It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.
Fall Out Boy Forever, Hanif Abdurraqib
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first about They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us and this author through the JemilaBeReading YouTube channel. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s where I heard about it, I am not entirely sure. I watched a lot of different “2024 book of the year” videos from different BookTubers in January.
In any case, this was the perfect way to close out a month of reading books by Black authors for Black History Month. This is my first time reading a Hanif Abdurraqib book so I didn’t know what to expect. Let’s get into it.
The Book
This book is a compilation of essays on various topics, and I do mean various. From basketball to music criticism to wrestling to various aspects of Black life in America. The amount of music critique and analysis was a pleasant surprise to me. I especially enjoyed reading the essay about Carly Rae Jepsen and also the one about Kendrick Lamar’s Alright.
This is one of those books that I am better off quoting from to show why it is so good. Here’s a quote from the essay titled “Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back”:
Watching Carly Rae Jepsen play EMOTION live is an hour-long clinic in vulnerability. It is a public display of affection, for the artist more than anyone in the audience. Jepsen is the most honest pop musician working, and for this, she may never be a star. But to dismiss her as a one-hit wonder is unfair: EMOTION, with its 1980s nostalgia and hazy shine, was never asking for hits.
Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back by Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif is especially good at closing his essays like in the essay about the intersections of punk rock and American racism:
Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.
I Wasn’t Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough to Find Afropunk, Hanif Abdurraqib
There are many points in this book where I was driven to tears at the poignancy of Hanif’s writing. There is a sheer, almost overwhelming amount of imagery to Hanif’s writing. The writing paints these visuals, situations, environments filled with emotions and vibes that I found myself visualizing in my head really well.
Here’s another quote.
The hood is not glamorous or romantic, but it is mine. It is ours, those of us who still sleep with its whispers hanging over us. And I am loyal to this, I return to where I am from and give a hug to my man who has done dirt and will do more, because we were kids once, riding our bikes through these same streets, and I love him for that. I have sat in a chair and looked through glass at a person in an orange suit and seen them as I remember them best, shooting jump shots with me on a bent rim in a dirt field–and I do this because I love them. I buy a DVD from the DVD hustler outside the corner store because his daughter held my hand the day of my mother’s funeral and I love her, and so I love him, and so I love what feeds him, and so I love his hustle.
Black Life on Film, Hanif Abdurraqib
And on sadness:
Sadness, when you are truly being swallowed by it, can feel almost universal. Not the vehicle that drives you to the doorstep of sadness, and certainly not the way it manifests itself inside of you. But the sadness itself, the soaking feeling of it, is something that you know everyone around you has had a taste of. The kids who came to rap and punk shows in nice shoes, always fighting to stay out just a bit later, anything to keep them away from home, anything to keep them in a world unlike their own. This is the cycle we create and live through: we see the greener grass and then run to it.
Under Half-Lit Fluorescents: The Wonder Years and The Great Suburban Narrative, Hanif Abdurraqib
I can keep quoting but I think I’ve made my point. I have never saved as many annotations for a book in my eBook reader as I have for this one. At so many points in this book, every essay I go, “goddamn that is some really fucking good writing”.
Conclusions
I am very happy I discovered Hanif and his writing. This is the first time I’ve read his writing but it won’t be the last. He has a couple of other books that are on my TBR and I want to read them soon. I think this is the kind of non-fiction writing I enjoy the most – a collection of well written essays from a very skilled writer.
Hanif’s music criticism especially is an inspiration for me. I want to write about music in the way Hanif does. I have been stuck in a depression induced writer’s fog for the past month or so and it has been especially difficult to find inspiration for my writing but I am finally feeling the winds of inspiration blowing after having read this book.
As is tradition with my reviews of non-fiction books, I’ll leave y’all with another quote.
And what a year 2016 was. Oh, friends, those of you who are still with us, what a year we survived together. We are not done burying our heroes before we are asked to bury our friends. Our mourning is eclipsed by a greater mourning. I know nothing that will get us through this beyond whatever small pockets of happiness we make for each other in between the rage and the eulogies and the marching and the protesting and the demanding to be seen and accounted for. I know nothing except that this grief is a river carrying us to another new grief, and along the way, let us hold space for a bad joke or a good memory. Something that will allow us to hold our breath under the water for a little bit longer. Let the children have their world. Their miraculous impossible world where nothing hurts long enough to stop time, Let them have it for as long as it will hold them. When that world falls to pieces, maybe we can use whatever is left to build a better one for ourselves.
Surviving On Small Joys, Hanif Abdurraqib
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