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from
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
| Cornel West makes the point that hope
is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential
election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want
to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts,
the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.
However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten
days later and we would still be in the throes of our American
optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush
himself, the same Bush who can’t remember if two or three
people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death
in his home state of Texas. |
 |
| You don’t remember because you
don’t care. Sometimes my mother’s voice swells and
fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush’s
case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don’t
remember because you don’t care. |
 |
| Then, like all things impassioned,
this voice takes on a life of its own: You don’t
know because you don’t fucking care. Fuck you. |
 |
| I forget things too. It makes me sad.
Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the
recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions
of lives, my sadness is alive inside the recognition that
billions of lives never mattered. I don’t know, I just
find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new
tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw:
IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into
no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel
West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too
nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to
experience, too close to dead is what I think. |
—Claudia Rankine
|
Claudia Rankine coedited American
Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language with
Juliana Spahr.
Her fourth collection of poems, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely,
will be published next fall.
Originally published
in the Summer 2003 issue of Boston Review
|
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