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Chapter 3
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 protagonist copes with the trials and tribulations of everyday life, sometimes moaning aloud like deer or sighing. Whenever she sighs, the world tells her to stop, but she only sighs again. When she moans, though, the world laughs. Thinking about this, she wonders if she could ever control her sighs, realizing that they’re out of her control because the very things that elicit the sighs in the first place are also beyond her control.
At times, Citizen is an incredibly abstract and poetic book. Because of this, it is often necessary to engage with it on a metaphorical level, refraining from trying too hard to interpret every last detail in a literal sense. Having said that, the sigh the protagonist considers in this section is quite obviously representative of her struggle to cope with the troubling emotions that arise in response to racism and mistreatment. That the world tells her to stop sighing is yet another manifestation of the ways in which society refuses to acknowledge how hard it is to face bigotry on a daily basis, since many people are unwilling to admit the continued existence of racism in the first place. For this reason, the protagonist feels as if her sighs are beyond her own control, since they are involuntary responses to these unfavorable conditions—which are themselves out of her control.
Themes
The protagonist considers the nature of memory, thinking about how it’s often not helpful to remember painful experiences. In fact, the world at large tends prefer to forget about past hardships. As individuals, though, it’s sometimes hard to forget about pain, since emotions are often what make up a person’s identity. For that reason, the protagonist’s various painful memories—which go unnoticed by the outside world—give her headaches. Over time, she stops sighing, but the headaches persist. However, they turn into a certain kind of “numbness” as she glazes over and tries to disconnect herself from her feelings, watching tennis matches with the volume off to distract herself.
The protagonist’s headaches are symbolic of how hard it is to emotionally process the racism she experiences on a daily basis. Unwilling to let herself show outrage like Serena Williams, she holds on to her emotions, and this seems to have a destructive impact on her wellbeing, as evidenced by the fact that she gets severe headaches. The only way to treat this discomfort, then, is for her to go numb, though this is obviously not a great coping technique, since it effectively requires her to shut her feelings off completely.
Themes
Despite the fact that the world at large thinks it’s possible to forget about past hardships and pain, the protagonist knows this is impossible. It is, she argues, simply not an option to ignore the past because it is “buried” inside of people. Still, she continues to try to distract herself from such thoughts by watching tennis with the television muted. When she sees an argument developing between Serena Williams and an umpire, though, she scrambles to turn on the sound. As the protagonist listens to the exchange, a sports commentator wonders aloud if Serena Williams will be capable of moving on from this issue in order to focus on the game. This is a tactic that is all too familiar for the protagonist, who knows that black people are often told, “Move on. Let it go. Come on.”
Once more, the protagonist considers just how hard it is to emotionally process injustice. As the protagonist opts to numb herself to the world, Serena Williams lets her anger show. Unsurprisingly, this grabs the protagonist’s attention, since Williams is effectively doing what she can’t bring herself to do: act upon her rage. Unfortunately, though, she sees that Williams’s anger only invites criticism and patronizing suggestions to “move on.”
Themes
