Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Citizen: An American Lyric, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy
Identity and Sense of Self
Anger and Emotional Processing
History and Erasure
Summary
Analysis
The speaker ponders the nature of existence and selfhood. She contemplates what it’s like to have a constant “ache,” one that is seemingly impossible to banish. This feeling exists alongside and in combination with a person’s identity. With this in mind, the speaker thinks about the ways in which the self can be divided, thinking about the various “histories of you and you” and how the different sides of selfhood can make it difficult to fully inhabit or understand a singular, cohesive identity.
Once more, the unidentified speaker steps away from the protagonist in order to reflect upon the nature of selfhood and identity. In this capacity, she determines that the pain people feel as a result of racism becomes incorporated into their identities, leaving them to search for ways to cope with this trauma while struggling with the fact that such challenges often factor so heavily into identity construction. This, in turn, interferes with a person’s ability to feel in full possession of their own sense of self, thereby demonstrating why the long history of racism in the United States and the world at large is so destructive to how black people conceive of themselves even in the contemporary era.
Themes
In a section entitled “July 13, 2013,” the protagonist thinks about numbness. One of her friends has written about how humming numbs him to certain things, and this reminds her of the way she often sighs. She realizes that her sigh has become quieter than it used to be. This, she thinks, is because she is getting older and is getting used to the “ache” she constantly feels. That morning, she is driving with her partner when they hear a man in a neighboring car (perhaps at a stoplight) say something racist while listening to a radio broadcast about Trayvon Martin. The protagonist’s partner jumps out of the car, wanting to yell at the man, but the protagonist tells him to stop. She ushers him back into the car, sensing that his actions could put her in danger.
July 13, 2013, was the day that Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted, as a jury ultimately found him not guilty on all counts. This decision incited uproar throughout the United States, as illustrated by the way the protagonist’s partner loses his temper when he hears somebody say something racist in response to a radio piece about Trayvon Martin. Knowing that anger often leads to more harm than good, the protagonist urges him to calm down, having committed herself to going numb—a state of being that has apparently become second-nature to her. This, it seems, is what constant racism does to a person, exposing them to so much pain, anger, and stress that there’s little else for them to do but try to insulate themselves from their own feelings.
Themes
The speaker narrates a conversation she has with her partner. In the conversation, she tells him that she was waiting in her car in a parking lot near some tennis courts earlier that day when a woman drove up and parked in the space across from her own spot. When the woman made eye contact with the speaker, though, she immediately reversed out of the spot and went to park elsewhere. At first, the speaker considered following her to ask why she did this, but she didn’t because it was time for her to get out of the car and go to the tennis court with her racket. Hearing this, her partner asks if she won. “It wasn’t a match,” she answers. “It was a lesson.”
In this moment, the speaker appears to have fully taken the place of the second-person protagonist. Readers can’t help but get the sense that in previous sections this kind of exchange would have been narrated in the second-person, putting the protagonist (“you”) at the center of the action. Here, though, the speaker assumes this position herself, shifting into the first-person in a move that embodies a certain inhabitation of personal agency; instead of feeling at odds with herself because of the way the external world impacts her sense of self, she now fully owns her own cultural positioning, choosing to see adversity not as a debilitating challenge, but as a “lesson.” In turn, she exhibits a resolve to keep racism and mistreatment from having so much power over her internal world, deciding to learn from her negative experiences instead of letting them defeat her, even if her initial response is to numb herself to this kind of pain.
Themes
