Loneliness, Grief and the (Un)Caring State

Collective Ailments in Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

Abstract

This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) from the perspective of “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005) such as disavowed mourning (Butler, 2004, xiv) or loneliness in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Following Butler’s contention of the hindered possibility for community in the recognition of US national vulnerability (2004), I will argue that Rankine’s work underscores the disparities in public recognition of grief and private care for Othered subjects’ pain. In particular, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely displays a series of physical and mental collective ailments in US citizens, such as medicalized depression, as Rankine attempts to bear witness to the institutionalized injustice and erasure of the violence exerted upon America’s precarious bodies, enacting a form of recognition, only if temporary, through the fragmented use of the narrative/lyric ‘I’.