UNINHABITABLE MOMENTS:

Abstract

On a chilly autumn day on November 9, 2015, at then-US presidential candidate Donald Trump's campaign rally in Springfield, Illinois, a Black woman later identified as 23-year-old writer and student Johari Osayi Idusuyi was “caught reading” while seated directly behind the candidate in plain sight of recording cameras and the court of public opinion. The footage capturing this moment of Idusuyi's defiant act of reading in public and refusal to comply with demands to stop from white rally participants encircling her immediately went viral on numerous social media platforms. When probed about her specific reading selection— Claudia Rankine's blistering 2014 poetic collection, Citizen: An American Lyric — Idusuyi later claimed, “I was just reading the book at the time” (Brown 2015). In fact, Idusuyi noted that she was also reading Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist , but did not bring it with her to the rally. Whether dissimulation or serendipity, Idusuyi's bold choice to center, both visually and symbolically, Rankine's stirring poetic ruminations on racism, antiblackness, citizenship, racial violence and microaggressions in the twenty-first-century United States alludes to a long tradition of civil disobedience and pacifist political opposition. Idusuyi performs peaceful protest through public reading— acting smart — and transforms Rankine's award-winning fifth poetic collection, Citizen , into a tangible object of resistance. Rankine frames the discussion of racist assaults on Black womanhood by emphasizing the distinct environments in which they occur. From the blatant bigoted comments of a cheating classmate in an elementary school classroom, discriminatory rants in the confined space of a car and the roaring clash of mistaken identity at the doorstep of a house, on the one hand, to the broad reach of a nationally syndicated radio show or an internationally televised professional championship tennis tournament, Rankine reconstructs these “uninhabitable moments” to expose both the private and public, the individual and systemic orbit of racism in America. In the quotidian recollections, social commentary and stirring analysis Citizen presents, the reader is reminded that for Black women reading and writing poetry of everyday life is sometimes the strongest opposition to the stereotypes that attempt to ensnare them, and that the distance between the occurrence of “uninhabitable moments” and the eruption of brutal racial violence is precariously short.