Sunday: The Girlfriend releases a second emergency podcast in response to the #BLM uprising, now in its 11th day in Brooklyn and reaching a mass of continuous national protest that has social historians struggling to find precedents.
Background: In 2017 The Girlfriend created a digital media primer, #100HardTruths, to respond to the Trump administration assault on truth; then she held a subsequent series of poetry workshops centered on the topic of fake news. She’s now creating a podcast series focused on the same poetry and ideas.
Today’s podcast release focuses on work of poet Claudia Rankine, whose works include “Citizen: An American Lyric” (2014), winner of, among other things, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and her husband, filmmaker John Lucas.
I present here the episode’s transcript. You can listen to the episode here. (The previous emergency #BLM podcast transcript, featuring words of Dr. Gabrielle Foreman and poetry by her father, Kent Foreman, is available here.)
[Podcast transcript]
On the ninth day of protest here in Brooklyn, I sent a text to Claudia Rankine, poet, essayist, playwright, editor, and professor at Yale University. Would she engage and contribute what she is so well equipped to offer: hard-earned wisdom about trust, the civic contract, video, poetry, and civil rights for Black Americans?
For this episode, we chose to play the audio from “Situation 8,” one of a series of “Situation” videos Claudia made with her husband, the filmmaker John Lucas, from 2015-2017. These are multi-genre responses to contemporary America that resonate with us, not only as people, but as citizens. In the eleven-minute sound clip that follows, we connect to two HardTruths written in 2017 for my online primer on fake news: #44, Black Lives Matter, and #97, Digital Participation is Reflexive, where I wrote about Claudia’s and John’s poetic approach to video images of black death at the hands of the police. In the primer, I wrote:
“We need to do our best to build the vocabularies and practices that can describe and then improve upon the digital norms by which we now see, engage with, and participate with the world and each other. We need models for responsive, humane systems for sharing, making, interacting, and viewing. In 'Situation 8' we see one attempt to produce an ethical context for seeing: a poetic, historic, lyric, audio-rich analysis that situates unspeakable images between known and unknown viewers who will have to ‘put their trust’ in each other.”
Please be advised, the soundtrack from “Situation 8,” made in 2016, includes graphic audio of violence. The ethical context we suggest for today, for this emergency, is to account for our own reflexive role in these visual regimes and participate in new ways; in this instance, to not look at these and other images of viral black death, but rather to listen, breathe, attend, and then act.
[Following are excerpts of Rankine’s text from “Situation 8.” You can listen to the podcast, including audio of the entire piece, here.]
"Between us, between strangers, our civic contract states: We will act in each other's best interests for no other reason than we are here together."
"We're circling the understanding that daily, we have to take a leap of faith regarding you, in order that we can go on believing in our mobility. Trust is what pledging and allegiance secures. Public trust relies on both an implicit understanding and a mode of seeing. Someone is paying attention. Someone is watching. See."
"If you see something, say something, because we will trust you. Peace of mind gives us the ability to move through our day without fear. It keeps us in our rhythms. It gives us an air of confidence regarding an illusory control of the world around us. We understand what will happen next. And this is crucial to a sense of wellbeing. Even if this control is no control at all."
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