In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?
The book begins with a friendship. Two young people – our narrator, and another she refers to only as “the theorist” – meet in college in the late 20th century, and are drawn to each other. They’re passionate; they’re idealistic; they’re committed to the activism of the time (“shantytowns were built on campus to protest apartheid South Africa”) and steeped in the texts and authors and philosophical conceits of the humanities.
Over time, they develop a game. They become known for it (“Aren’t you the two who fall?”), even though they themselves don’t seem, fully, to understand what their falling means. That it is a response to the “toomuchness” of the world around them, to “all the fevered wretchedness we had no answers for”, is without question.
But what exactly the response itself signifies is less clear. Looking back from a vantage point 40 or more years into the future, the narrator offers a range of possible interpretations: “a refusal of continuance”; “a way to say things were unaligned”; perhaps just “the easiest way to keep from breaking apart”. But between the narrator and the theorist, the meaning of the game is never definitively pinned down.
And it is perhaps this ambiguity that exists between them, even at the heart of a game that binds them to each other, that eventually drives them apart. The years pass; the world becomes wilder, more brutal, less sane; the crises and disasters to which the theorist and the narrator could, or should, respond multiply and intertwine. In the face of this worsening world, what began as a hair’s-breadth difference in the interpretation of their college game widens into a chasm.
On the one side, the narrator sees her role as one of witnessing: her purpose, as she perceives it, is to record the atrocities around her, to acknowledge them, to mark them and to grieve them. Her work takes her into art criticism, and she focuses on images of couches, because “within the collapse, [they] seemed a place to land”. The theorist, on the other hand, is not content with reaction; they are compelled to act.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
