They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I cannot die because this is my universe Lil Uzi Vert

This is going to slay

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.

I felt like I was exiting my current body and watching myself from through my younger eyes, wondering if this is what it was always going to come to. Returning to the balm for an old wound, ashamed that I once decided to wear it.

From a metaphorical standpoint, one of the worst things we do is compare love to war. We do this in times of actual war, without a thought about what it actually means. Mothers bury their children while a pop musician calls the bedroom a war zone and romance a field of battle—as if there is a graveyard for heartbreak alone. We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon. A buffet of sad and bitter songs rains down from the pop charts for years, keeping us tethered to whatever sadness we could dress ourselves in when nothing else fit.

I considered how often there is shame attached to loving anyone publicly. The shame, of course, comes on a sliding scale, depending on who you are and who you love.

It is a luxury to romanticize blood, especially your own. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence, especially the violence that you inflict upon others. To use it as a bond, or to call it church, or to build an identity around it while knowing that everyone you can send home bloody will not come back for revenge. To walk home bloody. To walk home at night. At the time of writing this, a video is circulating of a black man being killed by police, on camera. Before this, there was another black man. And a black boy. And black women vanishing in jail. And black trans women vanishing into the night. I do not blame punk rock for this.

I don’t know how to be honest enough to say that there isn’t a place for kids like us, so we need to make our own, and nothing is more punk rock than that. Nothing is more punk rock than surviving in a hungry sea of white noise.

the joke hiding in Thriller is that if you play anything for long enough, it’s like the dead never left. Revived, swaying in leather down another boulevard, I tell my boys that Michael was most black when he died without being able to save his land and no one gets that joke either.

it turns out that I want all pictures of me loving my people to be in color. I want the sunlight whistling its way across our faces to be always amber & never an absent hue that might mistake our lineage for something safe. I am talking of artifacts again & not of how I cup my hands to the chins of those I love & kiss them on their faces & this type of love will surely be the death of us all. this type of love will shake the angels loose & send them running to their horns.

It is an art, really. One that, like all institutions of black joy, gets dissected, parroted, and parodied—but only the language that comes from the body, and rarely the language that is spoken.

At some point, a person figured out that the performance of sadness was a currency, and art has bowed at its altar ever since. Sometimes it’s a game we play: if I can convince you that I am falling apart, in need of love, perhaps I can draw you close enough to tell you what I really need. Other times, it is not entirely performance.

It’s hard to ignore that the women made Rumours exciting. Christine McVie wasn’t as flashy as Nicks, but her familiarity and comfort within the band, paired with her and Buckingham’s musical rapport, allowed space for her to emote with ease and nuance in a way that often made Buckingham sound like he was having a frantic, exceptionally skilled temper tantrum.

It helps to think about Rumours as not just an album, but a living document. Once you push past the theatrics of it, the massive album sales and the thrilling gossip, it is a deeply sad project.

What I am told most often now is that I am kind. I am told this more by white people than anyone else, but I am told it often by everyone. That my kindness is a blessing. People who don’t know me particularly well talk about how they can see a kindness in my eyes, or feel a kindness that I have deep within. I generally laugh, shrug uncomfortably, and give a small thanks. I know, particularly when it is by people who aren’t familiar with me, that what they are actually complimenting is an absence of that which they perceived, perhaps expected.

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.

Black women, sitting at the intersection of race and gender, experience this more than I do, more than their male counterparts. Tabbed as angry, and only angry. I think, then, of my mother. How she always made sure to laugh louder than anyone in the room. How in every picture, she smiled with all of her teeth. How in the markets by our house, she would call everyone by their first names. Warmly touch them on their shoulders and ask about their families. How, even then, on a day where she was exhausted, I remember walking into the store with her. She was not smiling, but kind to the white man behind the register, offering short but polite responses to his questions. When handing her back change, he looked at my mother and said, “Everything okay? You just seem so mad today.”

That the radio played rap again, even in the suburbs that I hated. I’d like to tell her that I did not cry at the funeral, but I didn’t dance either. Not until weeks later, when I finally let go and flailed my limbs to the radio behind a closed bedroom door, crying and singing, feeling myself get closer and closer to freedom with every unhinged movement. You should’ve seen me, I’d tell her in our new and clean heaven. You should’ve seen me. I did, she’d say. I always did.

I don’t know what a community does when it has no more forgiveness left, or when it knows what forgiveness in this age truly means.

What makes the dead body worthwhile is that it was once living.

When black men die, they live on, almost forever. When black women vanish, they often simply vanish. When enough outlets tell you that your life is an exercise in rehearsing invisibility, when you become invisible, it just seems like you’re performing the grand closing act.

It is impossible to even mention America’s history of lynching without mentioning the woman who fought most fervently to dismantle it at a time when men were being dragged from their homes and hanged for not paying debts or being too drunk in public places. Or, in other cases, for displeasing law enforcement. There is sacrifice in that. In being a black woman who fights and is alive at any time in this country’s history is a sacrifice. It can still get you a death sentence, though the knife is fashioned differently.

There is pretty much no violence in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history. It is an uneasy conversation to approach, especially now, as we are asked to “behave” in the midst of another set of Black bodies left hollow.

The way I walk into a store and buy what my body is demanding without thinking of the labor that carried the product to that moment.

What people are asking in this exercise is never about where I’m from. The question they’re asking is “why doesn’t your name fit comfortably in my mouth?” and we both understand what this is asking, and my toying with the asker usually doesn’t win me any points.

Allahu Akbar, the only Arabic that fit comfortably over my tongue. Now, it is associated with a call of terrorists before some vicious act is committed in the name of Allah. The perversion of it hasn’t pulled me away. I still say it in praise, even when it doesn’t fit a specific situation, or when something like Alhamdulillah (“Thank God”) might be a better fit. I like the translation, mostly. Even though I don’t pray, I still like the idea that there is a God and that they are Greater. Than us, than this moment, than this wretched machinery that we’re fighting against and sometimes losing. It is the last lifeboat of Islam that I find myself clinging to.