Claudia Rankine Talks to The New Yorker About Her Visit to Ferguson

“Let America Be America Again,” the famous Langston Hughes poem, "has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Poets.org," remarks The New Yorker's Alexandra Schwartz. Claudia Rankine talks to Schwartz about the poem, her new book new book, Citizen: An American Lyric, forthcoming from Graywolf (read an excerpt at Poetry!) and, importantly, how Rankine is finding her visit to Ferguson last week. An excerpt from their interview:

Can you tell me when you came to Ferguson, and why?

I had no idea that I was coming to Ferguson. I was invited by the Pulitzer Foundation months and months ago, to come here and show some videos that I do with my husband, called “Situation videos.” So this trip was scheduled long before Ferguson was “on the map,” let’s say. Ten days ago, when Michael Brown was shot in the head twice, with the additional other four shots to the body, I realized that I was coming here. So then I extended my trip a few days so I could go to Ferguson.

I’m staying in a hotel in St. Louis. After I get off the phone with you, I’ll drive up to Ferguson with a reporter from the Spectator, and we’re going to go to coffee shops and just ask people what they’re thinking right now and how they’re feeling. I think it’s interesting because so far the people I’ve spoken with—the black people, the African-Americans that I’ve spoken with—there’s something about the fact that Michael Brown was shot in the head twice that they can’t—that’s the sticking point. Not that the first bullet wasn’t a problem. But the sort of execution-style shooting takes it to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around. There’s that video of the police just pacing back and forth and the uncovered body just lying there for hours; where no ambulance, no anything.

The poem “Let America be America Again” has been seen tens of thousands of times on Poets.org over the past few days—more than thirteen thousand people have read the poem on the site, and twenty-five thousand have come to it through social media.

Langston Hughes, for me, was always the poet of the people. There actually were some interesting controversies between him and others around writing from the voice of working-class people versus the “talented tenth,” but he’s always expressed the feeling of the man on the street. And that poem “Let America Be America Again”—what’s important in that poem is that he says, “America never was America to me.” The poem calls for an America that has never existed for certain segments of the population, to try to arrive there. It addresses that aspirational moment in the hearts and feelings of African-Americans and minorities who walk around every day, thinking—knowing—that there are two Americas, and there have always been two Americas.

Read it all at The New Yorker. Also: We cannot wait for that book, shown above.