CANR
WORK TITLE: There’s Always This Year
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.abdurraqib.com/
CITY: Columbus
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 405
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 25, 1983; married.
EDUCATION:Capital University, graduated.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist and poet. Interviewer at Union Station magazine; poetry editor at Muzzle magazine; columnist at MTV News. Member of Echo Hotel poetry collective.
AWARDS:Poetry prize, Capital University, 2014, for “Hestia”; Callaloo Create Writing Fellowship; Lenor Marshall Prize, 2020, for A Fortune for Your Disaster; McArthur Fellowship, 2021; finalist for National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, Gordon Burn Prize, 2021, and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, 2022, both for A Little Devil in America; Windham-Campbell prize, 2024.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Fader, Vinyl, Muzzle, PEN America, and the Pitchfork website. Author of forewords and introductions of books, including Friday Night Lives: Photos from the Town, the Team, and After, 2020, by Robert Clark; and Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, 2019.
SIDELIGHTS
Hanif Abdurraqib is a journalist and poet. He has worked for Muzzle magazine as a poetry editor, at Union Station magazine as an interviewer, and at MTV News as a columnist. Abdurraqib is also part of a poetry collective called Echo Hotel. His work has appeared in periodicals, including the New York Times, Fader, Vinyl, Muzzle, and PEN America, as well as on the Pitchfork Web site.
(open new) Abdurraqib has written works in a variety of genres, from essay collections to poetry to children’s books. He has also written introductions and forwards of books, including Friday Night Lives: Photos from the Town, the Team, and After and Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. In an interview with Hunter Case, contributor to the Florida Review website, he explained: “I’m actually at a point now where I don’t even think of genre as something that affects my approach to the work. I’m really driven instead by whatever it will take for me to figure out what’s latching onto me at the moment. Oftentimes, so much of my work is driven by my curiosities and knowing that I’m wrong about something.” Abdurraqib continued: “I’m interested in finding whatever avenue it takes for me—not even to find answers, but to find better ways to discuss my wrongness. Sometimes that’s a really long piece. Sometimes that’s a poem, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. But the sooner I gave up the idea of adhering to genre the easier the work came to me.” (close new—more below)
In 2016 Abdurraqib released his first poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, under the name, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib. In this volume he presents prose poems, some of which touch on various important moments in his life. He also discusses the experience of being a young black man growing up in America. In an interview with Kelsey McKinney, Abdurraqib discussed the writing process for the poems in the collection. He stated: “A lot of first books of poems, people craft them over decades. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a collection that was created largely from 2013 to 2015. There’s a little bit of 2012 shit in there, but the work was done in a really short period of time when my life went through almost a decade’s worth of changes. I got married. I moved out of Ohio. I began writing ‘not poems’ for a living.”
Abdurraqib continued: “I think the book meets me in a good place, because I will never be as jarred from comfort as I felt while writing this book. Never in my life again. Because I spent all the time before it looking at the world one way and then I was very quickly in a lot of different arenas forced to view the world in a different way.” Regarding the content of his poems, Abdurraqib told McKinney: “The growing pains are evident in the book. My insecurities are evident. My anxieties are evident. And I’m really proud of that. Once I figured out that I wanted to do this thing that was like good kid, m.A.A.d city-esque. Not a memoir, but a portrait of a child growing up in a changing city into an adult. It was a lot of hard work to recall memories of mine, because I wanted to put some of myself in it.” He added: “It’s not a nonfiction work. But it was hard for me to recall memories and be honest about them. And go back to Columbus and be honest about the city changing and not being what it once was, and have to reckon with that.”
Abdurraqib discussed the book’s title in an interview with Julia Cooper, a writer on the Hazlitt website. He remarked: “In the Wire (the HBO television series) one of the characters says: ‘The crown ain’t worth much if the nigga wearing it always getting his shit took.’ I thought about it, and thought about what themes the book had rattling around it, like themes about displacement and gentrification, and the claiming of space—people having things taken from them that they held close.” In the same interview with Cooper, Abdurraqib commented on his own experiences with death and his mentions of death in the poems in the book. He stated: “I have an understanding of death that won’t allow me to be complacent and not give all of myself to the people I love and care about while we’re all still present. And I think that’s a real gift, and I think part of my writing about that in the book is not necessarily to bum people out, though I’m sure it happens occasionally, but to kind of say: I lived through this, and through that living I found an incredible clarity. I found this joy about understanding that I have limited time here.”
The Crown Ain’t Worth Much received favorable reviews. A critic in Publishers Weekly suggested: “When Willis-Abdurraqib meditates on the dangers of being young and black in America, the power of his poetry is undeniable.” Writing in the Indiana Review Online, Willy Palomo commented: “ The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is not so much a book you read, but one you survive—with Willis-Abdurraqib’s compassionate, elegiac lyric gently pushing you forward through heartbreak and violence.” Palomo added: “Readers quibbling over line breaks are missing the point. There is something much more powerful carrying these poems than you will find in most contemporary U.S. poetry.” Brianna Albers, a reviewer on the Blue Shift Journal Web site, asserted: “There are many things to be said about the début collection of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much : intimate; haunting; an experiment in lyricality, rife with beauty imagery and stunning turns of language. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of the work is its complexity. Each piece is a world unto itself, and yet, each piece is simultaneously a quiet unspooling.” “The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is not a scream nor is it soft spoken; it’s simply poetry at its finest, and only a fool would deny how much that is worth,” commented Julia Gaskill on the Portland Book Review website.
(open new)Abdurraqib’s next book was a collection of nonfiction works called They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays. Like The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, this volume also contains autobiographical elements. It focuses on how music figured into his life, from the song released just after his mother’s death to a song he heard while covering the police killing of Michael Brown. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Abdurraqib’s essays are filled with honesty, providing the reader with the sensation of seeing the world through fresh eyes.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews suggested that the book presented “erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.” “Abdurraqib’s poignant critiques … inspire us to listen with our whole selves,” asserted Annie Bostrom in Booklist.
In Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, Abdurraqib offers musings on the celebrated hip-hop group in the subtitle. Geoff Edgers, contributor to the Washington Post, described the book as “riveting and poetic.” “Go Ahead in the Rain is a no-brainer for devoted hip-hop heads,” commented Carlos Orellana in Booklist. A Kirkus Reviews critic suggested: “Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process.” “It is a love letter and an expression of deep gratitude made personally, and on behalf of a culture,” wrote Aida Amoako in TLS: Times Literary Supplement. Brody Trotter, reviewer in Labour/Le Travail, remarked: “Although a familiarity with A Tribe Called Quest is recommended, the book can certainly be enjoyed by those who wouldn’t consider themselves fans. With Never Go Ahead in the Rain, Abdurraqib creates a lasting work with an ambitious scope.”
Abdurraqib returns to poetry in A Fortune for Your Disaster: Poems. In these works, he explores themes, including music, mortality, race, and daily life. Diego Baez, reviewer in Booklist, asserted: “Undoubtedly, this is the latest entry in what promises to be a long and fruitful career.” A Publishers Weekly critic described the book as “resonant.”
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance finds Abdurraqib examining the meaning of Black performances throughout history. In an interview with Langa Chinyoka, contributor to the Paris Review website, Abdurraqib stated: “As someone who came up performing in multiple ways—as a high school athlete, as a drama-club member, as a poet who reads things onstage—I wanted to step back and ask myself what I believed the fullest and richest interpretations of Black performance to be and, through those interpretations, how I could celebrate it.” He also noted: “It was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn.” Reviewing the volume in Booklist, Allison Escoto remarked: “Startling, layered, and timely, this is an essential, illuminating collection that advances Abdurraqib’s already impressive body of work.” “Social criticism, pop culture, and autobiography come together neatly in these pages, and every sentence is sharp, provocative, and self-aware,” asserted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A writer in Publishers Weekly commented: “Filled with nuance and lyricism, Abdurraqib’s luminous survey is stunning.” Lauretta Charlton, contributor to the International New York Times, described the volume as “a candid self-portrait of Abdurraqib’s experience as a Black man, written with sincerity and emotion.” “Little Devil in America sheds light on repeated acts of joy that lift us during traumatic experiences,” wrote Darryl Robertson in USA Today.
Abdurraqib’s first book for children is Sing, Aretha, Sing!: Aretha Franklin, “Respect,” and the Civil Rights Movement. In it, he provides biographical information on the beloved Franklin. A critic in Kirkus Reviews called the book “a sweet, upbeat testimonial to the ongoing, far-reaching impact of a dearly departed legend.”
In 2024, Abdurraqib released There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. The volume finds him discussing fellow-Ohioan LeBron James, his hometown of Columbus, his family relationships, and the Black experience in America. In an interview with Lex Pryor, contributor to the Ringer website, Abdurraqib stated: “I thought this would be a book about basketball, or this would be a book about my childhood. … But it became a book about place. It became a book about my dad too. A lot of my dad.” In the book, Abdurraqib also shares information about having been incarcerated and having been homeless. In an interview with Tres Dean, contributor to GQ Online, Abdurraqib stated: “To unearth those versions and put them plainly on the page and to assess those versions of myself attempting to do gently and thoughtfully meant that I had to reformat a relationship with how I felt about my past selves and the people who not only loved my past selves but endured them.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “lyrically stunning and profoundly moving” and as “an innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home.” “Every thoughtfully considered and vividly described element and emotion, action and moment, ultimately, connects,” commented Booklist reviewer, Donna Seaman. (close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2017, Annie Bostrom, review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays, p. 20; February 1, 2019, Carlos Orellana, review of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest, p. 18; August 1, 2019, Diego Baez, review of A Fortune for Your Disaster, p. 17; March 1, 2021, Allison Escoto, review of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, p. 9; January 1, 2024, Donna Seaman, review of There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, p. 18.
International New York Times, April 8, 2021, Lauretta Charlton, “Hanif Abdurraqib Celebrates Black Performance,” review of A Little Devil in America.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2017, review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us; January 1, 2019, review of Go Ahead in the Rain; September 1, 2020, review of Friday Night Lives; January 15, 2021, review of A Little Devil in America; December 15, 2021, review of Sing, Aretha, Sing: Aretha Franklin, “Respect,” and the Civil Rights Movement; December 15, 2023, review of There’s Always This Year.
Labour/Le Travail, fall, 2019, Brody Trotter, review of Go Ahead in the Rain, p. 358.
Publishers Weekly, June 20, 2016, review of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, p. 131; August 14, 2017, review of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, p. 62; August 19, 2019, review of A Fortune for Your Disaster, p. 75; January 18, 2021, review of A Little Devil in America, p. 68.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, January 3, 2020, Aida Amok, review of Go Ahead in the Rain, p. 35.
USA Today, April 1, 2021, Darryl Robertson, “Little Devil Examines Joy That Lifts Black Performance,” review of Little Devil in America, p. 8B.
Washington Post, January 28, 2019, Geoff Edgers, “Book World: A True Fan Offers a Riveting Tribute to A Tribe Called Quest,” review of Go Ahead in the Rain; March 18, 2019, Chris Richards, “Will We Ever Really, Truly Know Prince?,” review of Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.
ONLINE
Blue Shift Journal, https:// www.theblueshiftjournal.com/ (September 15, 2016), Brianna Albers, review of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.
Florida Review, https://cah.ucf.edu/ (May 16, 2024), Hunter Case, author interview.
Fusion, http://fusion.net/ (July 20, 2016), Kelsey McKinney, author interview.
GQ Online, https://www.gq.com/ (March 25, 2024), Tres Dean, author interview.
Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib website, http:// www.abdurraqib.com (May 16, 2024).
Hazlitt, http://hazlitt.net/ (January 10, 2017), Julia Cooper, author interview.
Indiana Review Online, https://indianareview.org/ (July 8, 2016), Willy Palomo, review of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 4, 2024), Katherine Rowland, author interview.
Matter, https://www.matternews.org/ (March 25, 2024), Andy Downing, author interview.
Paris Review Online, https://www.theparisreview.org/ (March 31, 2021), Langa Chinyoka, author interview.
Portland Book Review, http://portlandbookreview.com/ (July 5, 2016), Julia Gaskill, review of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.
Ringer, https://www.theringer.com/ (April 3, 2024), Lex Pryor, author interview.
Vulture, https://www.vulture.com/ (March 22, 2024), Giri Nathan, author interview.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hanif Abdurraqib
A photo Hanif Abdurraqib wearing a denim jacket over a black hoodie looking off camera and leaning against a counter.
Hanif Abdurraqib at CityLit 2023 at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore, Maryland
Born August 25, 1983 (age 40)
Columbus, Ohio, U.S.
Occupation Poet, music critic
Genre Poetry, essays, non-fiction
Subject Music, culture, identity
Notable works A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance,
The Crown Ain't Worth Much,
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Notable awards MacArthur Fellow
Website
www.abdurraqib.com/
Hanif Abdurraqib (born August 25, 1983) is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His first essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was published in 2017. His 2021 essay collection A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance received the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.[1][2] Abdurraqib was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.[3]
Abdurraqib's poetry works include the 2016 poetry collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much and the 2019 collection A Fortune for Your Disaster.[4][5] Abdurraqib's 2019 non-fiction book on the American hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes on A Tribe Called Quest,[6][7] was on the long list for the 2019 National Book Award.[8]
Early life
Abdurraqib was born on August 25, 1983, and raised in Columbus, Ohio.[9] He was raised Muslim.[10][11][12] He graduated from Beechcroft High School in 2001.[13] He then attended Capital University, where he earned a degree in marketing and played on the soccer team.[14]
Career
Poetry
Columbus is the setting for Abdurraqib's first book, a poetry collection called The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, July 2016).[15] Publishers Weekly's review noted, "When Willis-Abdurraqib meditates on the dangers of being young and black in America, the power of his poetry is undeniable".[16] The Indiana Review called the collection "expansive and rich...compassionate, elegiac."[17] Fusion called his "poetry a crash course in emotional honesty."[18] Writing of the collection's titular poem, The Huffington Post said Abdurraqib's "chilling take on black death is heartbreakingly true."[19]
Abdurraqib is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow. PBS's Articulate with Jim Cotter described Abdurraqib as "of a generation that is helping to redefine poetry".[20] Blavity called Abdurraqib one of "13 Young Black Poets You Should Know".[21] He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine[22] and a founder, with Eve Ewing, of the Echo Hotel poetry collective. He edited an anthology of poems about pop music called Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart (FreezeRay Press, 2015).[23] In April 2017 his chapbook Vintage Sadness had a limited edition release by Big Lucks, selling out its print run of 500 copies in just under six hours. In August 2017, he was named the managing editor of Button Poetry. On September 3, 2019, Tin House released Abdurraqib's second poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster.[24][25][26]
Abdurraqib was a visiting poet teaching in the MFA program at Butler University during the fall of 2018.[27][28]
Prose
Abdurraqib's writing has appeared in The Fader, The New York Times, and Pitchfork,[29] as well as previously serving as a columnist at MTV News,[30] writing about music, culture, and identity. The Huffington Post named his essay on Fetty Wap's song "Trap Queen" to its list of "The Most Important Writing From People of Color in 2015."[31] Discussing Abdurraqib's essay on the late Muhammad Ali as inspiration to a generation of hip-hop artists, critic Ned Raggett called the piece a "standout" among the many elegies.[32]
Abdurraqib's essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us was published in November 2017 by Two Dollar Radio.[33] The Chicago Tribune named it to a list of "25 must-read books" for the fall of 2017[34] and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, calling the collection "mesmerizing and deeply perceptive".[35] The book also received favorable reviews from the Chicago Tribune[36] and The Washington Post (where Pete Tosiello described They Can't Kill Us as "a breathtaking collection of largely music-focused essays"),[37] and The New York Times Magazine featured a passage from the collection in the magazine's "New Sentences" column.[38] A special five year anniversary edition of the collection will be released on November 15, 2022, featuring three new essays and an audiobook version recorded by Abdurraqib himself.
Abdurraqib published Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest in 2019 as part of University of Texas Press's American Music Series,[39][40] edited by Jessica Hopper, David Menconi, and Oliver Wang.[41] It debuted at number 13 on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback non-fiction[42] and received strongly favorable reviews from critics.[43][44] Reviewers stressed the accomplishment of integrating music history with both a broader history and a more personal one.[45] Writing for Publishers Weekly, Ed Nawotka called the book "part academic monograph on the group and its music, part pocket history of hip-hop, part memoir, and part epistolary elegy. It is a book that conveys the wonder of being a fan and the visceral impact of experiencing the feeling of having oneself reflected back in music and pop culture."[46] For NPR Lily Meyer praised Abdurraqib's "seemingly limitless capacity to share what moves him, which means that to read Go Ahead in the Rain, you don't need to be a Tribe Called Quest fan: Abdurraqib will make you one."[47] The book was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction[48] and longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.[49]
In January 2018, Abdurraqib announced he had signed a two-book deal with Random House;[50] announced as a nonfiction book They Don't Dance No' Mo' on the history of black performance in the United States, to be published in 2020[46] and an essay collection following up on They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.[50]
About They Can't Kill Us, a review from Booklist wrote: "Abdurraqib writes with uninhibited curiosity and insight about music and its ties to culture and memory, life and death, on levels personal, political, and universal... Abdurraqib’s poignant critiques, a catalog of the current moment and all that preceded it, inspire us to listen with our whole selves."[51]
The first book in the Random House deal was retitled A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and was released March 30, 2021.[52] A Little Devil received a starred prepublication review in Publishers Weekly, which wrote: "Filled with nuance and lyricism, Abdurraqib's luminous survey is stunning."[52] Kirkus called the book: "A thoughtful memoir rolled into a set of joined essays on life, death, and the Black experience in America....Another winner from Abdurraqib, a writer always worth paying attention to."[53] Abdurraqib himself describes A Little Devil in America as "a catalogue of excitements".[54] The book was awarded the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.[55] It was also awarded the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize.[56]
Podcast
In 2021, Abdurraqib launched a weekly podcast called "Object of Sound" with Sonos Radio. The music focused podcast features interviews and curated playlists by Abdurraqib and guests.[57]
Honors
In 2017, Abdurraqib received an honorary degree in human ecology from the College of the Atlantic.[58] The Crown Ain't Worth Much was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award[59] and nominated for a 2017 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.[60] They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a best book of 2017 by numerous outlets, including NPR,[61] Pitchfork,[62] the Los Angeles Review,[63] the Chicago Tribune,[64] Stereogum,[65] the National Post (Canada),[66] Paste,[67] the CBC,[68] and Esquire.[69] Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest was a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction[48] and was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.[49]
In June 2021, Cbus Libraries announced they are commissioning The People's Mural of Columbus, which will feature Abdurraqib. The mural is set to be completed in August 2021 in the writer's hometown of Columbus, Ohio.[70]
Abdurraqib was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.[3]
Personal life
In 2017, Abdurraqib moved back to Columbus, Ohio.[71] He previously lived in New Haven, Connecticut.[72]
Works
Again I Wait For This To Pull Apart (as Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib; FreezeRay Press, 2015)[73]
The Crown Ain't Worth Much (as Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib; Button Poetry, 2016) ISBN 978-1-943735-04-4[74]
Vintage Sadness (as Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib; Big Lucks, 2017)[74]
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017)[6]
Go Ahead in the Rain (University of Texas Press, 2019)[7]
A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019)[24]
A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021)[1]
There's Always This Year (Random House, 2024)[75][76]
Untitled essay collection (Random House, forthcoming)
MAR. 22, 2024
The Mr. Rogers of Columbus, Ohio The poet Hanif Abdurraqib is as idiosyncratic as his unclassifiable new book.
By Giri Nathan, a co-owner and writer at Defector
Photo: Courtesy of the subject
When I meet the poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib in Columbus, Ohio, it’s the kind of false-alarm early-March day that lures the locals out of winter burrows and into the park with the promise of warmth and Frisbee and fishing rod. Ducks skim the reflection of a cloudless sky, and purple crocuses poke up through thawing earth. In fact, it’s uncannily like a sentence from Abdurraqib’s latest book: “Spring, twirling out from behind the doldrums for a brief audition, just to check and see if it’s still got it — and it does.”
There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is about the sport in its title, but it’s equally about the passage of time, grief, and Columbus itself. Abdurraqib tells me this is his most personal work to date, a book he’s intended to write for years. “It’s one of those things where you have a crush on someone for so long and you finally go out on a date with them — and you just don’t know what to do or you’re talking too much,” he says, which resulted in a first draft that was 120,000 words long. “So much of the overwriting — I can tell I was just trying to convince people to love basketball instead of listening to what I knew to be true: I was brought to this book by basketball, perhaps, but it’s not a basketball book.”
It is more like an extended prose poem divided into four quarters with time-outs. Abdurraqib moves freely between the literary forms that have defined his career: memoir, verse, regional history, music criticism, odes to specific basketball movements (including his father’s jump shot, which he witnessed on just one occasion). He is adept at finding subtle through-lines for seemingly disparate topics, as he does here between a famous LeBron James chase-down block in the 2016 NBA Finals and a bombing spree by Cleveland mobsters in the 1970s. It’s a gift for recognizing the underlying structure of an emotion and pointing to its different manifestations, like a biologist alerting you to the Fibonacci sequence in pine cones and seashells, only for matters of the soul.
Abdurraqib greets me on his way to a flower vendor, where he picks up a bouquet for himself every other Sunday, one of many rituals in his life. Chin atilt, leading with his beard, he shows me around the city he’s lived in for all but two and a half of his 40 years. An employee at the flower stand recognizes him and says she’s excited for his upcoming book event. Wherever we went that day — even when we went as far afield as Cleveland — people were happy to see him. In Columbus, Abdurraqib is like a Mister Rogers in Jordans and a 1978 Springsteen jacket, giving dap and small kindnesses wherever he goes. The city has painted him, his face foremost among local artists in a mural three minutes from his home.
Being a professional writer did not occur to Abdurraqib, it seems, until he was halfway to being a successful one. In the book, he details spending nights in jail in his early 20s, fleeing the cops after stealing sandwiches from a grocery store, and straining the graces of his father. One passage describes the summer after he lost his job and was evicted from his apartment: sleeping in a storage unit, showering at the gym, lying low in churches and libraries. “You’re either invisible or a nuisance,” he says of life unhoused in an American city. He adds, “Because of my background — being in and out of jail, having a criminal record — it was really hard for me to get a job.” He came up writing in mid-aughts punk zines. While working shifts at a diner, he wrote music reviews for local papers until editors phased him out because he was skewing too “poetic.” Abdurraqib didn’t actually know anything about poetry, but he was asked to host a poetry night at the café where he wrote and was soon deep in the community. He put out a book of verse in 2016 and a collection of music essays in 2017 and the next year quit his nine-to-five at a health-care start-up to write full time. By 2021, he had published five books and won a MacArthur “genius” grant. Now, he’s talking about poets like Maggie Nelson and Diane Seuss as if they’re gifted two-way wings starring for a conference rival. “I study tape of my peers,” he says, looking ahead to Nelson’s new release. “Not on some competition shit. But like — what levels did she rise to in this book that I might be able to rise to next time out?”
Abdurraqib lives with his dog, Wendy, on the city’s East Side in Bronzeville, which he describes as one of the last historically Black neighborhoods in Columbus to hold the line against gentrification. He moved into this house in February 2020, before everything stopped, and has spent the years since cultivating his obsessions. Some of those are ordinary enough, like the Minnesota Timberwolves or the flowers. Others are more exotic. These include a chocolate-brown safe about five feet tall that reveals itself to be full of bobbleheads, the tottering rictus of Suns-era Stephon Marbury peering out at me from the dark. Nearby is a 1936 Wurlitzer jukebox and 1912 Swedish Mora clock — both bought broken, now objects of Abdurraqib’s off-and-on meditative tinkering. “I like vintage stuff. I’m fascinated by the life that something can live when someone else decides they’re done with it,” he says.
He believes this house is so tuned to his infatuations that if he were to try and share it with a partner, they’d have to scrap it all and start from scratch. When asked what feature of his home is most hostile to a potential cohabitant, he cites the room off his bedroom that contains 242 pairs of sneakers, organized in shelves, behind dust-guarded windows. That door stays shut on dates: “It can be a little weird, perhaps, and overwhelming and unapproachable to someone who maybe understands obsession but not at that temperature and tone.” When I admire a pair of mustard-yellow LDV Waffles from 1979, he tells me he needs to send those out to his sneaker guy who fixes shoes and is different from his other sneaker guy, who sources them.
We walk across the driveway and into a carriage house. Inside are two cardio machines, three computer monitors, a handful of records, and a poster of Prince. I’m struck by the smell of damp exertion, the vestigial aroma of his Sunday-morning run: six miles in here, followed by six miles outside. This is a place where work gets done. Abdurraqib moves fast; he said he recently turned around a 3,000-word essay for The New Yorker in 90 minutes. He intends to maintain his running through March’s dual demands of book tour and Ramadan fasting. (His solution: predawn runs, then protein pancakes, dense smoothies, 64 ounces of water, then a nap.)
Though Abdurraqib jokes about spending his whole life puttering between his home and its little satellite and says he has a “firm and thoughtful relationship with loneliness,” he is by some margin the most hospitable hermit I know. On the page, or even in an Instagram caption, his words charm with their intimacy, like a friend sidling into a worn passenger seat with a secret to spill. In person, he’s roughly the same. Ask him anything, at any level of emotional sensitivity — whether his father is proud of him, how he feels about beleaguered power forward Karl-Anthony Towns — and he replies in limpid sentences, plainspoken if occasionally bending toward metaphor, following a clear line of inquiry yet resisting tidy closure just as
a good poem might.
We hop into his Volvo to drive two hours up I-71 to Cleveland and watch the Cavs host the Knicks. I ask him about the candor with which he confronts painful personal history in his new book. How does he determine whether to present a given memory in blunt facts or shift into a more oblique poetic register? His answer calls back to an earlier conversation over diner omelets about hooping on asphalt versus on hardwood. “Sometimes what is required is the grittiness of giving oneself in to the raw realities of a scenario,” he says. “But sometimes using poetic forms simply slightly softens the impact so that you can continually endure the harder realities.”
This article is more than 1 month old
Celebrated poet, MacArthur genius – but Hanif Abdurraqib is just glad to have survived past 25
This article is more than 1 month old
The author’s new book uses basketball as a lens. In an interview, he reflects on grief, discipline and his love for Ohio
Katherine Rowland
Thu 4 Apr 2024 07.00 EDT
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Hanif Abdurraqib contains multitudes. Poet, essayist, cultural critic, curator, dog parent; for all his roles and mounting accolades, he is charmed above all to be alive.
In his most recent book, There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib reckons with the realization that he has lived beyond the timeline he had once imagined for himself. His upbringing was cut through with heartbreak - his mother died when he was 13, and he lost friends to suicide and drug overdoses. In the years before he “made it”, he spent time in jail and unhoused.
Abdurraqib, a 2021 MacArthur fellow, admits to having a sometimes ambivalent relationship with his success. “I have to be future facing, which is challenging for me,” he said over Zoom. “It’s hard to go from I didn’t think I would survive past 25 to ‘how do I build a life for myself into a fifth or sixth decade, if I’m lucky enough to have it’.”
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There’s Always This Year is nominally about basketball. It’s about LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and people who never catapulted to the stars, despite their promise. But it is also about surviving, and transformation, and the documentation of beauty. It is a love song to Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib’s home town – an ode to the virtues of staying in place, and a meditation on gravity, grief and loss.
Abdurraqib, 40, is on tour – navigating weeks on the road, with sold-out venues and added dates. This means having to inhabit, however briefly, a more public role than he is accustomed to (although he travels continually for talks and interviews, and his face now graces a mural on East Main Street in Columbus).
In preparation, he is doing extra therapy sessions. “I’m trying to stay grounded in who I know and understand myself to be,” he said, “because otherwise I will become a funhouse mirror version of myself.”
He laughed when I said that the book was rather like the one that preceded it, in that it is about everything. But he can pull it all off, depositing, as he says, more into the “ever-widening satchel that helps me inform my obsessions”.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
We’re now in Ramadan. How are you observing that while also launching into the tumult and thrill of going on tour to promote a new book?
Hanif Abdurraqib: It feels very refreshing to have the realities of that acknowledged. Thank you. One thing that defines my life is that I’m really disciplined. I’m very beholden to my disciplines.
I’ve outlived myself not just once, but several times
Ramadan heightens that because I don’t really disrupt any of my practices. For example, I’m a runner, and so I get up at 4am to start my runs, so I can run, hydrate and then eat.
The thing that excites me is affixing myself to these disciplines, even if they don’t have a reward. The reward is that I show up to something repetitively and that showing up is a reminder that I have endured, that I’ve survived enough to have the will and excitement to show up for something else. Sometimes that discipline is how I simply survive from sunrise to sunset.
Ramadan aligns with that for me. It has always been less about the consumption of food or drink and lack thereof, and more about mental discipline, rigor and focus on a kind of care and selflessness that I hope floods into my everyday living.
Have you always been this disciplined?
No, not at all. Most people who know me would say that for much of my life I’ve been rigorously undisciplined. I’m very lazy. I’m just more disciplined than I am lazy. It used to be the inverse.
But a big part of this book, quite frankly, is about living beyond a time period where I thought I would be alive. I’m always taking stock of how I feel about being alive in the world. That is an everyday, all-day examination. And part of that revolves around these small disciplines that propel me ... because each one is like a little life unto itself.
My running life is a life unto itself. My writing life is a life unto itself. My life of dog parenting is a life unto itself. They’re not siloed, they’re all interconnected. But the disciplines that bring me to them are like little lives unto themselves. And so I feel like I’m not just surviving beyond one version of my past self, I’m surviving in multiple ways. I’ve outlived myself not just once, but several times. And by surviving, I’ve gifted myself many new lives at once to pursue.
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Hanif Abdurraqib: ‘I like thinking about the defensive third of the soccer field as my corner of the world that I could master.’ Photograph: Maddie McGarvey/The Observer
What was the first practice that you affixed yourself to?
I was an athlete growing up and by default there are disciplines involved in being on a team of other people who are relying on you.
Soccer was the first sport that aligned my brain towards the kind of creative impulses I have now. I love soccer because of how you operate in your third of the pitch. I like thinking about the defensive third of the soccer field as my corner of the world that I could master, that I could be an expert in.
That shows up in my everyday life today, because what I’m invested in is becoming an expert in my own interior curiosities and figuring out how to articulate those curiosities effectively.
In the opening of the book, you present this great image of a cartoon version of heaven, with your beloveds smiling down on you. How does this relate to your spiritual identity?
Despite my rigorous approach to Ramadan, I am not a very spiritual person. I’m not a very committed religious person. But I am someone who is committed most vigorously to a belief in the afterlife.
I feel that’s a requirement for me because I’ve lost so many people, and it would be troubling for me to imagine a world wherein I never get to see them or never have access to them ever again. It would be troubling to me to imagine that they left this world and went nowhere.
If I’m honest with myself about what I feel, it is most easy for me to say when we die, nothing happens. We die and we’re gone, and that is the end. But I’m beholden to the spiritual understanding of an afterlife, because it would perhaps guarantee that I would see the people I love again.
I do find myself less interested in an afterlife that one has to earn their way into. That feels like an intense cruelty, to say that there are people you love behind a fence and you perhaps cannot get into the fence, depending on these arbitrary natures of what goodness is or what goodness is not. I believe in the potential to see the people I love again, because I need to.
In your work, there is movement between extremes. There is the waiting miracle, but there’s also the lurking apocalypse. There’s ascension, but also relentless gravity.
I was initially invested in the immortality, or the supposed immortality, of LeBron James. That was the original seed. People were talking about how he is ageless and is going to live for ever and play for ever. And I thought, yeah, that’d be cool, but also I don’t know if anyone should want to live for ever or have the ambitions of living for ever.
I was pondering this idea of immortality and how just unappealing immortality feels to me, and how it would be a betrayal of what Mary Oliver calls “one wild and precious life”, because it would lead, at least to me, to having a desire to take so much for granted.
But then I started to think most importantly about what it is to have a place that you consider yours and to not want to leave it. You know, I love Columbus, Ohio, a lot. I don’t have any ambitions of leaving it. And so I really wanted to have a body of work that was also considering what it is to say I am here, and I’m really thrilled to be here, and I can’t and don’t want to imagine a world outside of here.
Expressing interest, expressing genuine curiosity in other people is what sustains me
It warrants being said that there are some tensions surrounding the here that you are talking about. You write, for example, about visiting the patch of sidewalk where Henry Green was shot and killed by plainclothes officers in 2016 and of the East Side of Columbus being referred to as a “war zone”.
When you name the conditions of war, when you create the conditions of war, you get to name where it happens and you get to name how it happens. And the impacts of that are far-reaching, in that there are people who are at the mercy of being labeled in this way, of their survival seeming like it is only a miracle because they are surviving the brutalities of a war zone. In a lot of cases in the United States, a lot of these are infrastructural issues that are due to neighborhood neglect.
No one in the neighborhood that I grew up in thought of it as this unbearable war zone. It was our neighborhood and we built a loving place.
I think maybe that’s the real sin: people who don’t live where you live and who don’t understand where you live attempting to name places as evil or dangerous, when you know better and when you know there are multitudes beneath that.
LeBron James clasps hands amid crowd of onlookers. he’s wearing his Cleveland Cavs basketball jersey
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Abdurraqib’s work draws on LeBron James and the question of immortality. Photograph: Soobum Im/USA Today Sports
At one point in the book, you write about Daniel Gibson [who played for the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team] and how punishing it can be to try to live up to expectations. And you put forth this idea that the crime of failing the imagination of others is the crime from which all others are born. What do you mean by that?
When people project upon you what they need, and it’s not who you are, that opens up a doorway to all kinds of feelings of betrayal.
There’s the imagined person, and then there’s the actual person. And I think sometimes even in love, even in our desire to love someone in a very big way, we are perhaps rushing to love the imagined person. Sometimes in my rush to love someone, I can see myself rushing past the actual person and trying to love the imagined person because the imagined person is a little bit easier for me to love. It is a person who I’ve made. It’s detrimental to you, the lover of the person, and it’s detrimental to the person who is wondering why they cannot be loved well.
How do you cleave away those imaginings so that you actually see the person before you?
One of my heroes is the late great Greg Tate [a writer, musician and critic for the Village Voice]. He was always more interested in you than you could have ever been in him. And that is something that I think is a requirement to live by.
What I’m always reaching for is: I want to know your interior world. I understand all of us, to some degree, perform different versions of ourselves for the many exterior worlds we inhabit.
Once we get comfortable with our exterior worlds and how we maneuver them, I’m like: what else is there? What else is in the interior world that will help me actually understand you? And not just understand the way you present to the world, but actually understand the shape and form of your living and how I can make it easier. How can I offer grace to both you and myself?
Hanif Abdurraqib in Columbus, Ohio.
Hanif Abdurraqib: ‘I was fascinated by who got to define shame’
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That is, I think, a requirement to function in the world, that I find increasingly brutal, that I find increasingly isolationist, and that I find increasingly challenging to actively, eagerly get to know people.
Expressing interest, expressing genuine curiosity in other people is what sustains me. And it also just gives me a blueprint for how to love people well. I want to keep people around. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. And so, it feels possible to build at least a world that is my world that people don’t want to exit so quickly.
You keep mentioning loss, and it’s a major thread running through the book. How do you keep grief from swamping you?
I think grief is also an occasion for gratitude. Grief is a feeling that is simply knocking at the door of memory repeatedly. Grief knocks and then if you are fortunate, if your memories are intact and alive enough, the door opens and then you get to revel in what is revealed through that door’s opening.
Grief arrives to me in many pieces. And yes, sometimes it is me grieving the fact that some days I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice. That is an occasion for grief that is large, right? But I can remember my mother’s laugh, and I feel like that is going to echo in my brain for ever.
For a lot of people grief is only weight. The weight of grief is immeasurable and impossible. But I wonder, too, if there’s an opportunity to consider the way grief operates within us as something that is occasion for us to say, “How wonderful that I have loved and through my loving there is this visceral feeling that exists.”
There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib (Penguin Books Ltd, £20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
QUOTED: "To unearth those versions and put them plainly on the page and to assess those versions of myself attempting to do gently and thoughtfully meant that I had to reformat a relationship with how I felt about my past selves and the people who not only loved my past selves but endured them."
Author Hanif Abdurraqib on Writing About LeBron, Loving Ohio, and the Seductive Power of Nike Commercials
He's an acclaimed poet by day and a League Pass superfan by night—and his newest book bridges the gap.
By Tres Dean
March 25, 2024
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Photograph: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte
This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss GQ story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib can write about anything. His bibliography spans two poetry collections and three nonfiction volumes, along with a grip of indelible magazine pieces (including a few for GQ). His most recent book, 2021’s A Little Devil in America, bagged Abdurraqib a Carnegie medal and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Those who follow him on Twitter know that Hanif the Poet is also Hanif the sports fanatic. Next week he follows up his most acclaimed work with one that bridges the gap between the two: There’s Always This Year: Notes on Ascension. The book was initially announced as Abdurraqib’s first collection of writing on basketball, though it’s a little more complicated than that. Divided into four “quarters” with a recurring countdown clock, There’s Always This Year is a formally ambitious work blending sports writing, autobiography, and poetic verse into a free-flowing story about growing up in Ohio in the LeBron Era. Hoops fans may come for extended diatribes on the Fab Five, The Decision, and the 2016 Finals, but readers will stick around for its exploration of the relationship between athletes and the places they represent, and of the one between fans and their cities.
Abdurraqib called GQ from his home in Columbus, Ohio, for a lengthy conversation about what drew him to write a book about basketball, life in Columbus, and why the emotional climax of his latest book hinges on a Nike commercial.
You’ve mentioned a few times on various public platforms that while this is a book you’ve wanted to write for quite a while, the shape that it eventually arrived at changed a lot over time. I'm curious if you could trace where it started versus where it ended up and how it got there.
Hanif Abdurraqib: Early on, I just thought, well, isn't it wild that I'm around the same age as LeBron James and we grew up playing basketball in Ohio around the same time and his legacy is so uniquely tied to this place?
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That's not a book. That's not even an essay. That’s just a thought. I kept tacking things onto it until 2020 in one of the early phases of lockdown. He’d let his beard grow out a little bit and there was this video of him at one of [his son] Bronny’s games and it was grayer than I’d ever seen it. This was coming at a time when we were beginning to really talk of LeBron being immortal, being ageless. I thought yes, but isn't it more interesting that he is mortal? Isn't it more interesting that he, like all of us, is required to age and deteriorate?
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This was also coming in a collision of my own, where I hit a point of being alive for over a decade past the point where I told myself I was going to live. So now it's not just about LeBron and I being of a similar age and both being from Ohio, it's about the responsibility both of us have to our own mortality. In my case, it’s a responsibility that requires me facing backwards for a moment and asking myself if I can seek some level of forgiveness for the past versions of myself that did not want to be alive. That was the moment where I thought this might be a book: something more interesting than just going, “Isn't LeBron James cool? Isn't basketball cool?”
I think within a few pages of reading the book, any basketball fan will be able to gauge that it culminates in the 2016 Finals. That said, the story often continues on past that. Is there anything you want to see from his last years in the NBA? What would feel like a satisfying ending?
It’s so silly, but I would like to see him get one more ring. One more ring puts him at five. It feels like a good number. Part of me also just wants him to end his career in Cleveland. I feel like what I want to see from LeBron at this point is all narrative. it has less to do with what happens on the floor materially. If he came back to Cleveland and played 15 minutes a game and got a fifth ring with some young stars, that to me would be just as good as him dragging a Lakers team to an improbable championship this year.
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That said, it would actually really be hard for me to see a LeBron James incapable of playing at a high level. I’ve watched many of my favorite stars go out as really diminished versions of themselves. That would be hard for me with LeBron James, not because I have any fantasies about his mortality but because I've seen him play at a level that is unreal since he was a 15 year old. I wonder what watching him play at a diminished rate would tell me about my own illusions about myself.
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LeBron and the Cavs after their 2016 NBA Finals clincher. AFP/Getty Images
I don't think it's possible to say that your work as a poet and your work as an author don't inform one another, but this book does feel like an intentional blurring of the lines. What compelled you to do something so formally experimental in comparison to your previous books?
When I play basketball I often get in a lot of trouble, because I go against the fundamental rule: you’re not supposed to jump in the air without a plan. But I think what any hooper knows is sometimes we exist outside the confines of rules. Sometimes you're jumping and through the very act of jumping you have a little bit of time that you didn't have before, a time through which something else can be invented that did not exist while you were earthbound.
That was the process of this book. I got past the pregame and there was a moment where I realized it would be ridiculous if this form only existed for this section. I didn't really know how to execute this idea. That was the moment of me jumping in the air and just waiting for something to materialize. What happens, as anyone who plays basketball knows, is sometimes when you jump in the air, yes, sometimes another defender collapses and through that other defender collapsing, a sliver of light opens up through which you can fire a pass and find the hands of someone who’s open. That just kept happening with this book where repeatedly I was like, "I'm going to jump into the air, hopefully a double team will arrive and something will happen.”
You’ve never shied away from sharing yourself on the page, but this book leans into that in a way that feels far more substantial than your prior work. Was there a point at which you made an active decision to effectively write this as an autobiography?
Yes. I think sometimes as a writer you think you're writing several things and then the piece comes out or the book comes out and someone points out to you that you were actually writing a different thing. Though I was aware [what I was doing], I will say that going into the details of being incarcerated and being unhoused was something that I had maybe been a little bit more afraid to do [before]. I think I still harbor a lot of unfair resentment for those versions of myself, or perhaps have resentment for the way those versions of myself impacted the people who loved them. To unearth those versions and put them plainly on the page and to assess those versions of myself attempting to do gently and thoughtfully meant that I had to reformat a relationship with how I felt about my past selves and the people who not only loved my past selves but endured them.
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That meant coming to terms with the fact that I am not going to live long enough to be forgiven by everyone I've ever wronged. That is something to me that frightens me. The fact that forgiveness is not this limitless pool that we can reach into and pull from whenever we want to, it frightens me. I think before I sit down to write any book, I ask myself, what have you been afraid of? How are you going to get a little bit closer to that fear by the end of making this? It just so happened that this time out, all of my fears required me to be a little bit more rigidly autobiographical and to ask myself how effectively I could forgive the past versions of myself that needed to be forgiven, but could not get it from everyone they harmed.
The emotional climax of this book effectively hinges on a Nike commercial that you saw while living in Connecticut in 2015.
I'm very excited to talk about this because no one remembers [the commercial]. How could nobody remember that?
I imagine it will get readers thinking about how so much of sports and the narratives we ascribe to it are used as engines of commerce to sell hoodies or sneakers or season tickets. I think it's possible to be moved by a commercial in an uncomplicated way, but is that something that as an author, a fan of the game, and a fan of LeBron—who is as much an industry and a product as he is an individual at this point—you have trouble reconciling?
Every time I watch [the commercial] I feel like I'm being manipulated. Because, like, this is a Nike ad. I'm being seduced into this capitalistic labyrinth of emotion. I'm hyper-aware of that.
But I don't actually care about it as a Nike commercial as much as I do something that came to me at a time where I missed home more than I'd ever missed home. This idea that we all in this place, no matter what this place is, we're all one. Through our collective being, this place rises to a level that it could not rise to before. This place that is just one city on the map becomes the entirety of the map. That means this place is now everywhere you are. For a moment, it felt like Ohio was where I was.
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I can forgive myself for being seduced into an emotional frenzy. I can forgive myself for bowing at the altar of that specific commercial because I think what it's actually asking of me, at least as an Ohioan who loves Ohio and longs for it when I'm not there, is how much of a place can you carry with you when you are not in that place.
You’re a big Columbus Crew fan, and you called this most recent 2023 squad a “team of destiny.” [Last year the Crew won their third MLS championship.] I think that when you follow a team or an athlete in any sport there is a difference between hope and belief. Everybody hopes for a trophy at the end of the season, but every now and then there is a moment where hope becomes belief—just a certainty that it is going to happen, that they’re going to win it all. What was it about this version of the Columbus Crew that made you believe?
It was the Cincinnati win in the playoffs. Not only was it great to beat a rival to get to the MLS Cup final, but it was also this culmination of the team’s whole ethos of play. The belief with the Crew last year was that this style of play wouldn't translate to MLS because it's so possession-heavy. The defense is special, but a lot of people had questions about the possession-heavy nature that relies on really methodical attack. Cincinnati FC, for example, they're just relentless in attack. I'm not saying they don't play without methods. I'm not going to compliment them too much, but they're just so aggressive. What people didn't seem to understand, which I think anyone who plays the game does understand, is that possession isn't just possession for possession's sake. Possession also means that you have the ball, the other team doesn't, and they have to chase you around the fucking pitch, right? The Cincinnati game was a perfect culmination of that. After that game, I remember telling my friends, it doesn't matter who comes here. We're winning the Cup. I don't care who comes out of the West. For me, that's where hope became belief.
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It just felt different this time out. This was the first time we had a championship parade for the Crew. We didn't have one in 2008. Obviously, we didn't have one in 2020. This was the first one the city had ever had. I'm going to remember that for the rest of my life. I've seen three championships in my lifetime for a team I love so much. Most people don't get that. Most people don't get one. It's the same with the Timberwolves this year. They’ve begun to falter a bit, and I worry about the playoffs, and I worry about KAT and the injury shit. But to watch the Timberwolves this year has been so thrilling. It's the most fun I've had watching the Timberwolves basketball since 2003. I have to move past this sense of entitlement that I think comes very easy to this relationship we have with fandom, and instead move straight to this really extreme gratitude that I want to feel for what I'm able to witness.
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The Crew in all their glory. Zach Sanderson/ISI Photos/Getty Images
I think as much as There’s Always This Year is about you, as much as it’s about LeBron, at its core this is a book about Columbus, Ohio. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, the book that sort of launched this phase of your career, came out in 2017. In the years since, there’s been a mural of you painted in your hometown. You recently participated in the photo shoot for the Columbus Crew’s 2023 jersey launch. How does becoming a figure who’s so tangibly embedded into the culture of your city affect your relationship with it?
It’s important for me to note that I was once unhoused in this city. I think when you're unhoused in any city that has any population at all, you are either invisible or you're a nuisance. It's interesting to transition to this hyper-visibility. [The mural is] four blocks from my house. It sits at the gateway to the East side of Columbus, where I'm from. It is not lost on me when sometimes people send me pictures of their young Black kids in front of it. All that stuff matters both materially and emotionally.
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I also think that what I love about this city is that these have always been my folks. I like that when I'm in Whole Foods, people come up and talk to me about albums they like. I like that when I'm at the florist, I can have a conversation about my dog and the florist's dog. I like that when I go to my bakery, they already have what I like boxed up for me, not because I'm special, but because I'm there, because I've been there, because I'm tenured. My affections are tenured in this place, but also my real presence has a tenure to it. I get hesitant about anything that might separate me or build an artificial or very real hierarchy between me and the people who live here, because we all know better than that. I don't want to be separate from, I don't want people to ever be afraid to come up and talk to me because they saw my picture in the New York Times or whatever.
I am not only a part of a community, but any success I have begins here. I would like to build a world in Columbus where people are not interested in me because of what I produce. Here, if my lasting legacy is only what I've produced, then I think I've maybe failed as a community member. If in Columbus, after I'm gone, what people say is he wrote some books I loved, then I've really failed as a person who purports to love this place and love the people in it. Because, yes, I love Columbus deeply, but I'm not in love with the fucking skyline. I'm not in love with the bridges. I'm in love with the people. The people are the architecture of the place. I owe the affection I have for that architecture and those people who really built this place to shine through.
Hanif Abdurraqib reclaims Columbus on his own terms
The celebrated poet, essayist and cultural critic reads from his staggering new book, ‘There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,’ at King Arts Complex tonight (Monday, March 25).
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif AbdurraqibKate Sweeney
Andy Downing
Updated on:
25 Mar 2024, 7:32 am
7 min read
In the weeks after Columbus police shot and killed 13-year-old Ty’re King in September 2016, Hanif Abdurraqib wrote an essay for Columbus Alive in which the poet, author and cultural critic unpacked the reality that he was raised on the same streets where King died, in a city that has a history of treating some of its residents as disposable.
“In all of this, I want to say that I grew up Black on the East Side of Columbus,” Abdurraqib wrote at the time. “I grew up Black on the East Side of Columbus and have run from police before. I have not always been good, but I have always been worthy of living and fighting to become better. I have touched that community and been touched by it, and the people who live in it are all worthy of life, even as their lives are ignored or seen as less worthy by the city that surrounds them.”
It’s an idea to which Abdurraqib returns in his remarkable new book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, which uses sports as a launch point for the author to delve into everything from grief and aging to what it means to love your home even when it fails you and the perilously thin line that can exist between making it within a place and being consumed by it.
This final point becomes jarringly clear when Abdurraqib writes about visiting the patch of sidewalk where plainclothes Columbus police officers shot and killed 23-year-old Henry Green in June 2016 – a pilgrimage that took place so soon after the shooting that Green’s blood had not yet been scrubbed from the sidewalk. In the passage, which stretches over a full page, Abdurraqib abandons punctuation, the words arriving in a furious rush as the author recalls his desire in that moment to see the concrete crack open and swallow the new condo developments and breweries and “mixed-use helltowers,” and his want to watch the mayor walk at night through the neighborhoods he had previously dismissed as war zones, and to have the city’s public school children attend classes in buildings equipped with proper heat and air conditioning, their educations not so consistently hindered by the whims of the seasons.
The writing is righteous and honest and visceral, and the unbroken way the sentences are laid out on the page created a physical response within this reader, to the point where I could feel my chest steadily compressing under the mounting weight of Abdurraqib’s words as I moved through the text.
“At some point, for me, I decided I was going to write through this book – and particularly these parts – as I would speak them out loud,” Abdurraqib said in a mid-March interview at Upper Cup on Parsons, where he was preparing for the launch of an extended book tour that includes a hometown stop at King Arts Complex tonight (Monday, March 25). “And even before I drafted it, I remember thinking about these moments, and in particular going to that patch of concrete where Henry Green was murdered. And even as I was thinking about it, my heart rate went up and my palms started to sweat. And that was a signal to me that it would almost be a kind of betrayal to write this as politely and as structured as another writer might. … I’m writing through something visceral, and I had to ask, ‘How can I translate the way my literal body composition shifted while I consider this moment that I remember, that’s still very touchable to me? And how can I translate that to the page in a way that makes you, reader, perhaps feel your own body composition and your own internal meter and metronome shift?’”
Embedded within this passage, as well as in mentions of Casey Goodson, Julius Tate and Andre Hill, among others, is the idea that Abdurraqib’s own survival – let alone the reality that he has gone on to reached rarified air as both a New York Times best-selling author and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant – could be termed one of chance. “I think a lot of my quote-unquote ‘making it’ has felt accidental,” he said, his successes having arrived in the wake of a difficult upbringing that saw him spend time both in jail and unhoused.
Abdurraqib recounts these years with unflinching honesty in There’s Always This Year, reflecting on everything from the sense of shame he felt when his older brother visited him in jail to the small kindnesses that allowed him to navigate life unhoused in Columbus, including the worker at the storage facility where he slept for a time who guarded his overnight presence even though it went against policy. Indeed, Abdurraqib’s prose is so heartfelt and generous throughout, the text so consistently close to the surface, that it’s almost surprising when he writes about how the elders in the poetry scene once instructed him to protect those more tender parts of himself from the public.
“And to be clear, there are some things I did not offer up in this book. But you hit a point where it’s like, do you want to be safe, or do you want to write a good book?” Abdurraqib said of his latest, an almost undefinable work that effortlessly blends all of the forms for which the writer has become known: poetry, sports writing, memoir, musical criticism, essay and cultural critique included. “And it took a lot of time to get here. … I think personal revelation has to be in service of the larger narrative. Otherwise, you’re just the person on the street corner yelling information about yourself that no one wants to hear, right? But it got to a point for me where it felt like I couldn’t write about the truth and the lies of a city and place without saying, ‘I’ve seen both of those.’ Because being unhoused in a place is to be either invisible or a nuisance. … And to be an invisible entity in a place, it means you can see its bruises and brutalities and beauties.”
In There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib traces his evolving view of the city, which first introduced itself to him only as the small section of neighborhood framed by the window in his childhood bedroom and then gradually expanded from there, growing to include places such as the basketball court at nearby Scottwood Elementary. There, as a youngster, Abdurraqib would snag rebounds for local legends such as Kenny Gregory, who starred at Independence High School before going on to play for the Kansas Jayhawks, and whose presence ripples throughout the text alongside that of NBA star and Akron, Ohio native LeBron James.
And while James serves as a recurring character, moving through life alongside Abdurraqib in the text – at one point, the revelation of Bron’s graying, early pandemic beard functions as a mirror for the writer’s growing awareness of his own aging – the all-star’s stature isn’t elevated above those with whom Abdurraqib shared a court at Scottwood. “We loved MJ but there were Michael Jordans on our block,” he writes. “There were Michael Jordans walking among us. Jordans four houses down. Jordans at the bus stop.”
For the first time, Abdurraqib also writes at length about his father, affording the elder a degree of hard-won grace as he addresses their complex relationship, which atrophied amid a battle of wills in the years that followed the death of Abdurraqib’s mother, who passed away when he was 13.
“We are becoming alike in a lot of ways that I think I resisted for a long time,” Abdurraqib said of his father, who still lives in the same East Side home in which the author was raised. “I was so beholden to the idea of becoming my mother, but I have ideas of my mother that aren’t really fully realized because she’s been gone for so long, to where I don’t even know what being like my mother means. Sure, I know these broad strokes, where from my mother I learned a level of sensitivity and a level of care and a level of emotional awareness. … But I have a much more concrete understanding of what it is to be like my father – my father who is incredibly curious, my father who chases down his obsessions to the end of the Earth, my father who is deeply observant and quietly considerate of a great many things. Those are things I think I had attributed to coming from somewhere else, but they were from him. So, to have grace for him is really to have grace for the version of myself that is just tumbling towards him.”
These types of clear-eyed reflections are central to There’s Always This Year, with Abdurraqib gradually reframing his views on his family, his city and himself. The writer said he began to reconsider his relationship to Columbus, for instance, after he returned in late 2016 following a stretch when he lived in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time, he was newly divorced and contemplating where he wanted to spend the next phase of his life, kicking around the idea of moving to Providence, Rhode Island, Los Angeles or Chicago before realizing that he needed the familiarity of a city where he had previously carved out an identity of his own outside of marriage. And so, for 18 months he rented an apartment above the now-shuttered Tasi Cafe in Italian Village, battling depression while learning how to love his home in a new way, which he said included being honest about its flaws.
“It was choosing to say, ‘I could have lived anywhere and I’m living here,’” he said. “And since I’m living here, I need to really commit to a new version of learning and loving this city that isn’t rooted in this cheerleading approach, which I think I took when I was in Connecticut, like, ‘Columbus! Columbus!’ … I think choosing a place back requires some accountability of that place.”
Along with this, Abdurraqib, who has embraced running as a mind-clearing part of his daily routine, has also staked his claim to parts of the city that were once forbidden to him.
In our interview, the writer recalled how his father warned him and his brothers not to run in certain neighborhoods – Bexley being one of them – because of how a Black male running in those places could be interpreted by the people who lived there, particularly at night, and how this shameful reality could in turn put the youngsters in danger.
“But now there’s something I enjoy about reclaiming that,” Abdurraqib said. “I’ll run wherever I want. And that is something that is freeing to me.”
QUOTED: "I thought this would be a book about basketball, or this would be a book about my childhood. ... But it became a book about place. It became a book about my dad too. A lot of my dad."
How Hanif Abdurraqib Learned to Surrender Himself to the Process
A conversation with the award-winning writer about basketball, prose, and his new book, ‘There’s Always This Year’
By Lex Pryor Apr 3, 2024, 10:46am EDT
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Getty Images/Ringer illustration
We met around where Kobe refused to flee a little bit of rain. There are only two hoops at the fabled Holcombe Rucker Park. I was throwing up floaters under the one closest to the Harlem River when writer, MacArthur fellow, and hoop evangelist Hanif Abdurraqib sauntered onto the court in a pair of prismatic “Viotech” Dunks and a purple hoodie with wreaths of white acrylic flower petals. Abdurraqib’s hair was long enough to hold a bed of curls and short enough to mirror the outline of his skull. His beard was trimmed, slightly gray, and pristine; his demeanor a mix of pride and relief. His sixth book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, had dropped a day earlier.
“I think this was a hard book to write, in terms of just the execution and what I was trying to do with form,” he said from one of the stands that hug the court like metallic sideburns. “I was trying to make a book that didn’t look like anything else I’d ever seen before, stylistically, formally.”
Molded for your innermost hooper, the essays that populate the text are arranged around descending clocks and designated quarters, sidebars, and intermissions. Ingredients in this compositional gumbo include and transcend nimble prose, kinetic poetry, tender memoir, and affectionate criticism. More often than not, There’s Always This Year evades classification when it comes to content. “I thought this would be a book about basketball, or this would be a book about my childhood,” he later told me, before hoisting up a refined jump shot. “But it became a book about place. It became a book about my dad too. A lot of my dad.”
Essays about grief bleed into essays about dreaming, and community, and pickup games, and, more than once, LeBron. It’s a book about basketball in the way that Songs in the Key of Life is an album about plucking ivory—which is to say it is precisely because it isn’t. Born, raised, and firmly attached to Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib tends to a spirit that’s less possessed creator than cherished elder. He knows what he loves, so he writes to, for, and about all of his beloveds. Sometimes that wins him a national book award. Other times a ball merely surrenders to the air and rides it through a hoop.
Congrats on the release. These can be weird moments for writers. I’m interested in how it feels when the work is out of your hands.
I think I’ve made peace with it now. By the time the work is out of my hands, I’ve controlled all I can. Painstakingly so. And that means that I’ve, in some ways, prepared a gift. I’ve wrapped it and I’ve left it outside, and anyone who wants to can come and grab it. You don’t really want to be an arbiter of how the person utilizes it or uses it or what they take from it or what they see in it.
I always feel like on days that I have long articles that come out, I kind of don’t want to know what people think about it unless I let someone down whom I care about.
Yeah, it feels like none of my business, really. Not in a harsh or hostile way. It feels like your relationship with the work is your relationship with the work. And I think if I were lording over that relationship, it would disrupt your ability to have a relationship with it. I don’t need to know.
My first takeaway upon reading the book was how kaleidoscopic it feels. It’s memoir and poetry and criticism and sportswriting. Was that something that you came into the process intending to do?
I’m always acting in opposition to aboutness. I think if I were to be a writer who’s surrendered to the impulse that I’m following only one path, the books become less interesting because that’s not how our brains work. It’ll actually take more labor for me to home in on a single thread than it would be for me to embrace the multitudinous nature of the threads that actually organically run through my head. To act in opposition to that is also to be generous to both myself and a potential reader. To say, “I trust that you are capable of holding multiple things at once and seeing what you need to see in this book.”
I think about that in a similar way. I sometimes have back-and-forths with folks where, inside, I’m thinking, “Y’all trust your readers less than I do.”
I run into that all the time.
Especially when it comes to issues of race. I’m very much of the belief that we can write about Black people and to Black people, and other folks might fucking still rock with that shit.
I struggle a lot with that particular, that thing of, “I don’t think you’re trusting the reader.” I don’t need to explain every origin story of every person who passes through this piece. In this book, I had the real freedom to actually capitalize off something that started in A Little Devil in America, where I was like, “I’m going to actually operate against explanation.” All the people I loved so much when I was young, all the people I read, music critics especially, wrote as if I already loved the things they were writing about. That afforded me a real opportunity to discover that shit on my own. And I don’t want to rob anyone of that, and I also don’t want to clog up my writing that’s already trying to do so much with these rote explanations.
You mentioned you looked at this book and felt inspired to write a book that you had not seen before. Did you intend for it to be your most poetic work of prose?
I think it became a necessity. There were some things in the book where I was utilizing poetic language and devices just to fill in the gaps. I really pushed myself around metaphor, around imagery, and around the trick of directly addressing [folks] in the second person. The book is a lot of “you.” It begins talking about “our enemies.” To sustain that tone and meter, throughout the book—if we’re talking to “you” in the second person, without it feeling overwhelming—I had to rewire my brain around the limits of my language.
And in order to do that, it was like I had to stretch myself poetically. I haven’t put together a book of poems since Rob [Harvilla] and I talked in 2019. That was my last poetry book. I still write poems so often, but this gave me the opportunity to sit in front of a book and say, “I can kind of flex a little bit, flex these poetic muscles, and trick people into reading.”
It doesn’t have to be different.
Yeah, it doesn’t have to be different. I think I talk abstractly about, “Oh, I’m not beholden to genre, and I dabble,” whatever, whatever. This is a book where I’m firmly committed to having a foot in two worlds, which are in fact the same world.
I know I’m asking you to basically choose a baby, so I’m sorry, but do you have a favorite sentence in the English language? I will admit that mine is the opening to Toni Morrison’s Jazz.
Mine is also the opening to Jazz! For real. Parts of this book are straight up borrowing from Jazz. Yeah, I love the opening of Jazz. I love the ending of The Women of Brewster Place so much. I love Gloria Naylor and the way that kind of arcs into the closure. I love that. I love the opening of Gravity’s Rainbow. I love “A screaming comes across the sky.” I didn’t really love that whole of the book, but “A screaming comes across the sky,” as a sentence, I wish I wrote.
I’m so committed to the opening sentence, and a lot of my books haven’t had the opportunity to have a really great opening sentence because of structure. This was a book where I was like, I really need to, I want to be in the conversation with the opening sentences that I love. There’s so many gestures toward Morrison in this book. “Song of Solomon” is all about flight.
I was thinking that as I was reading it. I opened up the “Third Quarter” part and immediately thought, “Oh, shit. He’s refashioning the Flying Africans folklore in a book about hoop.”
I’m always reaching for Toni Morrison and failing. But that’s a part of writing. To fail reaching for Toni Morrison is to succeed in a multitude of other ways. And I felt like this was a book where I finally figured out how close I can get to the parts of Morrison’s work that I love. Which is still far away, to be clear. But it’s like I can see it on the horizon, where before I was just kind of aiming with no goal at the sky.
That’s fulfilling.
Yeah. It is. Can I shoot?
[Abdurraqib gets up and attempts to dribble my embarrassingly deflated basketball. I try to get out ahead of it to save myself from total embarrassment.]
This ball is so fucking flat. I’ve been sabotaged.
Yeah, it’s not debilitating though. I’m not going to be able to shoot with this jacket on. Let’s take this off.
When did you think about first writing this book?
2018.
That’s a good amount of time.
But I didn’t start writing it until 2022. And I think to have it in my head for that long allowed for it to come to life for me. I had this in my head for so long because I worked on Little Devil in between. I got a language and ability to write this book through the process of writing that book. And truthfully, this book I wanted to write in 2018, and no one would hear it out.
How do you feel about outlining?
I’m not a good outliner at all. I kind of like to surrender myself to the process. I think that it’s important for me to consider that writing is more than just producing language on a page. We produce language on the page, and that is the creation of a product, but it’s also the end result of a life that leads to an ability to write with some level of ease. Which means that all of us—you included, me included, all of us who write—are several different things before we are a writer, and we have to be those things. I have to be a good sibling, a good dog ... I hate the word “dog parent,” but for lack of a better word, dog parent.
It’s a weird thing.
Yeah. Dog owner or whatever.
Well, that sounds even worse.
I know. I know. I have to be a good sports fan, music fan, and I think sometimes when I do feel blocked, in terms of putting words on a page, it’s because I haven’t fulfilled one of those other commitments to myself. If I can’t write and I call my brother, and through a conversation with my brother, something enlivens in me that allows me to return to a page easier, it would be kind of treasonous to not call that phone call a form of writing or engaging in a process of writing.
How did the structure of the work change during the editing process?
In the first draft, it was very about basketball. And it wasn’t even good writing. It was just me explaining the NBA Finals and then explaining the ’80s Cavs and then talking about Terrell Brandon. Thankfully, in the editing process, my editors were like, “You need to turn this book around. You need to begin with you as a teenager, watching this high school game, and then begin to build slowly.” That was such a great bit of advice because even the rewiring of that made the first act of the book about childhood more than about basketball.
It’s spring as hell out here, and I know you are a flora connoisseur. This is my hard-hitting journalism: Orchids, tulips, or sunflowers?
Sunflowers. Sunflowers are my favorite flower. I don’t actually know a lot about flowers when I wrote all those flower poems in A Fortune for Your Disaster. But I don’t know a ton about flowers, but I love a sunflower because I love [how] sunflowers kind of organically bend toward the sun. And to me, that’s beautiful. It’s beautiful that there’s a flower that turns its face toward that which keeps it alive so eagerly. There’s a romanticism of the sunflower that I value.
Are you somebody who reads a bunch of other people as you’re writing?
In my house, I’m one of those people who has multiple computer monitors like I’m a fucking statistician or something. I’ll pull up poems or excerpts from novels. And while I’m writing, I have a stack of books on my desk. I like not being alone. I think writing does not happen alone. If I’m writing in my house and I have an excerpt from Jazz up on my computer, then that means Morrison is in the room with me.
And to even say to myself, “I am not writing alone” means that I am willingly placing myself, at least temporarily, in a lineage that I have responsibility to. Any time with this book where I felt, I don’t think I can pull this off, or I don’t think I can make this book the shape I want it to be, I would turn to the people I was in the room with and say, “But I’m required to at least see this out and see it through.” Because I am in a lineage of people who ran up against walls and then found ways to get through or around those walls.
There are a bunch of lines in this book where I found myself having to pause and reread. One of the only other experiences that I can probably compare it to is when I first was reading Morrison. There were times when she literally taught me how to read. Is that something that you intend for the reader to do—to slow down?
I think this book is trying to attempt a sort of magic trick in that the descending clock makes you distinctly aware that time is running out, and it presents a kind of pace at which the book is moving. But on a sentence level, I’m almost demanding that the reader slows down. And so that was really intentional, to create this kind of dueling narrative.
I’m not saying it’s a hard read, but it is a read where it’s like, I hope people are rereading a line or two here or there, or envisioning something here or there. The whole idea behind that movement and that magic trick is to kind of make it feel, in some ways, like a basketball game. There are basketball games where the minutes fly by, and there are basketball games where the seconds feel like hours.
The last thing I wrote was this long-ass feature on gentrification in Harlem. I ended it by writing about my grandmother. And I knew why I was doing it, but at the same time, I’d also look at it and couldn’t help but think, “You guys don’t deserve my vulnerability” on the internet. Do you ever feel conflicted about showing so much of your own personal history to the public?
For me, I think it’s not a question of the people on the internet or in the world deserving my vulnerability. For me, it’s like, does this person who I love deserve to live in my work? And as a by-product of that, people will have access to them, sure. I’m doing that to say grief or loss or any of these things, they live with us eternally.
So when I’m writing about my mother or even when I’m writing about past versions of myself, who I’m mourning in some ways, that is just kind of refurbishing and refurnishing an ever-growing museum that I want to return to. Because I won’t always have access to the memories that I have of my mother, of my friends who are gone, of my past self.
Every time I turn away from the page and turn back to it, I’m a different person. Time has made me older. Well, not always wiser, but at least newer in some ways, and that means the grief that I carry is also new. I think about this as you are allowing people to bear witness to something that you would be doing anyway to furnish whatever desire and need you have to keep people echoing throughout your writing.
What was the last thing that you learned that excited you?
One thing I learned recently that I love is this hard drive that I have that has all the isolated drum tracks from Stevie Wonder’s golden run of albums in the ’70s. Sometimes Stevie Wonder is drumming, and sometimes someone else is drumming. You can tell when Stevie Wonder is drumming because you can hear him humming in the headphones. And that’s so delightful for me because it’s enforcing the reality that he’s not drumming like a drummer, he’s drumming like a songwriter.
He’s feeling his way through a path that he and only he knows. And that’s really romantic to me. This idea that you are humming your way toward something that you’ve built, and you’re just trying to figure out how to feel your way to the next room and the next room and the next room. That’s one of the greatest things that I keep returning to and learning and relearning. Sometimes, with me, I feel like the work is already written. I’ve already written this. I just need to figure out how to produce the language on the page.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
QUOTED: "I’m actually at a point now where I don’t even think of genre as something that affects my approach to the work. I’m really driven instead by whatever it will take for me to figure out what’s latching onto me at the moment. Oftentimes, so much of my work is driven by my curiosities and knowing that I’m wrong about something."
"I’m interested in finding whatever avenue it takes for me—not even to find answers, but to find better ways to discuss my wrongness. Sometimes that’s a really long piece. Sometimes that’s a poem, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. But the sooner I gave up the idea of adhering to genre the easier the work came to me."
Interview: Hanif Abdurraqib
Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's The Crown Ain't Worth Much. Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's Vintage Sadness. Cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His published work includes poetry in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN America, and various other journals and essays and music criticism in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016), was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, and others. He is also the author of a poetry chapbook, Vintage Sadness (Big Licks, 2017), which was produced in a limited edition and is no longer available.
He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow and a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing. He now serves as poetry editor for Muzzle.
Yes, he would like to talk to you about your favorite band and your favorite sneakers. You can find out more at his website.
We caught up with Hanif at the Miami Book Fair in the fall of 2017, right before the release of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to talk to him about that collection and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much.
Hunter Case for The Florida Review: I’m a little bit star-struck (laughter) and I’d like to have you start off by reading a poem.
Abdurraqib: Sure. This poem is called “None Of My Vices Are Violent Enough To Undo Remembering.” (Abdurraqib reads the poem, found here.)
TFR: The last couple of years have had you releasing a collection of both poetry and essays. Do you find it easier to go between the two forms? Or do you find you have a certain proclivity for one genre?
Abdurraqib: I’m actually at a point now where I don’t even think of genre as something that affects my approach to the work. I’m really driven instead by whatever it will take for me to figure out what’s latching onto me at the moment. Oftentimes, so much of my work is driven by my curiosities and knowing that I’m wrong about something. I’m interested in finding whatever avenue it takes for me—not even to find answers, but to find better ways to discuss my wrongness. Sometimes that’s a really long piece. Sometimes that’s a poem, sometimes it’s a combination of the two. But the sooner I gave up the idea of adhering to genre the easier the work came to me.
TFR: A lot of your poems are very narrative, or at least seem to be driven by some sort of distinct memory. I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but the ghost of the author’s mother and Tyler both play prominent roles in each collection respectively. And in “When We Were 13…” [a poem from The Crown Ain’t Worth Much], you say that a “piano can coax the most vicious of ghosts out of a body.” Do you ever find that your writing, or what you write, tends to do the same? That is the way of coaxing these ghosts out of your memory?
Abdurraqib: Yeah, or perhaps more efficiently, is that it’s a way of bringing people to life. Bringing people back to life I’ve lost. I think that’s important. I think that work is more vital than anything, which is why I don’t think of the work as sad when others might. I think of it as honoring—that it’s an honor for me to write about people who are no longer with me so that they might live on in a space that is outside of me. In a world beyond the one they inhabit while they are here.
TFR: You write so much about fear. The fear of loss, and there’s a fear of whiteness, blackness, violence. Do you ever find yourself being afraid of something in particular? What is the fear you find through your writing?
Abdurraqib: I’m afraid of the current state of the world. I’m afraid for the marginalized people I love. I’m afraid of empire and the way that America is positioning itself, not just in our States but globally. I’m afraid of all those things, and I believe that together we can work toward changing those things, but I’m even more afraid of the things I’m individually in charge of. I’m afraid of my anxiety overcoming my day-to-day life and not allowing me to live a life that chases some joy. I’m afraid of letting down the people I love in whatever way that looks like. And I’m afraid of not honoring and valuing the people I love while they’re still here to be honored and valued.
TFR: So since a lot of your writing is about honoring people, or being afraid of letting down people you care about, what is the most important part of that process? Getting those thoughts out? Living your life in that way?
Abdurraqib: The most important part of the process—for me at least—is trying to approach all of my relationships as honestly as possible. Trying to—and this is the real struggle—bring the vulnerability that exists on the page and bring the kind of honest tenderness that I attempt to bring to the page and bring that into my real life interactions. I think that’s hard work because it’s easy to write the thing, but it’s harder to live the thing sometimes. It’s easier for me to wax poetic about how I love my people and my work, but sometimes it’s harder to do that when I’m tired or frustrated. So I think the thing I’m working on endlessly is trying to live close to the way I write.
TFR: And do you think, coming from a masculine community, that tenderness is especially challenging to express on the page as well?
Abdurraqib: Yes and no. I will say this. A thing that I’m always aware of is the fact that I’m a straight, cis-male, so I am rewarded for showing vulnerability in ways that people who don’t identify like me are just expected to show vulnerability. Or that sometimes those who don’t identify as I do are punished for that vulnerability. I try to be very aware of that. Yes, vulnerability is a challenge for everyone. But all this stuff has to be seen through the lens of whatever privileges we hold. So I am cognizant of my vulnerability being applauded because of how I identify, but I also still earnestly chase after that because when I was young I didn’t have a real masculine blueprint for vulnerability, and what that led to was me growing up in a world in which I thought vulnerability was the work of women. I spent my late teens/early twenties in the punk scene, and I thought [vulnerability] was the work of my queer or women friends in the scene. And it’s not. So I want to work to strip that idea away, and I think it is stripping away honestly. I sometimes go into high schools and do workshops with students, and I think young men are really writing poems fearlessly and comfortably in a way that I wasn’t when I was their age because I was afraid of what writing a poem would mean. I was afraid of what writing a poem would tell me about myself. That if I put the emotions I was having down on the page that it would make them real and then I’d have to confront them. I think I’m seeing that in high schools—young men confronting those emotions in ways that I was not ready to.
TFR: And coming up in the scene that you did, did you ever get blow-back from attempting to get into writing—both as writing and as vulnerability—from anybody that you grew up with?
Abdurraqib: Not really, the most push-back I got was from being one of the few black kids in the scene. But I also came up in a particular era of punk/pop-punk/emo. The Myspace and AOL Instant Messenger era of the scene where everyone fancied themselves some kind of poetic person even though none of us were, right? The men who were the front-men of those bands, or the mouthpieces of those bands, were often the brooding writer types even though most of their writing was directed pretty poorly.
TFR: A lot of your writing talks about growing up in the Midwest. Both in the suburbs and out of them. Or, as you say, “the less than suburban neighborhood.” How do you think your writing and you, yourself, would be different had you not come up in the Midwest? Because I know that that scene—both the Midwest and its punk scene, similar to Chuck Klostermann who writes a lot about the Midwest metal scene—is very influential and very present in your writing. How do you think it would be different if you had grown up somewhere else?
Abdurraqib: I’m growing a little more interested in how I talk about the Midwest because post-election I feel the Midwest person became this one entity—this singular being—and there are as many types of Midwesterners as there are anyone. I was recently in Nebraska and that’s a very specific type of Midwest different from mine in Columbus, Ohio. I was in Omaha and Lincoln and those are very different Midwests, but there’s an ethos that I think has to do with facing your people. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist on the coasts, but I think that I am writing, always, as though I am in conversation with an audience already. I want people to come to my readings or see me read and feel like they have already joined a conversation in progress—or that they’re welcome to. I don’t know if I’d have that ability, or I’d have an eye towards that, if I did not grow up in a place where I felt like I was always a part of a conversation.
TFR: Do you feel that that critical distance is something that helps when you’re unlocking moments of tenderness? Or do you think you’d be impeded if you didn’t have that lens thinking of your audience when you approach the writing?
Abdurraqib: I feel like it’d be impeded. But I also think that my music writing, knowledge, and education was totally born just talking about music with my pals. In diners, in bars, in living rooms and basements. That’s what I’m trying to recreate. I don’t want there to be a world in which I am the critic and I am writing down to audience. My audience are the people I want to talk to about music, and I want to create that large living room where we can all sit and talk about some songs that we like. Or don’t like.
TFR: Is that recreation, besides being an egalitarian measure, maybe a nostalgia for those moments which might be gone otherwise?
Abdurraqib: I think there’s some nostalgia there. But I also think there’s an interest in that. I don’t think people anymore are interested in reading the critic-on-high telling them what to like or not like. A lot of people want to dive into the discussion and may not have time to be music writers for a living or may not have the passion. I did a reading recently and there were these two guys in suits, two businessmen who came to this reading, and they were so eager to talk to me during the Q&A about the piece I wrote on Fleetwood Mac. I’m interested in that person. The person who has a day job but also loves music and doesn’t have the opportunities to talk about it as much as they want to. They want to seek out someone who’s speaking to them on their level, where they feel a part of the conversation.
TFR: Jumping off of that, in They Can’t Kill Us, all of your essays are framed by these vignettes around Marvin Gaye. And his final performance at the NBA All-Star’s game before he died. His 1983 performance. Why did that feel right to you?
Abdurraqib: So there were a handful of things. One, it was the year I was born. Two, I had this interest in Marvin Gaye—the unpacking of that moment and how it could sing to every part of the book. Because it encapsulates everything: there’s fear there, triumph, violence.
TFR: There’s vulnerability.
Abdurraqib: There’s vulnerability. I’m fascinated by Marvin Gaye on the whole, but that was the one thing where I thought, Gosh, there’s so much of this and that singing to the collection, and it’s such a fascinating story because it’s this performance that he performed miraculously under a great deal of duress. And he was able to find this small bit of freedom in that performance. I think everything in that book is arcing toward freedom, at least as I see it. So it was natural for me to insert that throughout.
TFR: So, in the words of Marvin Gaye, “What’s going on?” With you, I mean.
Abdurraqib: (laughs) A lot. Just in general?
TFR: In general. Today.
Abdurraqib: Today’s great. I’m just overwhelmed by this. I got here this morning, maybe I should have come the night before. But I got here this morning, I had to fly out of Columbus at six in the morning. And I’m thrilled to be here, so many of my friends are here. I think the writing community I came up in is that there’s so many people I love and consider dear friends, but we sometimes only see each other at things like this. Or if we’re in each other’s towns for a bit, so this is like a small family reunion for me. I’m really thrilled.
TFR: Do you think that kind of atmosphere also captures the feeling of leaving your twenties, where your friendships fall to where you see each other occasionally? It almost parallels that arc.
Abdurraqib: Yeah, it arcs that way. I think adulthood is sometimes honing your long-distance communication skills. I think that’s it.
TFR: Each of these collections is structured—you said They Can’t Kill Us is structured around freedom. What do each of these collections mean to you, if they mean something different at all?
Abdurraqib: I don’t know if they mean anything different at all. I think they’re both archiving a certain thing. I think Crown is more specific in that it’s archiving a very specific brand of East Side Columbus, adulthood, and a very specific brand of black male childhood. I grew up watching films like Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, where I saw these black coastal narratives. So I think Crown was my attempt to kind of make Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City in book form for the Midwest. This portrait of a black childhood that is not entirely autobiographical—the bones of it, yes, but it’s not a memoir. I wanted to create a landscape and a storyscape that was like these things I grew up watching but specifically for my brand of Midwest.
TFR: The title, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, what is the crown to you?
Abdurraqib: So the title comes from the TV show The Wire and the full quote is, “The crown ain’t worth much if the person wearing it is always gettin’ their shit taken.” For me, because so much of the collection is about the generational impacts of gentrification on the East Side of Columbus or Columbus in general, I began thinking the crown itself is any thing or any place you love and want to believe is yours. It’s something that can be taken as easily as it can be given, which I think is true of it in the traditional definition but also in this metaphor I crafted about land and home and freedom.
TFR: You said it’s semi-autobiographical, do you feel that your writing might portray you as having a more exciting life than you may feel you have?
Abdurraqib: Oh, absolutely.
TFR: (laughs)
Abdurraqib: I think that’s always the case. Crown, I wouldn’t even call it semi-autobiographical in some ways. I mean I think the most autobiographical stuff is maybe in that third section where I talk about the anxieties of preparing to be married and all of those things. But, a lot of it is the bones of my life with more complex, newer, better flesh on top of them. The stuff that’s in They Can’t Kill Us is way more personal. Way closer to home. And of course, you’re always worried about how you portray yourself more than anyone else. I think I did okay.
TFR: I saw in an interview that you’re working on a second collection of poems. Are there any forms or topics that you haven’t had a chance to write about yet that you are excited to experiment with?
Abdurraqib: Topics-wise, I feel like I wrote a very large political book with Crown. I know it might not seem political because we weren’t in this “political moment.” But I think I may be picking an interesting moment in time to want to write about the minutiae of living. When I first moved back to Columbus, there was a tree outside my apartment, and the way the sun would hit it in the morning the shadow of a leaf would move across my bed and eventually end up on my face. I’m fascinated by that. I want to write about several small mercies as they come to me. I know that might not seem as impressive now because people are expecting the now-more-than-ever book. We need poets to be political now more than ever but, I think that for me, as a black person in America, my now has been now for a long time. So I’m interested in exploring that which will get me through.
TFR: While I think it’s important to speak about the grand narrative, you can also lose a lot if you don’t focus on the personal moments. It’s almost as though you can sometimes forget how to live.
Abdurraqib: Absolutely.
TFR: Before the interview, we were talking about Fall Out Boy and their importance in They Can’t Kill Us, and I wanted to ask you: if you could tell Pete Wentz something both pre-hiatus and post-hiatus, what would you say?
Abdurraqib: I’ve actually told him something post-hiatus. In short, I told him, through someone, that the new songs aren’t for me, but I’m glad to see that the band is still affecting young people in a good way. I went to go see them on the back of the American Beauty/American Psycho tour and I just thought that album was a nightmare to listen to, but I wanted to see them. It’s a different type of young person, but I don’t want to dismiss that. Pre-hiatus, it depends on which Pete, right? Because pre-hiatus there were four different Petes. There’s a Pete for each album. The Pete that’s most interesting to me is the Infinity on High Pete who was struggling with the idea of fame. He really wanted to be famous, but didn’t really want fame. Because now, Pete Wentz is mega-famous, he adjusted. But the whole band break-up was because he couldn’t adjust, he married Ashlee Simpson. I guess I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems like the whole tension between that last album pre-hiatus was because he couldn’t [adjust.] I think Infinity on High is their greatest album, but I think it’s the album where, as a writer, Pete is seeing through a lot of his tricks. He’s just writing plainly about this intense agony—and as I wrote about them in They Can’t Kill Us. I saw early Fall Out Boy shows—I saw the first Fall Out Boy show ever. It has to be a very specific kind of pain to come up in the Chicago hardcore and emo scene, to be Pete Wentz in that scene. To be beloved in bands like Race Traitor and Arma Angelus, playing to thirty people who were his best friends; to go from that to playing VH1 for Paris Hilton overnight. They put out From Under the Cork Tree, thought it would be fine, and then “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” becomes this massive hit. That had to be a real pain, where the band would play in Chicago and his friends couldn’t get into the show, or to have people from his scene, that he was in bands with, calling them “sell-outs.” My heart broke for that Pete Wentz. That writing scene means so much to me, I can’t fathom what it would be like to be so successful that it harms my relationship to it.
TFR: I love talking music and, given your writing, I know you do too. If you could make our readers a mixtape, who would be on it?
Abdurraqib: It’s hard to make a universal mixtape. A mixtape is a story, and you have to build a narrative, so I like leading off with songs that are haunting. I would probably lead off with “Devil Town,” the Bright Eyes version, because I don’t think the Daniel Johnston version is that compelling. I would put “Crazy” by Kehlani because that’s a really fun song. Cat Power has a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I Found a Reason” which I think is maybe the best cover of anything, ever. I’m just fascinated by Cat Power. There’s a piece on them that was cut from the book—I don’t think it should have been cut from the book, I wish I could put it somewhere else. I’d put some Otis Redding, you can’t go wrong with any Otis Redding. Anderson Paak. But if I put Anderson Paak, I also have to put A Tribe Called Quest because I think it’s good to put an artist and the lineage they come from. This could go on forever. I would put Fall Out Boy. Generally, if I’m making a mixtape for somebody, I’ll end it with Fall Out Boy’s “Saturday.” It’s the great closer.
TFR: Similarly, if you could have a “poet mixtape.” Not generally, but for you, who would be on it?
Abdurraqib: Oh, Angela Veronica Wong, who’s one of my favorite writers. Sam Sax. Safia Elhillo. Courtney Lamar Charleston. And Nate Marshall. William Evans, who’s my mentor from Columbus. Terrance Hayes. Kaveh Akbar. Franny Choi. Cameron Awkward-Rich. Ocean Vuong. Anne Sexton. Frank O’Hara. Gosh, I could go on.
Oh, Adrian Matejka. Sorry, that’s the last one.
TFR: (laughs). I read in a previous interview with you that you always manage to feel like an artist, even when you aren’t producing. I know that that can be a struggle for a lot of writers, myself included. Any tips on how to keep yourself from being self-critical and feeling inadequate if you don’t produce constantly?
Abdurraqib: I think the answer is imagining the work living as the work. This society—because of capitalism and how it bleeds into the art world—is so obsessed with what we can produce and how much we’re producing when really the production is an ongoing thing. If I go out tonight and have a conversation that moves me closer to the unearthing of something that has been nested inside, or that allows me to see the world in a way that’s a tiny bit richer, that is also work. That’s also art. If I wake up tomorrow morning, look out my hotel balcony, and see a bird diving into the water and that motion brings to mind some poetic movement I haven’t been able to figure out yet, that’s also work. It’s not only work if I run to go write it down immediately—the witnessing is work. Conversation, laughter, and song, all of these things that sit inside of us and push us on a path towards whatever eventual art may exist that comes from us, or others, that’s all the art, too. So you’re an artist when you’re doing these things. You’re an artist when you’re consuming that which opens you up to something refreshing or new. You’re an artist when you’re enjoying a meal alone. You’re an artist then, too.
TFR: What advice would you have for writers, in general? Not just about self-doubt, but just about writers, for writers.
Abdurraqib: I think read twice as much as you write. That’s been my thing since the beginning. I read way more than I write. I guess this isn’t universal advice, because sometimes the people you love to read might be too busy to talk to you, but find the writers you love and don’t be afraid to reach out to them and ask them who they’re reading. That’s how I built my poetry canon. I asked the writers I admired who they admired, or what books they loved. Because I don’t have an MFA, I didn’t really start taking poems seriously until around 2011.
TFR: Do you have a favorite piece from either of your collections? Or both?
Abdurraqib: In They Can’t Kill Us, “Fall Out Boy Forever” means a lot to me. I don’t know if it’s the best piece. It’s the longest thing in the book by, at least, 3000 words. It was one of those things that lead to a lot of self-discovery. I also really like the piece on My Chemical Romance and feel good about the piece with Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson kissing.
TFR: From The Crown?
Abdurraqib: I like the first poem in the book, “On Hunger.” It’s the first poem I wrote for the book, and it’s an effective thesis statement for the book.
TFR: To echo what you said earlier, it’s very haunting, which is a good way to start off a mix.
Abdurraqib: I sequenced that book as though I was making a mix. I think that piece is probably my favorite.
TFR: Your author bios on your publications always say that you want to talk about music, love, and sneakers. So, what is your favorite sneaker and do you think it means anything that you were born right before Air Jordans came out?
Abdurraqib: Probably. (laughs) Although, the first couple of ones were pretty bad. I think my favorite sneaker of all time is the third sneaker: the Jordan 3. It’s just very clean and comfortable. It fits my foot really well in the way that some don’t because it’s a little wider. My foot’s a little wider. It just looks good with any pair of pants. Sometimes the thing about shoes is how they look with pants, and I think Jordan 3’s look good with every pair of pants. They’re not complicated, there are some Jordans that are complicated, like Jordan 6’s. The design is so muddled. The Jordan 11—those are beautiful with the patent leather on them, but it is just not a practical shoe. But I would say that the Jordan 3 is my favorite.
QUOTED: "As someone who came up performing in multiple ways—as a high school athlete, as a drama-club member, as a poet who reads things onstage—I wanted to step back and ask myself what I believed the fullest and richest interpretations of Black performance to be and, through those interpretations, how I could celebrate it."
"it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn."
What Is There to Celebrate? An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib
By Langa Chinyoka March 31, 2021AT WORK
HANIF ABDURRAQIB. PHOTO: MEGAN LEIGH BARNARD.
Hanif Abdurraqib spent the winter shoveling. In Columbus, Ohio, his hometown, he often found himself spending hours clearing the snow from his driveway, only for it to start back up again as soon as he was done. Sometimes, his neighbor would be out there, too, and as they braced themselves for the cold and the work ahead of them, they’d exchange a smirk, a raised eyebrow, and a nod, as if to say, Ain’t this some shit. Abdurraqib laughs as he offers this anecdote, not just because it’s funny but because of the simple, effervescent joy that bubbles up from beneath interactions like this—when you’re with your people, and things do not have to be explained, or even spoken, to be understood.
But how do you put these moments into language? In part, this is the project of A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib’s new collection of essays on the history of Black performance in the U.S. It’s Whitney and Michael, minstrelsy and blackface, school dances and sports games, Soul Train and a spades table, and so many other cultural artifacts held beneath a loving microscope for Abdurraqib’s careful examination. A practiced author, poet, and critic with books such as Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (2019) and They Can’t Kill Us until They Kill Us (2017) under his belt, Abdurraqib is in complete control here, balancing the personal and the public as he explores the legacy, the nuance, and sometimes, yes, the shame of Black performance while surrendering even himself to scrutiny—the limits of his past self, the limits of all this loving.
When we spoke on the phone earlier this year, we discussed optimism, gratitude, and grace, I was reminded of the Lucille Clifton poem that goes, “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” I thought of it again as I reread the book’s final essay, in which Abdurraqib writes, “Isn’t that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t?”
Although Abdurraqib admits to feeling cynical sometimes, A Little Devil in America is a testament to still being here, still finding moments to celebrate despite everything else. If you were to transform a head nod into something that could be held within the pages of a book, it would look like this. If you were to tell someone you loved them, you missed them, and you were happy to know them, you would hope it sounded like this. There is no exaggerated sentimentality, but there is—even in the middle of mourning—music, and even dancing.
INTERVIEWER
In A Little Devil in America, you celebrate the joy of Black performance, but you don’t shy away from its difficult history. Can you talk a little about that?
ABDURRAQIB
When I was first writing the book, I spent a lot of time in the midst of minstrelsy and blackface. Much of that is still in the finished book, but the original drafts were anchored by it. I don’t want to disparage my past books, obviously, but I do think it was a different type of thrill to spend time deep in the archives of performances that I perhaps would have once seen as only shameful or only frustrating to witness. To add humanity and illuminate some corners of those felt really good. In the accounts I read, minstrel performers often talked about how the stage, in a way, was pulling them closer to a type of freedom they otherwise would not have been able to access. And that kind of reframed my thinking around shame and survival—making something out of what they had at the time in order to ascend to heights that they were denied at every other turn. Which doesn’t mean that I’m, like, coming out in favor of minstrel shows, but it was important to recontextualize, to think about what it was like to be a person who had been enslaved, or had a relative who had been enslaved, and possessed very few resources to perform in a way that provided power to the people.
INTERVIEWER
You spend time with so many different performances and types of performance, both public and private. How did your definition of performance evolve, especially in regards to how it’s embedded in the Black community?
ABDURRAQIB
As someone who came up performing in multiple ways—as a high school athlete, as a drama-club member, as a poet who reads things onstage—I wanted to step back and ask myself what I believed the fullest and richest interpretations of Black performance to be and, through those interpretations, how I could celebrate it. Thinking, for instance, about the game of spades as a type of performance brings me closer to a desire to celebrate it or to name the pleasure that comes out of both witnessing and being immersed in it. I love when someone breaks out some new house rules that’s just, like, their shit, and I’m always like, Oh yeah, I know what’s going on. And that, too, is the performance within the performance. Even if I don’t know what the fuck is going on, I’m still going to pretend. And I would prefer that, to fake it until I make it, to being on the outside of the experience—even if that outside is still loving, even if it’s people whom I love and who love me, I still want to be in that fold. Because I know in that fold there’s an affection that cannot be duplicated.
INTERVIEWER
So do you write to the inside or the outside? Is there an imagined audience, and if so, how do you bring them into these more esoteric moments without compromising the intimacy?
ABDURRAQIB
I think a lot about what will serve the people who not only know what I’m attempting to do but also don’t need an explanation. There’s something really celebratory about coming to the page and knowing that you’re in conversation with someone who trusts you, who understands that you do not need to be walked through something that you lived, and who isn’t trying to waste your time. Now, there are some things I don’t mind building scaffolding around for the sake of historical context, but I’m not going to explain the rules of spades or a certain dance move when I can paint a picture of a time or a person. Like, to describe Don Cornelius—in voice, in stature, in elegance—does a greater service to a reader than explaining what Soul Train is. It’s in service of people who have an understanding of where I am trying to take them, who, instead of looking for explanation, are perhaps looking for an image that will enliven their memory of something or someone. And as a writer, I think my voice can be a lot more playful when I feel like I’m in a conversation with people who know what I’m talking about. I can write as though I’m in the room and we’re laughing across the table. And that is what I wanted to replicate—the feeling of being in a room with my people, going back and forth over something inconsequential that to us, in that moment, means the world.
INTERVIEWER
Can communities, even if they’re of affection and love, sometimes be alienating?
ABDURRAQIB
Alienation is a harsh word, but I don’t mind being on the outside of a community that I would hinder with my presence. Sometimes—for me, at least—the best move is to move, to be out of the way. And to be frank, there are some groups and communities that I am not equipped to be a part of or don’t want to be a part of, because community to me has always felt, and still feels, like a very intentional project of care and of holding your people close.
There’s a self-awareness that I strive for, perhaps in understanding what I can offer to whom and when I can offer it. Other than that, sometimes the best thing to do is to stay on the outside of something. There’s an idea of performance as a barrier to keep out those who perhaps do not understand every mode of interaction and are not required to, and I think the approach to the book was similar. I could only write about the portions of performance, and the witnessing of performance, as I saw it. So I never wanted to come across as an expert, but I did want to present myself as someone who had been thinking a lot about performance and survival through different generations.
INTERVIEWER
Still, with all the eras and generations the book spans, so much of it feels rooted in your own adolescence. You give a lot of grace to that period, that stumbling process of figuring out what you liked and what you were like, especially when both might have been flawed.
ABDURRAQIB
I really revel in the opportunity to go back and say, Well, I was wrong about this, but I was wrong about it due to a set of circumstances. Sometimes not even saying, I did the best with the tools I had at the time, but instead saying, The tools I had at the time were faulty, and I didn’t do the best with them, but now I’m interested in reformatting that something from the past mentally, without stripping myself of what it did mean to me when I first encountered it. For example, I don’t really feel the way about Michael Jackson that I did when he died. But in the book, I write about his death and his funeral because of what that moment did to propel my thinking about death and funerals. I’m never beholden to anything I believed once. Instead, I feel more beholden to the search for new information and then an adjustment based off of that information. But I certainly don’t feel beholden to like, Well, I believed this or felt this once, so I have to carry it with me for the rest of my life or I have to feel bad about it. I think in between there lies a more interesting examination—why I believed something. And if I measure that up against what I believe now, what can be exhumed from that? Which is more worthwhile than just wagging my finger at my past self.
INTERVIEWER
What about the stakes of performance and representation right now in media and culture?
ABDURRAQIB
My big thought always is that whatever representation is or could be, if it is not serving the eventual liberation of and ability for Black folks to determine their own paths, then I don’t know if it’s really useful. The politics of representation—I mean, particularly literally in politics—has so often stifled progress. I’ve seen it stifle progress for people who are on the ground working, for people who have been organizing in their communities for decades, for generations of people who have been uplifting Black folks in their communities. My hope is that people continue to resist being satisfied by the optics of representation, and always return to the work. Because there’s always going to be more work to be done.
I’m someone who has organized his community and continues to and will continue to, and I think one thing that’s helped me is being in contact with folks who are already on the ground here and continually asking what the people here need and how I can be of service to empowering and liberating these folks. I’m proud of this book, and I love this book, but me writing a book doesn’t do anything material in terms of broad-strokes liberation or the people I care about, particularly here in Columbus, but also nationally, globally. I’m not trying to disparage the work I did—I’m very proud of it—but I’m trying to separate the work I do as a person who creates things from the work I am striving to do that will hopefully outlive whatever I produce on the page.
INTERVIEWER
In one of the sections about Whitney Houston, you write, “No matter how much our people love us, they can’t protect us.” So what can we do? What can love do?
ABDURRAQIB
Well, I try to be very thoughtful about the limits of love and the limits of excitement and the limits of my own curiosities, too. And the limits of what I believe freedom to be. In some ways, this is because I am admittedly too cynical, though I don’t believe myself to be pessimistic. I often run up against understanding the limits of how far a love for any people and any people’s love for themselves can carry them. I do think love can carry us very far, but we all come up against our individual limits—limits that have been heightened by the past eleven or twelve months in particular. At the end of last summer, I think those limits were stretched beyond even what many people thought they could be because we were operating in a country that, by design, is not built to reciprocate whatever love is poured into it. And even if the love is not poured, even if that love is withheld, the country can still punish at a level that does not match the withholding, that is significantly more severe than the withholding—on a community level but also on a very individual level.
So much of my investment in the celebratory nature of the book, or in the hope that the majority of the book is celebratory, was trying to come to terms with the limits of my affections, and writing with the understanding that—this does feel very cynical to say—I don’t want to take for granted the pleasureful curiosity I have, because it’s not promised, it’s not guaranteed. I saw the way the world and the country were just grinding away at the people I love, and continue to grind away at the people I love, and in my brain and in my heart, I am always in celebration of what my people have done and can do, but I worry that I will one day run out of language for that excitement. I’m not near that now, but I worry that due to the exhaustion of having to endure, witness, and be a party to a struggle braided with a history that existed before I was born and will exist likely after I’m gone … I just don’t want to take celebration for granted when I can still summon it. And I don’t want to take these small moments of pleasure that spill over beyond the rage or beyond grief or beyond mourning for granted as long as I can still articulate and illuminate them with some type of beauty. And that’s what the pursuit of this book was. And again, understanding that it’s not going to save anyone or change the materials of the machinery that many people I love are still caught in actually opened me up to more effusive joy and a broad-reaching understanding of celebration and the nuances of small movements.
INTERVIEWER
You say you feel cynical, but the book does such a good job of being celebratory and feeling so generous and thoughtful. Where do you find that celebration?
ABDURRAQIB
There’s a cautious optimism, almost. I don’t call myself a pessimist only because I grew up around so many people who found optimism when there was none to be found. It was important for me to write about Ellen Armstrong and her well-known trick where a coin materializes from behind the ear of an eager bystander. It was particularly important to me that she was doing this trick for Black folks, and for poor Black folks, who didn’t have a lot of money, and making them feel as though they were walking around holding more than they ever knew they had.
I grew up with people who I watched make things materialize out of thin air when it felt like things were dire, and almost certainly they were. And I’m not talking about the kind of empty but true sentiment of, Well, at least you have your health. I mean in a very specific and material way. Like the lights go out because the electric bill can’t be paid, but this means we can break out the candles and hear a good story from someone, this means we can convene and connect with an ancestor through storytelling. That to me feels like optimism, or optimism materializing out of a situation that is dire. I see it reflected in some of my actual behaviors now. And to be clear, I’m not an optimist—I’m just not a pessimist. I’m somewhere in between. I live alone, and I’m taking to the winter pandemic months with less enthusiasm than the warmer months, but I’m still finding small pleasures that don’t divorce me from the treacherous nature of the lived moment, ones that get me from one breathing exercise to the next. I need that propulsion, but I never want to be so optimistic that I am detached from the reality of a situation
INTERVIEWER
How do you balance optimism with cynicism—especially now, in the wake of the past year?
ABDURRAQIB
The book went through a lot of changes. There was a draft that I thought was too centered on whiteness, and there was a draft that was just steeped in grief—and I’ve already written a book that has a lot of grief in it. Obviously, the book was finished by the time the uprisings began last year, but toward the end of last summer, I was in the streets with folks, and at the end of one night—and this was a night when the cops were out beating people’s asses as they had been all summer—someone got out a radio and just set it down on the street and started playing music. And almost like clockwork, like a ripple effect, a couple folks started dancing, a couple more folks started dancing, and a circle formed. And then it became a whole thing. And this was at the end of the night, right? This was after people had to flush out folks’ eyes from tear gas, and after people had to put coats over those who were trying to protect their faces. And there was still energy after that, after the grief and after the weight of having to be out, the energy to feel something moving us toward celebration. Even though the casual bystander who maybe doesn’t know the intricacies of Black celebration might have looked at us like, What is there to celebrate? It felt steeped in tragedy, of course, but it felt in some way like home. Because without even speaking, someone brought out music, and that was the cue. People just started dancing and formed a circle to protect the people dancing. That is a perfect example of what does not need to be spoken or explained. And through that, through the withholding of explanation, there is a pleasure that exists, I think, just for us.
Langa Chinyoka is a writer living in New York City.
QUOTED: "Abdurraqib's poignant critiques ... inspire us to listen with our whole selves."
They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us. By Hanif Abdurraqib. Nov. 2017.300p. Two Dollar Radio, paper, $16.99 (97819375126511.780.
MTV, Pitchfork, and New York Times contributor and poet Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain't Worth Much, 2016) writes with uninhibited curiosity and insight about music and its ties to culture and memory, life and death, on levels personal, political, and universal. He's interested in what sells and what's currency, how music reminds us of who we love or who we've lost or who we once were. Hearing Nina Simones 1964 recording of "Pirate Jenny" as a preteen shaped him, as did the midwestern punk/ hardcore/emo scenes he explored later. Released days after Abdurraqib's mothers sudden death, the Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous hit "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems"--and the "shiny suit era" it ushered in--was a kind of light in the darkness, a rap song, with its infectious Diana Ross sample, that Abdurraqib will forever wonder if his mom might have liked. The title of his essay collection comes from a sign left above Michael Brown's memorial in Ferguson, which Abdurraqib visited the day before seeing Bruce Springsteen perform all the songs in The River, "an album of men and women and families and the grand idea of surviving to enjoy it all." Abdurraqib's poignant critiques, a catalog of the current moment and all that preceded it, inspire us to listen with our whole selves.--Annie Bostrom
YA: Abdurraqib's timely essays and memories of youthful listening will speak directly to teen writers and music lovers. AB.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Bostrom, Annie. "They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2017, p. 20. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512776084/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fcfeb678. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music."
Abdurraqib, Hanif THEY CAN'T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US Two Dollar Radio (Adult Nonfiction) $15.99 11, 14 ISBN: 978-1-937512-65-1
An Ohio-based poet, columnist, and music critic takes the pulse of the nation while absorbing some of today's most eclectic beats.
At first glance, discovering deep meaning in the performance of top-40 songstress Carly Rae Jepsen might seem like a tough assignment. However, Abdurraqib (The Crown Ain't Worth Much, 2016) does more than just manage it; he dives in fully, uncovering aspects of love and adoration that are as illuminating and earnest as they are powerful and profound. If he can do that with Jepsen's pop, imagine what the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Prince, or Nina Simone might stir in him. But as iconic as those artists may be, the subjects found in these essays often serve to invoke deeper forays into the worlds surrounding the artists as much as the artists themselves. Although the author is interested in the success and appeal of The Weeknd or Chance the Rapper, he is also equally--if not more--intrigued with the sociopolitical and existential issues that they each managed to evoke in present-day America. In witnessing Zoe Saldana's 2016 portrayal of Simone, for instance, Abdurraqib thinks back to his own childhood playing on the floor of his family home absorbing the powerful emotions caused by his mother's 1964 recording of "Nina Simone in Concert"--and remembering the relentlessly stigmatized soul who, unlike Saldana, could not wash off her blackness at the end of the day. In listening to Springsteen, the author is reminded of the death of Michael Brown and how "the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal is coming from." In all of Abdurraqib's poetic essays, there is the artist, the work, the nation, and himself. The author effortlessly navigates among these many points before ultimately arriving at conclusions that are sometimes hopeful, often sorrowful, and always visceral.
Erudite writing from an author struggling to find meaning through music.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Abdurraqib, Hanif: THEY CAN'T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A509243950/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=370aef99. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Abdurraqib's essays are filled with honesty, providing the reader with the sensation of seeing the world through fresh eyes."
* They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays
Hanif Abdurraqib. Two Dollar Radio, $ 15.99 trade paper (236p) ISBN 978-1-937512-65-1
Abdurraqib's essay collection is mesmerizing and deeply perceptive. Most of the essays are about music, particularly live music, touching on how it acts as a balm in a time of fear and pain. One essay explores being an outsider among outsiders through Abdurraqib's memory of being a black kid at an overwhelmingly white punk rock show, yet imbues this experience of loneliness with a sense of triumph. Not every music writer would think to connect the performative identities of the rap group Migos and Johnny Cash as Abdurraqib does, showing how both are based on an arguably inauthentic outlaw persona. All of the musicians discussed, including Carly Rae Jepsen and Chance the Rapper, are accorded respect, along with an understanding of what needs in their audience they satisfy. Abdurraqib's essays linger on the black American experience, emphasizing the desire to be seen and the fear of being invisible. He doesn't posit music as a cure-all for modern America's societal ills--those he mentions include mass shootings, racial violence, and prejudice against Muslims--but also observes that it "isn't only music" but a way of feeling a sense of belonging. Abdurraqib's essays are filled with honesty, providing the reader with the sensation of seeing the world through fresh eyes. (Nov.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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"They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 33, 14 Aug. 2017, pp. 62+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A501717138/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2abf8383. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Although a familiarity with A Tribe Called Quest is recommended, the book can certainly be enjoyed by those who wouldn't consider themselves fans. With Never Go Ahead in the Rain, Abdurraqib creates a lasting work with an ambitious scope."
Hanif Abdurraqib, Never Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (Austin, University of Texas Press 2019)
IN THIS BOOK, Hanif Abdurraqib explores the personal, political, and cultural impact of the celebrated Queens hip hop group, A Tribe Called Quest. More than a standard biography, Abdurraqib uses the group to comment on the expansive socio-political context in which their music was created. Through a series of essays, Abdurraqib unfolds the history of A Tribe Called Quest while weaving in personal anecdotes to tell a grander narrative on music, race, politics, culture, and relationships.
Never Go Ahead in the Rain begins by contextualizing A Tribe Called Quest within the storied history of black music in America. Abdurraqib makes interesting musical connections, noting that A Tribe Called Quest combined funk and horns in the same way Buddy Bolden mixed ragtime and blues to create jazz. (10) The sounds of A Tribe Called Quest drew on this legacy of black music. They are known for their extensive sampling of jazz records, repurposing another generation's sounds for a new era. (10) One of the tools Abdurraqib employs to reassert the themes he is developing is to recount memories from his childhood. For example, he recalls that hip hop was not always permitted in his home--for a time, rap was taboo--but A Tribe Called Quest was always an exception. (9) They had a unique cross-cultural appeal which Abdurraqib attributes to the warm and vital feeling of their sounds. (9) The fact that they were paying homage to their influences also makes them the ideal subject for this book, allowing Abdurraqib to make his broader commentaries.
The honest and thoughtful analysis of each of A Tribe Called Quest's albums is a notable highlight of the book. These analyses serve as a platform to develop fascinating and perceptive interpretations of the group's music. The Low End Theory, the group's sophomore album, is explored through a series of alternating letters addressed to the groups two MCs: Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. In this chapter, Abdurraqib confronts the political meaning of the "low end." For Abdurraqib, the album title refers to the downtrodden -those not heard and those unseen. (58) The political commentary of this album is contextualized within the beating of Rodney King, occurring shortly before the album's release. Like the media attention given to King, which brought to light the struggles of harassment by the police, Abdurraqib feels The Low End Theory develops characters that speak to the various ways people try to survive. (58) For instance, in "Everything is Fair", Q-Tip raps about his romantic interest of Miss Elaine, who asks him to sell weed for her. (59) Abdurraqib argues that this story demonstrates the political message of the album. For Abdurraqib, the low end is the politics of everyday struggles; "the dark and endless humming of want, which opens the door and beckons us to all manner of ills." (59) Abdurraqib praises the album for wrapping these political ideas in a danceable sound that celebrates the freedom to briefly forget. For fans of the album's jazz-heavy production and clever storytelling, Abdurraqib offers a fresh and ingenious perspective on the album's political message.
The emotional core of the book is found in the chapter "Family Business" which grapples with the death of Phife Dawg from diabetes in 2016. Addressing Phife Dawg, along with his mother, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, and Q-Tip--we are given a glimpse into the meaningful connection Abdurraqib feels towards the members of A Tribe Called Quest. In these letters, Abdurraqib expresses the kinship he experiences with Boyce-Taylor--a fellow poet--whose loss of her son is paralleled with Abdurraqib's loss of his mother. (154) With Q-Tip, Abdurraqib gives his condolences for the loss of his brother and contemplates the state of the world since The Low End Theory and Rodney King. (162) In his letter addressed to Phife Dawg--using his given name, Malik --Abdurraqib calls for a celebration. Reflecting on the significance of sugar in Abdurraqib's own childhood, he does not dwell on Phife Dawg's habits which lead to his death, but instead wishes to revel in what he loved, at least for a day. (167) These letters are an impactful and poignant tribute to a misunderstood genius.
There are numerous insights to be gleaned from Never Go Ahead in the Rain, especially for those with an interest in race and culture. Abdurraqib is able to reflect on his own life events and connect them to larger cultural experiences. For instance, he discusses how his knowledge of hip hop was used as a sort of social currency growing up. Although Abdurraqib acknowledges he would not have been considered cool, he was able to exchange his knowledge of the newest and most interesting trends in music for a degree of social protection. (36) Another account details his religious reading of the rap magazine, The Source, which leads to a larger discussion of black media. Abdurraqib goes on to give a short history of Jet (a legacy black publication) and what that magazine meant for the civil rights movement--especially by printing uncensored images of the battered body of Emmitt Till. (115) These sorts of comparisons help to illustrate the cultural significance of hip hop in Abdurraqib's life.
Abdurraqib's background as a poet is on full display in his remarkable prose and extensive use of metaphor. Much like reading poetry, these essays are better experienced than summarized. Abdurraqib imparts on the reader a closeness to the characters found in the book. The intimacy of this book is creates insight into why the band has resonated with so many fans, and why this cultural history of this music is important to evoke.
Although a familiarity with A Tribe Called Quest is recommended, the book can certainly be enjoyed by those who wouldn't consider themselves fans. With Never Go Ahead in the Rain, Abdurraqib creates a lasting work with an ambitious scope. He obscures the line between social commentary, memoir, and biography. Most importantly, Abdurraqib constructs a worthy homage to one of hip-hops most innovative artists.
BRODY TROTTTER
University of Toronto
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
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Trottter, Brody. "Hanif Abdurraqib, Never Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest." Labour/Le Travail, vol. 84, fall 2019, pp. 358+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A609217107/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0b10fa6e. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "It is a love letter and an expression of deep gratitude made personally, and on behalf of a culture."
GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN
Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
HANIF ABDURRAQIB
300pp. Melville House.
Paperback, 8.99 [pounds sterling] (US $16.95).
Go Ahead in the Rain is a sparkling tribute to A Tribe Called Quest, one of hip-hop's most influential groups. It is a love letter and an expression of deep gratitude made personally, and on behalf of a culture, for what Hanif Abdurraqib calls "the art of resurrection". Tribe's sound felt like the payoff of centuries of resistance against the silencing of African rhythms, passed down through jazz--a "music born out of necessity"--and signifying a "long reach backwards toward something magical in the hopes that an unspeakable distance ... can slowly become closer". The book is ultimately about distance emotional, physical, temporal and how we try to bridge those gaps between descendants and ancestors, musicians and fans, parents and children and between childhood friends who grew up together in New York at the dawn of hip-hop.
It is self-consciously both intimate and grand (the opening words are "In the beginning"). The characters are drawn from across hip-hop's rich pantheon, but the protagonists are Tribe's biggest and most complex personalities: Q-Tip, de facto frontman and cratedigger extraordinaire, and Phife Dawg, Five-Foot Assassin, who died in March 2016 before Tribe's last album We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service was released. Abdurraqib is an excellent guide through the cultural landscape that made (and unmade) Tribe, effortlessly weaving socio-cultural history, music criticism and personal anecdote in an accessible manner, to remind you if you had forgotten and convince you if you had been unaware of the band's art and impact beyond their Lou Reed-sampling hit "Can I Kick It".
He is skilled at circling back to show how what might seem like a digression is in fact a vital component of the story. In one chapter, he takes the reader on a journey from his memories of making cassette mixtapes to the Source magazine cover of 1998 that announced Tribe's break-up, by way of the history of Jet magazine and its covers depicting Emmett Till in his open casket and Otis Redding's frozen body still strapped to an aircraft seat.
It could seem hyperbolic to correlate those haunting photographs to the image of "the whites of Q-Tip's eyes against so much darkness". But this book is a study in empathy. It provides a doorway into the often maligned and ridiculed emotional world of fandom. It warmly conveys the earnestness of Tribe's fans, regarding their affinity with the band--"I got it, Phife", "I know you get where I'm coming from"--and shows it to be an expression of the many ways we try to "speak to each other across any distance placed between us".
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Amoako, Aida. "GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6092, 3 Jan. 2020, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631647626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dd1cf1e5. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process."
Abdurraqib, Hanif GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN Univ. of Texas (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 2, 1 ISBN: 978-1-4773-1648-1
Memoir meets cultural criticism in this bittersweet appreciation of hip-hop visionaries A Tribe Called Quest.
Poet and essayist Abdurraqib (They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, 2017, etc.) avoids the temptation to oversell his subject while maintaining a tricky structural balance. He somehow does full justice to the musical achievements of Q-Tip and his crew, to the influence of the musical world on this singular group, and to how deeply the experience permeated the young fan who might not have become a writer--and certainly not this writer--without their inspiration. In recent years, the author found himself with students as young as he once was who, as contemporary hip-hop fans, "had never heard of A Tribe Called Quest, and then, later, only knew them as a phoenix, risen from the ashes." There was a 17-year interval between albums, and by the time what appears to be the last one was released in 2016, friendships had frayed and a crucial collaborator had died. This is a history of how two boyhood friends, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, teamed up (though the former overshadowed the latter), how they differed from each other, and how they needed each other. Some of the book takes the form of letters from Abdurraqib to each of them and to others. Elsewhere, the author chronicles the progression of rap and how the way that Dr. Dre challenged Q-Tip was similar to the way that the Beatles pushed Brian Wilson, as well as how the East-West synergy later turned vicious and dangerous. "It is much easier to determine when rap music became political and significantly more difficult to pinpoint when it became dangerous," writes Abdurraqib toward the beginning of the book, a somewhat inexplicable pronouncement that he proceeds to explicate and elucidate over the rest.
Even those who know little about the music will learn much of significance here, perhaps learning how to love it in the process.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Abdurraqib, Hanif: GO AHEAD IN THE RAIN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A567651809/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3fdb8dd. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Go Ahead in the Rain is a no-brainer for devoted hip-hop heads."
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest.
By Hanif Abdurraqib.
Feb. 2019.215p. Univ. of Texas, paper, $16.95 (9781477316481).814.
Abdurraqib's profile of A Tribe Called Quest (ATCQ) is much more than a musical biography; it's also a deeply personal tribute to the classic hip-hop group, some of which takes shape in open letters to Q-Tip and the other members of the crew. Although the origins of ATCQ and their bitter breakup is a story loaded with drama on its own (it was the subject of a documentary in 2011), exploring the group's history is only a part of what Abdurraqib (They Can't Kill Us until They Kill Us, 2017) does here. The book comes to life when he speaks from his own experiences: discovering ATCQ's early albums growing up and how he was impacted by other classics of the genre in the 1980s and '90s; how being a dedicated music fan in his youth was critical in shaping his peer group ("not entirely uncool but who were also decidedly not the cool kids"); and his undying love of the cassette format. Although Go Ahead in the Rain is a no-brainer for devoted hip-hop heads (even those who think they've read all there is to know about the group), Abdurraqib's poetic homage to ATCQ (and hip-hop in general) will captivate casual music fans as well. --Carlos Orellana
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Orellana, Carlos. "Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2019, pp. 18+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A574056355/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3cf59928. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "riveting and poetic."
Byline: Geoff Edgers
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest
By Hanif Abdurraqib
University of Texas. 216 pp. $16.95
---
If you can remember back to Nov. 12, 2016, before Robert Mueller, Stormy and steel slats, A Tribe Called Quest appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and basically staged a musical takeover of "Saturday Night Live." It had been 7,349 days since their last record and yet there stood Tip and Jarobi, backs turned to the camera to salute a sprawling mural of the fallen Phife Dawg, as "The Space Program" kicked in.
Sonically, the song is classic Tribe, built on beats and groove and a Paleozoic sample from an Andrew Hill Blue Note record. But content-wise, "The Space Program" manages to be more of the moment than the moment itself. Never mind that it was probably mixed down at a point in the presidential campaign when white suburbia still believed pantsuit flash mobs would rule the day. Tribe seemed to know what was coming. Only four days after President Trump took the White House, Tip had shifted out of stun mode. He stalked the SNL camera, stage front, to lead a resolute chant of "Let's Make Something Happen."
As Hanif Abdurraqib writes in his riveting and poetic new book on Tribe, we shouldn't have been all that surprised by the group's re-emergence on "We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service," their sixth and final album:
"Black folks have been creating with their backs against the wall for years, telling the future, speaking what is coming to the masses that aren't eager to hear it until what's coming actually arrives, looming over them."
There are two general models for musical histories: the deeply reported biography (think Peter Guralnick) and the impressionistic takes found in the wildly uneven 33 1/3 series and Rob Sheffield's stellar "Dreaming the Beatles." In "Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest," Abdurraqib opens Door No. 3. He keeps to the chronology enough to allow the uninitiated in, charting the birth of Tribe, the parallel and sideways movements that emerged and the group's slow fizzle, collapse and reemergence. Adburraqib's gift is his ability to flip from a wide angle to a zoom with ease. He is a five-tool writer, slipping out of the timeline to deliver vivid, memoiristic splashes as well as letters he's crafted to directly address the central players, dead and living. He is a grown man, a cultural critic, an Important Voice, but he's also an awkward kid huddled in the back seat of the school bus, that "Beats, Rhymes and Life" cassette wearing out his Walkman. He brings everything to the game, whether a cosmic vignette about Leonard Cohen or an unexpected curveball that somehow morphs into connective tissue.
"Do you know that it wasn't the ball trickling through Bill Buckner's legs that lost the Red Sox the 1986 World Series?" he opens a letter to the sports-obsessed Phife, which addresses the rapper's lone solo record, "Ventilation: Da LP."
He calls the album "the ball that skipped through your legs, but it was never your fault. You were at the mercy of unfair machinery, the same way Bill Buckner was at the mercy of an unpredictable and unforgiving plot of land, and a ball that decided its own destiny."
A Tribe Called Quest was formed in the mid-'80s, a collaboration between two kids from Queens, Kamaal Ibn John Fareed and Malik Izaak Taylor, whom we would come to know as Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad and MC Jarobi White joined by the time they recorded their debut, 1990's "People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm."
At a time when the public either got dosed with pop rap (Young MC, Vanilla Ice) or harder, political material from Public Enemy and N.W.A.'s various branches, A Tribe Called Quest and the Native Tongues collective - which also included De La Soul and the Jungle Brothers - offered an alternative. They had a sense of humor, an undeniable talent at grabbing sampled grooves and they weren't afraid of the music their parents loved, particularly jazz. Tribe would ultimately break up in 1998 for the same reasons most bands collapse, with the tensions between Q-Tip and Phife highlighted in Michael Rapaport's excellent 2011 documentary, "Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest." And their unexpected return would serve as a defiant but ultimately heartbreaking coda. Phife's long battle with diabetes ended in March 2016 - eight months before the album he named, "We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service," would arrive. He was 45.
We get the full picture in "Go Ahead in the Rain." We watch Tip emerge as the sonic scientist with his pause tapes - samples built with double tape-decks before he could afford proper equipment - and Phife portrayed as the flaky, even reluctant participant, a sports goof who sometimes has to be pushed to go to the recording studio.
The beauty of being both a true fan and a professional is that you can embrace even the low points and yet analyze with pinpoint accuracy when your heroes have fallen short. And as you search for the perfect ending, you'll realize there seldom is one.
"Not every story in music ends with a group forced to throw in the towel due to a great and impossible loss, and not every story should," Abdurraqib writes. "But had it not, I would want A Tribe Called Quest to return again and again, giving me the doses of updated nostalgia that I might need when no other music could provide it. At least now, I think, we can lay them to rest."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
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Edgers, Geoff. "Book World: A true fan offers a riveting tribute to A Tribe Called Quest." Washington Post, 28 Jan. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A571405095/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eec1e238. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Byline: Chris Richards
Music came so easily to Prince, one of the most difficult things in his purple life was convincing others that he was real.
From the start, too. Go back and read a clip from 1977, when a scribe from Minnesota Daily was sent to investigate the local 18-year-old wunderkind, and you can practically hear the reporter sigh with relief when Prince pulls a prank at a restaurant -- proof-positive that this super-freaky prodigy was "a real live kid, packed with talent, but basically normal and mischievous." Nearly four decades later, in the pages of Rolling Stone, an eyewitness describes how bizarre it was to see a deity performing the mundane tasks that fill most everyday lives: "Prince being Prince, it's fascinating to watch him do just about anything. The more ordinary the activity -- clicking a mouse, say -- the weirder it feels."
Prince was human, though. We confirmed it in the worst way on April 21, 2016, when he was found dead inside an elevator at Paisley Park, the suburban Minnesota recording studio that he treated as a laboratory, a bunker and a vault. Since then, we've been bombarded with books about the reclusive virtuoso -- by journalists, by critics, by anecdote-collectors, by his ex-wife -- all of which seem to prove how unknowable he ultimately was.
For those hoping to not-know him a little better, there's "Prince: The Last Interview and Other Conversations," a new compilation of profiles and Q&As previously published in a delightfully disparate array of outlets, including Minnesota Daily, Rolling Stone, Vegetarian Times, Yahoo! Internet Life and Prince's high school newspaper.
In the book's introduction, the poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib hypothesizes that, despite his enigmatic ways, Prince came to each of these conversations hoping that his inquisitors might "understand him beyond his superhuman capabilities." For fans, that's always been hard. And for mourners, it'll always be. How do you grieve a sphinx? Can we assemble the meaning of Prince's life based on all of the things he didn't say? It feels like there must be some elusive truth waiting for us in the negative space, lest all of that lavender-scented mystique have been for naught.
Unsurprisingly, these 10 interviews uphold Prince's reputation for being tight-lipped with his interrogators -- not always down to play ball, but occasionally playful. When Ben Greenman asks him about "cybersex" in 1997, Prince winks back with six words: "Ain't nothin' like the real thang." But he also knew how to deflate a discussion. In a 1985 interview with MTV, when asked whether he could have ever foreseen the success of "Purple Rain," he flatly replies, "I don't know."
The only thing more vexing than the questions that go unanswered are the questions that go unasked. Prince cites "The Matrix" in interviews with the New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Did he ever read Jean Baudrillard? During the book's titular 2015 interview -- an awkward group-chat at Paisley Park in 2015 with the Guardian's Alexis Petridis and other European journalists -- Prince explains how the Internet has forced his critics to be more honest, and concludes that "it gets embarrassing to say something untrue, because you put it online and everyone knows about it, so it's better to tell the truth." So what did a pop utopian of his stature make of all the trolling and disinformation that had begun to foment on social media around that time?
And when the New Yorker's Claire Hoffman asks him about his stance on gay rights and abortion in 2008, Prince taps his fingers on a nearby Bible and replies, "God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.' " Prince had become a Jehovah's Witness by this point, but his position still baffles. How could a writer of visionary songs about radical acceptance believe anything even close to that?
To be fair to the journalists, Prince didn't dig follow-up questions. He didn't really like answering questions at all. Starting in the '90s, he famously asked that his interviewers no longer use recording devices or notebooks -- and according to a 1994 profile in Q Magazine, his handlers added a third demand: "that no questions be asked."
By most accounts, he was difficult and defiant with the press. But Prince probably didn't spend all of those decades being evasive for the mere fun of it -- at least not entirely. Maybe the commitment to his mystique was just Prince's way of protecting our idea of him. To be known is to become static, stiff, frozen in time. To be unknown is to remain flexible and free. Now, even though he's gone, our understanding of him can still change shape.
Chris Richardsis the pop music critic for The Washington Post.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
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Richards, Chris. "Will we ever really, truly know Prince?" Washingtonpost.com, 18 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A579302752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9ff1053a. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "resonant."
A Fortune for Your Disaster
Hanif Abdurraqib. Tin House, $15.95 (120p) ISBN 978-1-947793-43-9
This resonant second collection from cultural critic, essayist, and poet Abdurraqib grapples with physical and emotional acts of violence and their political context. Woven throughout these lyrical meditations on racial tension, hearrbreak, friendship, and pop culture, 13 poems titled "How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This" display Abdurraqib's Technical dexterity, particularly with enjambment ("Forgive me, for I have been nurturing/ my well-worn grudges against beauty"), while creating a sense of conditions both inescapable and irresolvable. Abdurraqib's background in music criticism informs an imaginative series engaged with Marvin Gaye, which in its more effective turns ("your mama so black she my mama too") combines pathos with affectionate humor. Several poems titled "It's Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die" explore the human cost of playing God, while elsewhere, poems provide visceral eyewitness sense of everyday life with precise insights: "The mailman still hands me bills like I should be lucky to have my name on anything in this town." More confessional poems, such as "And Just Like That, I Part Ways with the Only Thing I Won in the Divorce," create a narrative continuity with the poet's previous collection; these speakers' losses may suggest that "true wealth/ is the ability to embrace forgetting," yet such wry commentary reveals its own hard-won, defiant resilience. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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"A Fortune for Your Disaster." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 33, 19 Aug. 2019, pp. 75+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597616434/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a9cfcd95. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Undoubtedly, this is the latest entry in what promises to be a long and fruitful career."
A Fortune for Your Disaster. By Hanif Abdurraqib. Sept. 2019. 120p. Tin House, paper, $15.95 (9781947793439).811.
An old adage in creative writing workshops holds that a writer ought to show how an action or idea unfolds instead of simply telling readers that it happened. So when an author's unmitigated brilliance shows up on every page, it's tempting to skip a description and just say, Read this! Such is the case with this breathlessly powerful, deceptively breezy book of poetry, the author's second collection (after The Crown Ain't Worth Much, 2016). With the swagger of a boxer and the restraint of a scholar, Abdurraqib invokes pop culture and Black history with equal ease, alternating stream-of-consciousness prose poems with deeply introspective lamentations. Abdurraqib includes several series of poems that share the same title, and these serve as refrains for the book. Poems titled "How Can Black People Write about Flowers at a Time Like This" describe the roses at Obamas feet in Kehinde Wiley's presidential portrait or a young woman named Jasmine popping gum at a funeral. Indeed, a fatal specter haunts the book, which is perhaps what gives every verse such urgency. Undoubtedly, this is the latest entry in what promises to be a long and fruitful career.--Diego Baez
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
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Baez, Diego. "A Fortune for Your Disaster." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2019, pp. 17+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A598305125/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1e100cbc. Accessed 9 May 2024.
Clark, Robert FRIDAY NIGHT LIVES Univ. of Texas (NonFiction None) $45.00 11, 3 ISBN: 978-1-4773-2119-5
A return, 30 years later, to Permian High, the celebrated Texas football powerhouse highlighted in Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights.
Clark, then a contract photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, recounts that he “was hungry, with a bit of a chip on my shoulder and fighting every day for the chance to prove my worth on the staff of this great newspaper.” When he learned that Bissinger, then an investigative reporter at the paper, was planning to write a book about the place that Texas high school football fans called “the Mojo of Odessa,” he made a pitch to shoot photos for it. In this outstanding portfolio, Clark gathers outtakes and reprints freshly scanned from 137 rolls of film that he hadn’t looked at for decades. “The players were frozen in my negatives and my mind as beautiful, strong athletes,” he writes, “but upon reexamination of the work I see macho warriors, as well as kids on the verge of adulthood.” It’s true: The players are very young, and for all the posturing of the big-men-on-campus jocks, there’s often a vulnerability to them, particularly on those infrequent nights when Permian was losing. Clark has also photographed the players and principals of that winning season in the years since, and his captions sometimes tell stories that come not from the lives of the teenagers but instead from those of middle-aged men. One young man had a remarkable 1,300-yard rushing season and was heavily recruited by major colleges only to injure his knee during what Clark calls “a meaningless scrimmage,” losing his ticket out of a poverty-stricken childhood. Other players married and divorced their Permian sweethearts, went to prison, grappled with addiction, and worked the tough jobs of the hinterlands. Still, as one Permian gridiron vet recalls proudly, “I always say our fifteen minutes of fame have lasted thirty years.” Hanif Abdurraqib provides the foreword.
A book that belongs in every football fan’s collection.
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"Clark, Robert: FRIDAY NIGHT LIVES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634467384/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d884be6d. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Little Devil in America sheds light on repeated acts of joy that lift us during traumatic experiences."
Byline: Darryl Robertson, Special to USA TODAY
Black performance has been a part of the Black radical imagination since America's inception. From enslaved Africans frolicking during quilting parties on plantations to Jay-Z conceding in his song "Kill Jay-Z" to creating a careerlong character for mass consumption, Black performance has guided American culture. When juxtaposed with Black radical imagination, Black performance serves as a form of Black liberation.
Performing and freedom is what stirs Hanif Abdurraqib's "A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance" (Random House, 320 pp., ***). Examining performance isn't new to Abdurraqib. In "They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us," he writes: "Once you realize that it's all performance the medicine goes down easier."
In "A Little Devil in America," Abdurraqib digs into historical, musical and personal vaults to unearth layered moments of performance, such as dancing in a basement in Columbus, Ohio, to the music of Whitney Houston; conversations with elders at a BBQ joint in Memphis; and Josephine Baker working as a spy for France's military. Abdurraqib details how these performances fit into the conversation about American culture.
The way in which Abdurraqib writes about performance in "A Little Devil in America" posits Black freedom. For instance, Abdurraqib tells the story of the late Don Cornelius, who began his career as a journalist reporting on the civil rights movement. Cornelius' creation of "Soul Train," was his way of abating the stress of protesters and laborers by giving them a break from fighting American racism. Where misogyny, racism and gender bias limited Black agency, "Soul Train" provided a space where Black people could move, twist and shout, smile and laugh freely.
Abdurraqib's ideas about Cornelius' dream of Black freedom borrows from "They Can't Kill Us," where he writes: "The only way to build yourself into something unstoppable is to become intimate with all of that which would otherwise attempt to stop you."
Abdurraqib touches on the Black church, where many Black people haveheld hands with the message of freedom found in Exodus. Combining popular culture and church music, he writes of Aretha Franklin, who brought her faith to American culture.
Of Franklin's album "Amazing Grace," Abdurraqib writes: "Aretha sings 'What a Friend We Have in Jesus,' 'Mary Don't You Weep,' and 'Amazing Grace' This is Aretha, at the height of her game, coming back to see if she could match the swelling voices of a choir; to see if the words of hymn could still move her to tears midsong."
Abdurraqib has drawn parallels between Chance the Rapper's music and the church. Chance's "Coloring Book" project found the rapper waxing poetic about "Blessings," "Angels" and God on the choir-backed record, "How Great." According to Abdurraqib, Chance's church-influenced album spread enough positive energy to usher people through the election of Donald Trump and the Pulse nightclub shooting.
For Chance, like Franklin, Cornelius, Houston and Baker, joy has been made into a brand. As Abdurraqib writes in his previous work, joy is both "hollow and touchable, in part because it is something that can't be explained as well as it can be visualized and experienced."
"Little Devil in America"sheds light on repeated acts of joy that lift us during traumatic experiences.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 USA Today
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Robertson, Darryl. "'Little Devil' examines joy that lifts Black performance." USA Today, 1 Apr. 2021, p. 08B. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A657050150/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=960dd1e2. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "a candid self-portrait of Abdurraqib's experience as a Black man, written with sincerity and emotion."
Byline: Lauretta Charlton
A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICANotes in Praise of Black PerformanceBy Hanif Abdurraqib
John Hartford Armstrong was a Black conjurer. In the 1920s and '30s, he traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard performing magic tricks for Black audiences that would pack into churches to watch him make things disappear. One of the highlights of his show was his daughter, Ellen Armstrong, who joined as her father's assistant when she was just 6 years old. Later she developed her own bit, zigzagging through the crowd professing to be a mind reader. She'd touch people's heads and claim to know what they were thinking about the person sitting next to them. Ellen's father, known as the "King of the Colored Conjurers," died suddenly in 1939 when she was 25. Everyone expected the show to end, but Ellen kept it going for another 30 years. Perhaps it was her most impressive trick.
Ellen Armstrong is one of multiple extraordinary Black performers whose lives are chronicled by Hanif Abdurraqib in his new book, "A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance." In it, this poet, cultural critic, essayist and music buff uses the tales of Black performers to make poignant observations about race in America while using Black performance as a metaphor for the transcendent imagination, gliding through television, music, film, minstrel shows, vaudeville and even space. The book is also a candid self-portrait of Abdurraqib's experience as a Black man, written with sincerity and emotion.
Sun Ra, the avant-garde composer, is among the Black performers profiled by Abdurraqib. He was born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 Birmingham, Ala., and named after another popular Black magician of the early 20th century, Black Herman. Black Herman's main act was being buried alive. And apparently he was so good at it that when he died onstage in 1934, no one in the audience believed he was truly dead. Sun Ra wasn't a magician, but he did claim to have experience on the other side. In his case that meant in space. He liked to tell people he had been abducted by aliens who sent him back down to Earth "to speak through music." His music became a conduit for Black people and the cosmos. "I've run out of language to explain the avalanche of anguish I feel when faced with this world, and so if I can't make sense of this planet, I'm better off imagining another," Abdurraqib writes.
Josephine Baker was earthbound, but no less remarkable in Abdurraqib's eyes. She dropped out of school, became a waitress and performed on street corners hoping for a big break. At times she was so broke she would rummage through garbage for food and shelter. She eventually made her way to Paris at 19, when the city was still in love with jazz and Black culture. And yet what fascinates Abdurraqib about Baker is what happened after her success. Baker became a spy for the French Resistance during World War II, hiding freedom fighters in her basement and using her charms to get men in power to reveal intelligence to her. America couldn't offer her a big enough stage. But in France, "she crafted the version of herself that felt most true to what she wanted."
Baker and Sun Ra are both well-known Black artists, but Abdurraqib also peppers his book with less familiar examples of great Black performers. William Henry Lane, a.k.a. Master Juba, was an entertainer with the ability to mimic any dance move he laid his eyes on. When Charles Dickens caught his act during a visit to America, he called him "the greatest dancer known." So when P. T. Barnum needed a replacement for an Irish-American clog dancer in one of his minstrel shows, Master Juba got the gig, recreating the white man's steps, which he had ripped off from African dance anyway. The clog dancer never got over being replaced by a Black man and frequently challenged Master Juba in dance competitions. Of course, Master Juba almost always won.
The irony of a white man performing in blackface for so long that he believed he was better at "Negro dancing" than actual "Negroes" is not lost on Abdurraqib. "There will always be an audience wanting a Black face, but not necessarily a Black person," he writes. And even when the audience tolerates a Black person, it may be for the wrong reasons. Dave Chappelle walked away at the height of his career when he noticed white people "laughing too loud and too long" at his jokes, making him question whether he was the comedian or the punchline.
Abdurraqib also notes that there has never been a shortage of Black people willing to perform their Blackness for the right audience. Bert Williams, the vaudeville comedian, wore blackface to get a job at the Ziegfeld Follies, performing his Blackness so well that white critics said he "transcended race" and seemed "almost detached from his race altogether." Abdurraqib recalls an episode of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in which Carlton is rejected from a Black fraternity by its president because he is "Not Like the Other Blacks." Abdurraqib points out that by the end of the episode, the audience is left wondering if it is Carlton, the Tom Jones-loving prep, or the dashiki-wearing fraternity president who is the one performing his Blackness.
Here's where the book gets more interesting. Abdurraqib acknowledges that he knows what it's like to be in Carlton's position and "dislocated from a specific set of Blackness." The more challenging issue, he confesses, is that he has also been the fraternity president, forcing other Black people to hew to his expectations when, as he puts it, "we are all outside the borders of someone else's idea of what Blackness is."
It's one of the more powerful observations in the book, and it's reinforced by each of the lives Abdurraqib captures so well. "The problem is that there is no way to prove oneself Black enough for every type of Black identity in the States, let alone the world," he writes. It's a lonely proposition and Abdurraqib doesn't pretend to have any solutions. Rather, he is left thinking "how crucial it is to love Black people even when feeling indicted by them. Even when that indictment is not out of love (which of course it sometimes is), but out of them clocking you for a standard you are not capable of rising to."
Abdurraqib has written an important book on the transformative power of that kind of love. Where it falters are the moments when he yanks the reader from one pop culture reference to the next at breakneck speed, jumping from astrology and the moon to Michael Jackson and the moonwalk; spacesuits and Patti LaBelle to space travel and Billy Dee Williams; 40 ounces and Afrofuturism to Trayvon Martin and the Columbia shuttle disaster.
Whiplash may occur, but it's worth following along. Those not interested in Abdurraqib's musing on "Green Book" and Altamont may find themselves moved by his aching writing on his family - leading to the book's devastating final chapter - and particularly his mother, whose death he also wrote about in a previous book. Here he describes the way she laughed and how he could tell her mood by the way her steps carried through their home in Columbus, Ohio. He remembers watching her taking off her hijab and picking her black Afro until it was big enough to look "like a whole black planet." Her presence acts as a sort of spirit guide. She is joined by Don Cornelius, the creator of "Soul Train," who died by suicide in 2012.
Before he started "Soul Train," Cornelius was a journalist who understood that music was the backbone of the civil rights movement and saw his show as a place where its ideas might evolve. Abdurraqib recounts watching reruns and studying the legendary "Soul Train" Line, in which dancers shuffled and twisted, flipped and dived in between two solid lines of fellow dancers clapping their hands and waiting for their turn to show out. The "Soul Train" Line is the ultimate Black performance in Abdurraqib's book: "Black people pushing other Black people forward to some boundless and joyful exit."
Lauretta Charlton is an editor for The Times in South Korea. A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA Notes in Praise of Black Performance By Hanif Abdurraqib 300 pp. Random House. $27.
PHOTO: Don Cornelius and "Soul Train" in the 1970s. (PHOTOGRAPH BY Howard Bingham/TV Guide, via Everett Collection FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 International Herald Tribune
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Charlton, Lauretta. "Hanif Abdurraqib Celebrates Black Performance." International New York Times, 8 Apr. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A657666863/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6206873b. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Filled with nuance and lyricism, Abdurraqib's luminous survey is stunning."
Hanif Abdurraqib. Random House, $27 (320p) ISBN 978-1-98-480119-7
In this staggeringly intimate meditation, essayist and poet Abdurraqib (Go Ahead in the Rain), chronicles Black performance in American culture. Broken into five "movements" consisting of essays, fragments, and prose poems, Abdurraqib weaves cultural analyses with personal stories. "On the Certain and Uncertain Movement of Limbs" captures Whitney Houston's performance at the 1988 Grammy Awards ("And I will tell you what I know, and what I know is that Whitney Houston could not dance"). In "On Going Home as Performance," Abdurraqib commemorates Michael Jackson on the night of his death in a club where "there wasn't enough space for the bodies to do anything except dance." Abdurraqib shines a light on how Black artists have shaped--and been shaped by--American culture: he outlines Josephine Baker's life as a performer and a spy, and examines the "magical negro" trope and "the laughter of white people" through performances by Dave Chappelle and magician Ellen Armstrong. Abdurraqib addresses his commentary to readers both alive and dead, referring to "my dearest dancing ancestors," "magically endowed problem solvers," the "non-Black reader or scholar of history," and a "dearly departed band of brothers," and his prose is reliably razor-sharp. Filled with nuance and lyricism, Abdurraqib's luminous survey is stunning. (Mar.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 3, 18 Jan. 2021, p. 68. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650247407/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=068bfb4c. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Social criticism, pop culture, and autobiography come together neatly in these pages, and every sentence is sharp, provocative, and self-aware."
Abdurraqib, Hanif A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA Random House (NonFiction None) $27.00 3, 30 ISBN: 978-1-984801-19-7
A thoughtful memoir rolled into a set of joined essays on life, death, and the Black experience in America.
Black women, it’s been said, saved American democracy by delivering their votes to the Democratic Party in 2020. Poet, essayist, and music critic Abdurraqib is having none of it. “Black people—specifically Black women in this case, are not here in this country as vessels to drag it closer to some moral competence,” he writes. Later, he adds, “it occurred to me that Black women were simply attempting to save themselves.” The point is well taken. The chapters open with flowing stream-of-consciousness introductory passages—e.g., “I was the only one in the Islamic Center on Broad Street who got to stay up & watch the shows on MTV that came on after my parents cut out the lights & went up to bed & it was only me & the warmth of an old television’s glow & the DJs spinning C+C Music Factory for people in baggy & colorful getups”—and then settle in to tightly constructed, smart essays—in this case, about the history of marathon dancing, the exhilarating contributions but tragic life of Soul Train host Don Cornelius, the deaths of both his mother and Aretha Franklin, and numerous other subjects. In another essay, Abdurraqib considers the concept of the magical negro and the unenviable role of being the Black friend who provides an escape route for White racism. Here, comedian Dave Chappelle figures prominently, having become a huge draw for Comedy Central precisely because it gained a huge White audience: “Chappelle got to be everyone’s Black friend for a while,” writes the author. “The one that stays at a comfortable enough distance but still provides a service.” Social criticism, pop culture, and autobiography come together neatly in these pages, and every sentence is sharp, provocative, and self-aware.
Another winner from Abdurraqib, a writer always worth paying attention to.
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"Abdurraqib, Hanif: A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A648127267/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=45d7d3d7. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Startling, layered, and timely, this is an essential, illuminating collection that advances Abdurraqib's already impressive body of work."
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. By Hanif Abdurraqib. Mar. 2021.320p. Random, $27 (9781984801197), 791.089.
Blending pop-culture essays, memoir, and poetry, the latest collection by Abdurraqib, following A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019), delves into the many iterations of Black artistic expression through an often deeply personal lens. Divided into five "movements," these pieces offer an expansive exploration of subjects ranging from the often-tragic lives of legendary Black artists to close examination of a singular performance. On Merry Clayton's choruses in the Rolling Stones' song "Gimme Shelter," Abdurraqib writes: "They would speak of her performance, and how it summoned all of the darkness in one hand and all of the light in the other." Whether pondering the dynamic life and contributions of Josephine Baker (to whom the book is dedicated) or meditating on his own various performances, the author's ruminations are an invitation to think deeply about Black performance on both cultural and individual levels. Abdurraqib consistently engages the reader, mixing conversational tones and poetic turns of phrase ("it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my own interior landscape"), with surprising, succinct insights ("to know whiteness is an infinite task"). Startling, layered, and timely, this is an essential, illuminating collection that advances Abdurraqib's already impressive body of work.--Allison Escoto
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 American Library Association
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Escoto, Allison. "A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2021, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655228943/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2c1ec02f. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "a sweet, upbeat testimonial to the ongoing, far-reaching impact of a dearly departed legend."
Abdurraqib, Hanif SING, ARETHA, SING! Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Children's None) $18.99 12, 28 ISBN: 978-0-374-31345-6
The timeless Queen of Soul is introduced to a new generation.
In his picture-book debut, National Book Award longlisted author Abdurraqib traces Aretha Franklin's groundbreaking career as a singer and her legacy as a civil rights activist. Beginning with her childhood singing gospel in her father's church, the story covers her time traveling with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her rise to international stardom, and the emergence of her iconic signature song "Respect" as a popular and powerful anthem of Black and female empowerment during the 1960s. The text is written mostly in simple expository prose except for an acrostic poem on one double-page spread in which the first letters of each line spell out the word respect. Evans' vibrant digital illustrations highlight Franklin's beauty and vitality and the racial diversity of the people who were in her thrall. As acknowledged in the backmatter, attempting to encapsulate all that Franklin was in a picture book is a difficult task, and indeed, the book feels overambitious at times, but its message regarding music's power to help love conquer hate is compelling.
A sweet, upbeat testimonial to the ongoing, far-reaching impact of a dearly departed legend. (author's note) (Picture book biography. 4-8)
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"Abdurraqib, Hanif: SING, ARETHA, SING!" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A686536567/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3c85e22c. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "Every thoughtfully considered and vividly described element and emotion, action and moment, ultimately, connects."
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. By Hanif Abdurraqib. Mar. 2024. 352p. Random, $32 (9780593448793); e-book (9780593448816). 790.
MacArthur fellow Abdurraqib follows his Carnegie Medal-winning A Little Devil in America (2022) with another unique, memoir-propelled, far-ranging, and affecting inquiry. Basketball is the heart of this many-faceted exploration, from gatherings at the garage hoop at his family home to competition at the neighborhood's most popular court to high-school champions to LeBron James. Structured like a game in quarters and minutes, it's a galvanic drive through the intricacies of family, community, belief, and dreams. Ascension, for Abdurraqib, is soaring to the basket and elevating as a human being. As players, teams, and fans ascend, so does a neighborhood, even one called a war zone by outsiders, and a city, in particular the one Abdurraqib's loves, his hometown, Columbus, Ohio. Passionately attuned to the resonance of home and heartbreak, survival and mercy, he also chronicles descension, sharing unforgettable tales about becoming unhoused and incarcerated. He writes about growing up Muslim, losing his mother at a young age, friends and enemies, athletes as gods, police murders of unarmed Black boys and men, "the gospel of suffering," paying witness, protesting, music, miracles, love, and time's mutability. Abdurraqib keeps multiple balls in the air as he swerves, spins, and scores, and every thoughtfully considered and vividly described element and emotion, action and moment, ultimately, connects. An exhilarating, heartfelt, virtuoso, and profound performance.--Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Poet and writer Abdurraqib is a reader favorite with his fresh, innovative work and magnetic social media presence, and the focus of his latest will create new fans.
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Seaman, Donna. "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2024, p. 18. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A780973291/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0948a564. Accessed 9 May 2024.
QUOTED: "lyrically stunning and profoundly moving."
"an innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home."
Abdurraqib, Hanif THERE'S ALWAYS THIS YEAR Random House (NonFiction None) $32.00 3, 26 ISBN: 9780593448793
The acclaimed poet and cultural critic uses his lifelong relationship with basketball to muse on the ways in which we grow attached to our hometowns, even when they fail us.
Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and Go Ahead in the Rain, was in awe of the talents of such local basketball players as the legendary LeBron James ("a 14-year-old, skinny and seemingly poured into an oversized basketball uniform that always suggested it was one quick move away from evicting him") and Kenny Gregory, who went on to play college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. Abdurraqib's complex love of the sport and its players mirrors the complexity of his love for his home state, where he's spent time unhoused as well as incarcerated, and where his mother passed away when he was only a child. "It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave," he writes. Yet, despite witnessing the deaths of friends and watching the media deem his home a "war zone," the author feels unable to leave. "Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be," he writes. "When we were young, so many people I loved just wanted to live forever, where we were. And so yes, if you are scared, stay scared. Stay far enough away from where our kinfolk rest so that a city won't get any ideas." Structured as four quarters, delineated by time markers echoing a countdown clock, the narrative includes timeouts and intermissions that incorporate poetry. Lyrically stunning and profoundly moving, the confessional text wanders through a variety of topics without ever losing its vulnerability, insight, or focus. Abdurraqib's use of second person is sometimes cloying, but overall, this is a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph.
An innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home.
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"Abdurraqib, Hanif: THERE'S ALWAYS THIS YEAR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A776005266/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba23cd77. Accessed 9 May 2024.