How can we live when suffering is endemic and protest ineffectual? Should we honour the legacy we’ve inherited on the left and put ourselves on the line, again and again, though there’s the risk that we only damage ourselves? Or should we give up hope of political change and take refuge in the personal, grieving our losses? These questions run through Triage, Claudia Rankine’s bold and necessary new book. “Every move feels like one of triage,” the narrator says. “We are meant to absorb and accept the pained and callous position of witness and observer until we reach levels of desperation that are crippling.”
Rankine is one of the foremost poets working in the US today, and a vital public intellectual – the master of defiantly didactic, prose-inflected poetry. In Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014) and Just Us (2021) – which together make the American Lyric trilogy – she examined racial politics in America. Through interrogating white privilege, racist aggression and micro-aggression, she produced grandly ambitious work that aimed at renovating US politics and literature. Citizen became the first poetry book to become a New York Times top ten bestseller on the paperback non-fiction list and won numerous awards.
Rankine is also invested in visual art, making video essays with her husband John Lucas, and her books are full of unsettling, often unexplained images, from Turner’s slave ship to works by an array of contemporary artists working across media. Her books, too, are laid out as works of art: raucous protest images are left on the page unexplained, askance from the text, and the spacing and blank pages are themselves meditations on silence.
In Triage, Rankine turns to prose, somewhere between memoir and fiction. It seems simpler than the trilogy, with a straightforward “I” voice, but it’s ultimately even more elliptical. It does have a simple premise. As an undergraduate 40 years ago, the narrator had an intense friendship with another student she thought of as a sister. The pair listened to Prince, ate granola, talked at dawn in the narrator’s top bunkbed, and developed a habit of collapsing to the ground together – an act of both protest and of faith. “Looking back, I think our falling was a refusal of continuance, refusal of the illusion of flow, a recognition of injury, ours, everyone’s, as we travelled through time.” Then the friend, known as “the theorist” they would later become, went off travelling and wrote the narrator a letter that was a declaration of love: “Your hold on me is like a current pulling me even as my toes try to dig into sand.” The narrator failed to respond, and the friendship became gradually attenuated to the point that the narrator now knows the theorist mainly from their books and lectures. However, they get back in touch, and two turbulent – simultaneously spiky and vulnerable – encounters are recorded in intricately dramatised scenes.
In her trilogy, Rankine explored how we belong to each other by bringing together storytelling and image and political analysis. The title of Just Us was spliced out of the word “justice”; Rankine was asking if it was possible to construct a fully just world out of just interpersonal interactions – and if it was the small everyday moments of injustice that were creating the larger injustices of the world around her. In Triage she offers a new vision of belonging, one that is less accusatory because it is full of novelistic richness.
The narrator and the theorist first came together in a relationship fuelled by all the best possibilities of intimacy: passion and rage shared at that moment of young adulthood which is most rich with metamorphosis and mutual inflection. Yet it’s clear in their two later meetings that these people can no longer belong to each other as they once did – though there’s a sign of hope when the theorist places a hand on the narrator’s thigh and the weight pulls her back “to sitting without pressure, without force. A stone falling through water.” The book asks what we’re left with if even this type of togetherness is unsustainable, and analyses this predicament with lyrical mournfulness.
At the book’s heart is the cruelty splintering the friendship. In some ways, this is the story of an idyllic friendship that goes wrong under the pressure of history; but it’s a strength of the book that this cruelty is present from the start, in the narrator’s failure to respond to the theorist’s letter. Unanswered post is a great literary trope, and this letter, with its red and blue airmail markings and its courageous tenderness, accrues a kind of tragic power over the course of the book. Indeed, it may be because of that letter that when the two characters eventually meet, it’s the theorist who’s cruel, testing the narrator’s faltering commitment to political resistance with a demand they suspect she’s unable or unwilling to fulfil. Will she house a Palestinian refugee couple in her Berlin flat, the theorist asks? The narrator – set up to fail – refuses to break the law. It’s a small thing to do, the theorist insists. Weakly valiant, the narrator asks: “In what world is a black person existing up against the wishes of the state a small thing?”
This argument crystallises the discussion they’ve been having in both encounters. The theorist insists that the narrator should act now as she did in her twenties – protesting, fighting and believing that a better world is possible. The narrator tries to argue that her exhaustion and impotence isn’t merely hers: “As far as I know no one has taken out a patent on the right response to now,” she snaps. The triage of the title is a state we might get stuck in perpetually, because in a world in which we’re presented with new forms of violence, day after day, we don’t have time to move beyond assessing the situation for damage, to a place where active redress is possible.
It may be a flaw in the book that the narrator emerges as considerably more likeable than the theorist – primarily because she’s the only one capable of self-critique. “Weren’t we meant to reduce impact, catch ourselves, break the fall? When did these hands become too busy breaking to extend?” the narrator asks herself, lamenting that “I was never freely we and now I am less so”. But I think it’s brave of Rankine – who herself runs risks in the trilogy with the loftiness of her didacticism – to double down on the sanctimoniousness of the theorist, who has always been “duct-taped” together by “definitive statements”. Rankine, who has taught at universities throughout her adult life, was formed in the great age of literary theory. It seems she now needs to acknowledge the censoriousness and oppressiveness that existed in the theoretical project alongside its transgressive, emancipatory aspect.
It’s the narrator’s capacity for self-critique and irony that makes the book a complex success. “We are trying to gain footing by landing without putting our hands out to any other. It’s heartbreaking, truly,” the narrator writes, as hope is gradually swallowed up by mourning. Rankine speaks for all of us here, as she always has. And Triage is a profound meditation on the legacy of radicalism, the fraught but vital possibilities of friendship, the relationship between personal and political forms of love, and the question of whether we can still trust one another enough to collapse alongside one another.
Lara Feigel is the author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins)
Triage: Truth, Art and Fiction
Claudia Rankine
Allen Lane, 208pp, £22
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[Further reading: Mario Vargas Llosa’s demons]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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