Cyprus Mail review of Claudia Rankine’s Triage: between grief and hope
In Cyprus, Cyprus Mail published Simon Demetriou’s review of Claudia Rankine’s Triage. The reviewer believes that the work deliberately resists clear genre classification and combines fiction with elements of vaguely defined memoir. In his view, the emotional core of the text is the opposition between hope and despair.
The narrator and “the theorist”
The narrator of Triage is a Black scholar in her early 60s who works on the subject of artistic depictions of sofas and their symbolic meanings. Her interest in the motif of falling emerged in college after she met another central heroine, known only as “the theorist”.
According to the reviewer’s retelling, both women sought an escape from traumatic pasts in college. The narrator experienced domestic violence, while “the theorist” is a Palestinian woman who fled Ramallah in her youth. Their closeness is expressed in a peculiar game: upon seeing each other, they immediately fall down. Demetriou interprets this gesture as a physical and intellectual response to the heroines’ inner state and to the state of the world.
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A refusal in Berlin
Four decades later, the heroines meet again. According to the reviewer’s assessment, the climax comes when the narrator refuses “the theorist’s” request to illegally accommodate a Palestinian refugee couple in her Berlin apartment. Demetriou notes that the reasons for the refusal may be justified, but he himself sides with “the theorist”.
After this episode, according to the critic, the narrative shifts into reflections that seemingly justify the heroine’s decision, and later breaks apart into a prose poem without complete syntactic constructions in response to the question of what can be survived. The reviewer acknowledges the appeal of Rankine’s language and the occasionally captivating allusiveness of her writing, but believes that the text ultimately leans toward grief rather than hope.
