Dr. Javadizadeh said: "This essay began for me when I first read Rankine’s Citizen. I noticed that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—“the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads”—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery. Lowell’s version of the phrase came in a poem called “Man and Wife,” part of his 1959 book Life Studies; both his poem and that book seem to be largely about crises in Lowell’s private life—and nothing to do, or at least nothing obviously to do, with anti-black racism, much less the history of slavery.
"So I started to dig around. Rankine had also said in an interview that she thought Lowell was struggling, in Life Studies, with the construction of whiteness, but that it was hard to find academic work about that. Lowell is one of the poets I work on most closely, and I knew that she was right that there wasn’t much scholarship on his whiteness. (So far as I knew, there wasn’t any!) But I didn’t know, in the first place, what Rankine was seeing when she remarked on this struggle in his work. I looked back to “Man and Wife,” and certain lines in the poem began to suggest to me a lingering anxiety about race. But it was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of the poem that my jaw dropped. Race, it turned out, was all over the early drafts of the poem. Rankine—who had never seen these drafts—had nevertheless intuited something genuinely lurking within the poem. She was right! And I could see, as Lowell revised those drafts into the published poem, how much of his poem’s explicit references to race—and all of its references to blackness—had been scrupulously cut away. I felt like I was seeing a poet whom I thought I knew very well through new eyes. And I had Rankine’s poetry to thank for that.
"That’s what got me started. What got me through the writing was a desire to figure out what Rankine’s intuition about Lowell meant for her own poetry, poetry that I also loved. Basically the challenge I saw Rankine facing was that, on the one hand, the kind of poetry that Lowell had written (introspective, autobiographical, personal) meant a great deal to her, but that, on the other, she had seen how that kind of poetry had been premised (in Lowell’s particular case but also more generally, for the kind of poetry that he represented) on a construction of whiteness that was responsible for historical violence against black people, and indeed for Rankine’s own marginalization. So: how could she write that kind of poetry without replicating its racism? Why would she even try? That’s what I tried to figure out. I learned a great deal in writing the essay: about Lowell, about Rankine, and indeed about my own relationship, as an Iranian-American who has been trained and has worked within predominately white institutions, to whiteness.
"One other thing I wanted to say: I’m deeply indebted to my colleagues in the Villanova English department for helping me do this work. In particular: Lisa Sewell invited me, once I began to talk to her about Rankine and Lowell, to contribute an essay into a volume she was coediting. And then once she saw what I was coming up with, she encouraged me to submit that essay to a journal first. I then brought a draft of the essay to a writing group made up of some other of my colleagues: Joe Drury, Travis Foster, Brooke Hunter, Mary Mullen, and Megan Quigley. They—along with Lisa, who kept editing the piece for her volume and where I’m happy to say another version of it will soon appear—gave me brilliant, crucial feedback. And they encouraged me to send it to PMLA, which was a vote of confidence I really needed at that moment."
