Triage by Claudia Rankine review: 'charting a rekindled friendship'

Claudia Rankine | Tanya Marcuse

Like stilton or anchovies I rather fear that this book – subtitled “Truth, Art and Fiction” – might be something of an acquired taste. Although the publishers claim it is Claudia Rankine’s “most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet”, readers unacquainted with postmodernist thinking and intersectionalist activism might struggle to gain a foothold in the text. I say that as someone pretty well-versed in my critical theory and deconstructionist means of analysis. Heck, I even once translated parts of Jacques Derrida for fun. Or to impress a woman. One or the other. That’s the kind of switchback looping that characterises this volume.

As much as there is anything resembling a plot, what we have is 12 chapters charting a rekindled friendship. The narrator and a character referred to as “the theorist” – did I mention it rather flaunts its academic smarts? – were firm friends in college but drifted apart. But we begin: “If you are human, you might give yourself gifts. Some of us mark years like that. As a result, it was not long before my 60th birthday that I purchased a ticket and attended a lecture by an old friend. Under the spotlight positioned to illuminate their angular face, the theorist stood at a podium centred on a vast stage. I hadn’t seen them in years and the familiarity of their gestures and voice eased me. During the Q&As someone asked how they felt given what’s going on in the world. All was quiet.”

There’s a lot that seems awry. “If you are human?” I rather think most people capable of reading are. Personally, I don’t give myself gifts, I am delighted when I am given gifts. That is, I would aver, the point of a gift. Giving yourself a gift is – well, the word that springs to mind is solipsism, and that seems a horrible prelude.

The theorist and the narrator are paralleled as the one who thinks we must do and the one who thinks we must think. The book riffs on the Antigone of Sophocles, a play concerned with different forms of duty. Should the daughter of Oedipus obey or resist? And what might either decision cost? But here we have something less ambiguous, less complex, less nuanced. So one portion from “the theorist” reads, “There are so many atrocities our governments are promoting in chorus, that I find pulling the anger from the grief is impossible. No to stopping mass murder by ceasing genocide before the genocide. No to trans people. No to choice. No to refugees. No to employment. No to FEMA and USAID. No to free speech. Camps are being built. No one knows who is meant to fill them. Undocumented babies? American citizens? No to healthcare. No to education. No to the Constitution. No to the Bill of Rights. With linguistic acrobatics, no to DEI means no to Black people. No to Latinx people. No to women.” (I’m glad women got in there at the end). This is obviously urgent, obviously grief-ful but equally it has an air of illiberal liberalism; the kind that merrily labelled people as “deplorables”. People with different views might be human too – the ethical stance that Emmanuel Levinas and Simone Weil articulated so well.

The friendship in the novel has a curious kink: both characters enjoyed deliberately falling. Falling and rising are a merism in the book – opposites that create a unity. Some of these passages are acute, others seem indulgent. There are certain repetitions – page 168 reiterates and alters page 24 and its haunting phrase “all my clothes are” [or were] “black because I expected the world to soil me”. There is a leitmotif of looking at art works that involve sofas, and I would much rather have read just an analysis of these works (they include Sarah Lucas and Uta Barth). My bad: they are couches, allowing for a pun on “coucher avec moi”. Quips like “synapse lapse” or “the discomfort of comfort” or “Guilt rhymes with built” or “All is okay. It’s okay. That’s okay. You’re okay, No, no, no. Not okay.” have a Gertrude Stein quality but with less... I think the word I am looking for is shimmer.

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There are moments of brilliance here. The idea of a generation afflicted by the “toomuchness of life” struck me as utterly true. The phrase “sometimes impossible things must be tried” also gave a shudder. Maya Angelou once wrote “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” As someone with totally different life experiences, I cleave to “never let the best be the enemy of the better”.

The title is mentioned but once: “Every move feels like one of triage. We are meant to absorb and accept the pained and callous position of witness and observer until we reach levels of desperation that are crippling. I’m not going to pretend there is anything I could or can or will do to reroute the dying. This truth feels oppressively and deflatingly offensive, while offering no relief, no change, no nothing”. No. Triage is to help the most hurt first, not to engage in an arms race of grievance.

Triage by Claudia Rankine, Allen Lane, £22. Claudia Rankine is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 25 and 26 August.

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