them to see—the woman behind the curtain. Yet, the more people may still appreciate the two-dimensional Hollywood sign in red lipstick that I am, the more inauthentic I feel.

•••

Claudia says: “Or, well, I tried to fit language into the shape of usefulness. The world moves through words as if the bodies the words reflect did not exist. The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words: Is he dead? Is she dead? The words remain an inscription on the surface of my loneliness. This loneliness stems from a feeling of uselessness.”

•••

I wake up in the middle of the night, or rather I wake up constantly every night, and watch TikTok on my phone in bed. I should listen to the ocean or the forest or the gentle rain on the Calm app, but I keep returning to TikTok, which is ideally suited to my new rabbit brain, or perhaps it’s the cause of my rabbit brain. There’s a hashtag for #hopecore, full of heartwarming videos (short clips for short attention spans) of soldiers coming home to surprise joyous family members, or students appreciating teachers, or people being kind, and dogs, so many dogs, and I watch and tear up, or perhaps it’s only in the middle of the night that my despair about soldiers young souls who will never come home, forced to fight, to defend themselves harnessed by careless governments across the world, or the students and teachers dying at schools, or the droves of bullies (and bullets) on our airwaves and off overtakes me like tsunamis or the screaming wind or hurricanes, and no amount of dog videos can make that better.

And then I swipe up.

Claudia writes “the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness.”

•••

She writes:

Define loneliness?
Yes.
It’s what we can’t do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other?

The opposite of loneliness is feeling seen, and understood, which of course requires doing the same for others. For most of my life, beyond rogue brain, office politics, physical fluctuations and bad hair days, as an only child and now fully-entrenched in spinsterhood, the arts—theater, books, visual art, and music—provided that connection. They are the difference between the ache of loneliness and the peace of solitude. And at their best, they provide a generative reflection of whatever I am in the moment. Poetry, especially, like theater, offers a relationship. Fiction can too, but for me it’s often more transactional in nature. Poems ask to be re-read over time, with no demand of chronological order, and they feel new, because you are new. They reflect their time, but also your time, and perhaps an eternal present.

•••

My isolation—enforced and chosen—has deboned me. I no longer live in expectation. Which offers its own freedom. What Rankine accomplishes in this re-issue—and what will make you want to read Citizen and Just Us immediately afterward—thrums through our present moment. Is there a generative Us? Who is allowed in? Or is Us just not They—(as Kendrick Lamar verses “they not like us, they not like us”)—

How we contemplate the “Us” also interrogates the “I” or “i-sland” of I. Subsuming in a collective can result in a mob, and surely that’s a source of terror for us in 2024.

I once wrote that I only have a visa for the communities in which I engage, one that can be easily revoked. I make sure to use my best manners, not ask for too much (don’t stand out, never stand out) in the hopes that I’ll be invited to a table—even if it’s the corner kiddie six-top from my childhood. I peer into the room beyond this one, where the grownups are sitting.

The face I’ve shown the world is the face I’ve presumed they want to see. The only one they want to see.

Sitting in these discomforts, the frictions, the contradictions, yields a softening. I feel more and think less. I still have ambitions, though they are more Edith than Joseph. I welcome possibility. But I no longer count on outcome.

What do we give up to be seen and what does it mean to stop caring? I’ve always admired Claudia’s expressions of selfhood, an ever-evolving exterior around a solid core. Her lyric is distinctive and personal, and though on paper we share no similarities other than coming to the US as young children—she: brilliant, a groundbreaker, the center of many wheels—this book feels like it was written for me, for me right now. The reissue Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is less a look back than a reminder of where we are with perhaps a hint—or warning—about where we might be heading.

“I deliberately wrote from a position of incomplete knowing and understanding, not knowing exactly but feeling completely. I allowed hesitancy, worry, fear, apprehension, and need to be my subjects wherever I saw, heard, or felt any or all of these emotions.”

I’m an only child, born in an era and culture where it was noteworthy to be a singleton—I have twenty-nine first cousins—and compounded my archipelagic essence by never marrying or having children, perhaps my only rebellion. Solitariness is my natural state. Whatever focus I have left is now geared to leaning into what is, rather than trying to fit into what never was, which takes more energy than I have. Leaning into vulnerability, into powerlessness, into impermanence. No more perilous high heels.

•••

“When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows.” So starts Citizen, published ten years after Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, murmuring back to the conclusion of this first lyric from 2004, which is so moving, each time that I have re-read it:

Or one meaning of here is ‘In this world, in this life, on earth. In this place or position, indicating the presence of,’ or in other words, I am here. It also means to hand something to somebody—Here you are … Here both recognizes and demands recognition … In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive.

Twenty years later, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely still extends that tender hand, and I receive it. I need it more than ever. I extend my own (trembling, fragile, hopeful) to you. ___ Here.