The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis<\/p>\n
\u201cAny resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or\u00a0actual events is purely coincidental,\u201d writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. \u201cUnless it isn\u2019t.\u201d The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that\u00a0digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us \u201cto hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for\u201d. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her\u00a0personal history and from a\u00a0world\u00a0whose landscape now encompasses \u201cthe rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change\u201d, and uses the material she gathers to\u00a0pose a simple question. When faced\u00a0with realities such as these, what\u00a0do you do? Do you stand, or do\u00a0you fall?<\/p>\n
The book begins with a friendship. Two young people \u2013 our narrator, and\u00a0another she refers to only as \u201cthe\u00a0theorist\u201d \u2013 meet in college in the late 20th century, and are drawn to each other. They\u2019re passionate; they\u2019re\u00a0idealistic; they\u2019re committed to the activism of the time (\u201cshantytowns were built on campus to protest apartheid South Africa\u201d) and steeped\u00a0in the texts and authors and\u00a0philosophical conceits of the humanities. Over time, they develop a\u00a0game. \u201cWhen we spied each other during the day,\u201d the narrator explains, \u201cwe had to collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/5b00644b8b27e70a9643a8d789e982cc16fc5d77\/309_117_1046_836\/master\/1046.jpg?width=140&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=a695e2cfe920807badfc5e9fac902cbb\" "\\"Triage")
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