More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
This is what he does. His work asks not, as much criticism does, what is happening here, but rather, what does this work mean? What is it doing in the world?
And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise or for scolding.
There are days when the places we’re from turn into every other place in America. I still go to watch fireworks, or I still go to watch the brief burst of brightness glow on the faces of black children, some of them have made it downtown, miles away from the forgotten corners of the city they’ve been pushed to. Some of them smiling and pointing upwards, still too young to know of America’s hunt for their flesh. How it wears the blood of their ancestors on its teeth.
This, more than anything, is about how there is sometimes only one single clear and clean surface on which to dance, and sometimes it only fits you and no one else. This is about hope, sure, but not in the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning.
If you believe, as I do, that a blessing is a brief breath to take in that doesn’t taste of whatever is holding you under; say I Speak To God In Public and mean more than just in his house, or mean more than just next to people who also might speak to God in public, or say God and mean whatever has kept you alive when so many other things have failed to.
Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague because it needs to be. It 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.
I think what Chance does is what the best artists of color manage to do in this setting: makes music facing his people while also leaving the door open for everyone else to try and work their way in.
Yes, this black grandmother being praised isn’t a universal grandmother for all who are living, but there is praise in the living hand of someone who raised the person that raised you, pressed against your face.
The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.
When you watch hope closely enough, manifested in enough people, you can start to feel it too.
And perhaps that is freedom, more than anything. To turn your eye back on the community you love and articulate it for an entire world that may not understand it as you do. That feels like freedom because you are the one who controls the language of your time and your people, especially if there are outside forces looking to control and commodify both.
He is the type of writer I love most: one who thinks out loud and allows me to imagine the process of the writing.
The truth is, if we don’t write our own stories, there is someone else waiting to do it for us. And those people, waiting with their pens, often don’t look like we do and don’t have our best interests in mind.
I think about the romanticization of work and how that is reflected in America. Rather, for whom work is romantic, and for whom work is a necessary and sometimes painful burden of survival. One that comes with the shame of time spent away from loved ones, and a country that insists you aren’t working hard enough.
I have always known and accepted that the idea of hard, beautiful, romantic work is a dream sold a lot easier by someone who currently knows where their next meal will come from.
I have been thinking a lot about the question of who gets to revel in their present with an eye still on their future, and who gets discussed as though nothing about them could be promising.
Even in a city that makes you feel small, there is someone waiting to fall in love with you.
She is the person handing you a gift at Christmas, tearing into the wrapping paper before you can start to, with an eagerness that says, “I made this gift for you, for all of you. And I want you to have it, while there’s still time to enjoy it.” It is hard for me to imagine anyone wanting an actual friend this close to them, asking them to feel everything.
This is the difficult work: convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and, for a night, bring out whatever joy remains underneath—in a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to water and letting them drink from your cupped hands.
There are times when the night pushes against the clock and time slows down: when you lock eyes across the room with someone who you think you could love.
The problem is that everyone wants to talk about language entirely independent of any violence that the existence of that language has accumulated over time. If, for example, a word can be hurled through the air while a boot comes down on a face, that part of the word’s lineage has to be accounted for. Any language that is a potential precursor to bloodletting has a small history that it can’t be pulled apart from.
But the truth is that I am comfortable here, under the swallowing moonlight, throwing an arm around my niggas and laughing loud into an uncontainable night, regardless of what trouble our sound might bring. This is a particular type of love. The type that has survived history and the weapons formed against the body and all of its lineage. The type that has turned the weapon back in on itself and now, that which welcomes violence can also welcome two arms, spread apart in a wide and waiting hug. I am comfortable here, shouting at my niggas across a card table with a hand full of cards during a
...more
The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, sings about sex. The kind of sex you have if you aren’t interested in love, but perhaps interested in warmth. The kind of sex you have when you’re lonely, or rich, or both. When the desire for a body outweighs the desire for a name.
And, look, I am saying that I have wanted to forget the day and run into whatever allowed me to do so at night. I’m saying that I want to be in love, but sometimes I just don’t want to be alone, and I don’t want to do the work of balancing what that means in what hour of whatever darkness I’m sitting in.
What I imagine to be most difficult is the exact moment when you realize that your wealth and success will still not save you. To be black and understand that you are in a country that values these things, but will still speak of how you earned your death after you are gone far too soon. Blackness and labor have been inextricable in America for hundreds of years, but still, being reminded of that hovering truth can destroy a man who does not think of what he does as labor, a man who perhaps thinks it’s not “work” if I’m bringing people joy.
But it was a reminder that choosing invisibility means giving yourself over to what so many systems in this country already deem you.
Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. The heart scatters across states, and has nothing left after what home takes from it.
Once, I never knew how anyone who lived in a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood could be sad. Sometimes, when you know so much of not having, it is easy to imagine those who do have as exceptionally worry-free.
The great mission of any art that revolves around place is the mission of honesty. So many of us lean into romantics when we write of whatever place we crawled out of, perhaps because we feel like we owe it something, even when it has taken more from us than we’ve taken from it.
It was charming, if you’re into the type of charm the band has become known for: a Midwestern emotional affectation that both wins over parents and emotionally starved youth.
Twisting anger over heartbreak into something, well, cute, is easier for some genres than others. In emo, particularly during its heyday of attractive frontmen who fancied themselves poets, the misogyny was seen more as process than problem. Who among us, regardless of gender, hasn’t scrawled something in the silence of a notebook about an ex-someone? It’s a part of the coping, at least to a point. The problem is one of audience, though. The problem is the one of the notebook becoming public, sung to thousands. The problem is one of men being, largely, the only ones doing the singing. And,
...more
And look, I know that memories don’t actually bring a person you love back to life. Real life, I mean. It doesn’t make them touchable in the way we most need them to be.
It felt, more than anything, an acknowledging of no hard feelings. Or, an acknowledgement of that which we all spend a lifetime searching for: the permission to come home again, after forgetting that there are still people who will show up to love you, no matter how long you’ve been away. No matter how obsessed you’ve been with your own vanishing, there will always be someone who still wants you whole.
There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of simply imagining them.
Michael is about six years removed from having his daddy’s nose & what better way to sever ourselves from the sins of the father than to rebuild the temple & the kiss in the picture is gentle the way it might be for an old friend or a lover or two kin leaning for a moment out of the damned American engine of pop music again at their backs & howling for them to shake their skin to the ground & sing the hits & in the picture Whitney and Michael are under a tree & on a bridge somewhere South & it is easy to imagine a song in the leaves & it is easy to imagine a song in the water beneath them
...more
it is likely true that we only get one livable youth & I wasted mine thinking myself beautiful & throwing rent money into jukes & scrawling my phone number on skin in summer & watching it sweat off outside at goodale park where we just had to dance to the song we all knew & performing self-worship as a survival & giving myself, unkillable, over to a parade of death instruments & racking up just enough sins to make praying worth the time & leaving socks tangled in bedsheets & sneaking out of a room before sunlight ruptured its silence & locking arms with a motley crew of hooligans in the
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Once you understand violence, once its presence is constant enough, it can become something you survive until survival becomes normalcy, and fear becomes something you lie about when your friends are listening.
The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father. And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise or for scolding.
When a smiling, joyful black person says they’re “doing all right,” I imagine it’s because they know “good” may be too close to the sun. I imagine it’s because they’ve seen things burn.
Maybe all they ask is that we help hold back the darkness for as long as we can, and when we can’t anymore, they’ll save us a room. They’ll make sure “Alright” is playing, and we’ll feel the way it felt hearing it for the first time, in the face of all this wreckage. Full of so much promise, as if all of our pain were a bad dream we just woke up from.
It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around.
And I did, for a moment, look down and feel like if this were to be it, I would be all right. If the floor gave out and the walls caved in, and we were all trapped under the ruins of the Atwood Ballroom in St. Cloud, Minnesota, I would at least have gone in a room where people were getting free on their own terms.
I often joke about how I don’t wear anger well. To a very real extent, this is true. I didn’t see anger translated well growing up, so it isn’t an emotion that I have worked through enough times to push outside of myself.
I am interested in what we afford each other, in terms of the emotions that can sit on our skin, depending on what that skin might look like. This makes me ask the question of who benefits from this, our eternal façade of kindness? Is the true work of kindness owed to ourselves, and our sanity?
The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short. They are, like sleep and death, within the same family, a quick nudge pushing one directly into the other.
It felt easier this way, fitting in without having to offer explainers. I was making the curious parts of myself invisible in the hopes that curiosity never turned to fear.
hours, un-feared and un-killable. Having “a place to belong” is something that often works on a sliding scale. The urgency of owning a space with people who look like you and share some of your experience increases the further against the margins you are.
The fact that I was afforded survival once
used to make this type of death remarkable. Over the years, I find it to be less and less. With each body, I wonder how their stories began. If they began something like mine.
If you do not know what she knows, then you know nothing of the ultimate reward of greatness. The way it feels when everything clicks. It is almost unfathomable to tell someone to act like they’ve been somewhere before when they are intensely aware of the fact that they were never supposed to be there in the first place, isn’t it?
