Claudia Rankine's 'Triage' asks: witness or act?
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- Triage, the latest book by multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet Claudia Rankine, is published by Allen Lane at £22 and described by reviewers as a hybrid of memoir, reportage, essay and lyrical lament.
- The book opens with a disclaimer stating 'Any resemblance to actual persons… is purely coincidental. Unless it isn't,' setting a tone of assertive ambiguity about truth and representation.
- Rankine frames the work around a friendship between her narrator and a figure called 'the theorist,' who met at college in the late 20th century and developed a game of physically collapsing when they spotted each other on campus.
- The protagonists eventually diverge: the narrator becomes a witness who records and grieves atrocities (focusing on images of couches as 'a place to land'), while the theorist insists that the point of falling is to rise and intervene.
- The book cites a contemporary landscape of 'the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change' as the backdrop against which the question of response is posed.
- Rankine ultimately lands on the theorist's insistence that action matters despite uncertain outcomes, quoting the line 'Things are unachievable only when you need the road to be short' over the narrator's 'no solutions, only recognitions.'
Why it matters: Rankine is one of the most decorated American poets of her generation, and 'Triage' reframes the perennial debate over art versus activism not as a binary but as a question every reader must answer for themselves. For a literary audience weighing how to engage with compounding global crises, the book offers both permission to grieve and a push to act.
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