Follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.
Colorfully, referentially, and intellectually dynamic ... A glossy-paged, art exhibition catalog-worthy book ... Though the narrative’s ending verges on negative abstraction, Rankine clearly demands that we confront our failure to prioritize Gazans and reckon the massive resultant losses, personal, ethical, and human alike.
Most of the book follows Rankine’s narrator as she reflects on her life ... She tries to make sense of her privileged yet vulnerable status in the world ... There is, however, disappointingly little discussion of the apt artistic metaphor on the cover, a photograph from Autumn Knight’s brilliant performance piece 'La Querelle des Monstres,' in which Knight and a collaborator are bound into a conjoined sweatsuit. Imagine Rankine, or her narrator, yoked in solidarity to the theorist ... The culminating conversation between the two is so elaborate, involved and painstakingly transcribed that I wondered if it was an act of autofiction. Their dialogue, even more than the nuggets of daily observations and art criticism, is reason enough to read the book.
Triage traces a winding, unpredictable story of a relationship sustained by choice ... It may be misleading to say that Triage arranges these moments into a 'story' and more accurate to say that it does to story what Citizen and Just Us do to nonfiction: makes it poetic and opens it up to new ways of seeing. It does this partly by repeatedly circling back through images and developing them in new, unexpected directions ... Continues Rankine’s strategy of weaving text and image together, creating a third space of possibility from their contact ... The rhythm and sound of the language create a feeling of static noise interrupted by occasional glitches. The final passage does not end with a period. The language has collapsed.
