They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

There is something about his joy that makes it stretch longer—perhaps that it demands nothing immediate from a listener or observer, except to take it in and let it be a brief and necessary bandage over anything that hurts.

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.

It is one thing to be good at what you do, and it is another thing to be good and bold enough to have fun while doing it.

back, after it ran away to a more deserving land than this one. And maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times: the happiness is fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us.

When you watch hope closely enough, manifested in enough people, you can start to feel it too.

On Coloring Book, “Smoke Break” seems like a smoking anthem from a distance, but up close, it’s a song about cherishing silent and stolen moments in the face of new parenthood.

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.

It occurs to me that maybe no one actually wants a pop star who could be their friend.

We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon.

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.

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 understand what it is to be sad, even when everyone around you is demanding your happiness—and what are we to do with all of that pressure other than search for a song that lets us be drained of it all?

We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all. I know that I stopped thinking about extreme grief as the sole vehicle for great art when the grief started to take people with it.

I am less drawn to the artist who at least appears to make it look easy. But our best work is the work of ourselves, our bodies and the people who want us to keep pushing, even if the days are long and miserable and even if there are moments when the wrong side of the bridge beckons you close. All things do not pass. Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might. No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment. What I’m mostly saying, friends, is that I’ve lost too much. And everything sounds good when you know it was the last thing a person would ever make. All of the words sit more perfect on the page when they are the last words. What I’m mostly saying, friends, is that I am sad today. I am sad today, and I may be sad tomorrow. But I watched a video where rappers hung out of the roof of a car and threw money in slow motion, and it made me briefly consider another type of freedom. I am sad today, but I held, in my hands, a picture of me on a day where I was not sad. In it, the sunlight leaked over my face in a city I love, and my eyes were wide and eager. I am sad yesterday, and I might be sad tomorrow, and even the day after. But I will be here, looking for a w...

I have been thinking, then, about the value of optimism while cities burn, while people are fearing for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, while discourse is reduced to laughing through a chorus of anxiety. A woman in a Cape Cod diner the day after Christmas saw me eyeing the news and shaking my head. She told me that “things will get better,” and I wasn’t sure they would, but I nodded and said, “They surely can’t get any worse,” which is the lie that we all tell, the one that we want to believe, even as there are jaws opening before us.

Even at their most performative—which The Black Parade definitely is—there was something about My Chemical Romance’s vision that felt comfortable, touchable, genuine. It was easy to be confident on The Black Parade, an album that unpacks a complete certainty: that we are all going to die, and none of us know what comes next.

To be black and still alive in America is to know urgency.

In 2005, Pete downed a bottle of pills in a Best Buy parking lot while listening to Jeff Buckley, who drowned in the Wolf River Harbor at age 30 and who was the son of Tim Buckley, who overdosed on heroin at age 28. And so what I’m saying is that our heroes spill from their heroes and their heroes before them, and at some point, everyone wants out.

I think I am trying to say that I like to imagine Tyler was calling to say goodbye, and couldn’t bring himself to do it to a machine. But what I am mostly trying to say is that the air at a funeral feels different when someone finds their own way to the grave, but we scene kids all decided to still wear black leather to bury Tyler today, even with summer bearing down on our backs. Sometimes, it is truly about the aesthetics. It helps, in the moment of the casket’s lowering, to think about suicide not as a desire for death, but a need to escape whatever suffering life has dealt.

Before they started playing, they huddled briefly, slapping each other’s hands. 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. Pete, for all of his songs about racing toward an abyss, returned to us with two kids. Patrick and Joe returned married. No one wanted out anymore, at least not that night.

No one decides when the people we love are actually gone. May we all be buried on our own terms.

“Alright” tells us to, instead, revel in the living, despite it all. 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.

Kendrick Lamar says “God got Us” and the Us crawls out of the speaker and wraps its arms around the black people in the room. The way a good preacher might say “We” in a black church and the congregation hums. The way I say “My people” and My People know who they are even if we’ve never met, or even if we’ve never spoken, or even if all we have is the shared lineage of coming from a people who came from a people who came from a people who didn’t intend to come here but built the here once they arrived.

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

Maybe all of these heavens are the same—Kendrick Lamar’s heaven, the heaven that all of the trains and chariots took our ancestors to, the heaven on the other side of Harriet Tubman’s river. 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.

Heartbreak is one of the many emotions that sits inside the long arms of sadness, a mother with many children.

I wanted, for a moment, to share in this small horror. What a country’s fear of blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking in joy, being promised that you would make it through.

My freshman year of college, I played for my university as the first American-born player of color. I stepped onto the field for a preseason match, in a sea of white jerseys, white faces, white coaches, white fans. I got a yellow card for clapping in slight frustration, in the direction of the sky, after I allowed a ball to roll out of bounds.

I kissed my mother on a June night in 1997, and when I woke up, she was gone. That was it. I think sometimes it was better that way, to have our last moment be a routine farewell. Her throat simply closed in the middle of the night, a reaction to medication she was taking to fight against her bipolar disorder. Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us, but simply the battle itself.

A way to show the dead that we’ll be all right, that we can go on without them just fine.

The thing that I can’t promise is that heaven exists. I like to hope that it does, despite growing less and less connected to an idea of a higher power with each year. My mother died without knowing that death was coming for her, and I like to imagine her somewhere comfortable, a place where she can make peace with that. Selfishly, and more than anything else, I’d like to see her again, whatever seeing in the afterlife might look like. I’d love to sit across from her and hear her laugh at something, anything. I’d like to tell her about the summer of 1997 while someone sits behind us and plays a horn, slow and beautiful. I’d like to tell her about how I went outside for the first time two days after we covered her casket in dirt and heard the notes to a song she could sing along to. I’d like to tell her that I played basketball late into the night that summer, with the words to that song fresh on my tongue. 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.

It is easy to be black and non-confrontational if nothing is on fire, and so it has never been easy to be black and non-confrontational.

Though the church holds ceremonies for our dead, no one goes to church to die.

During the civil rights era, black churches served as holy ground. A place where black organizers could meet, strategize, pray, and give thanks. The organization of black resistance has always sparked white fear, never greater than when violent bigots see a building where black people are praying to the same God that they do, and doing it with so much fire, so little worry. When a place like this also becomes a base of power for social and political movement, it becomes a target. Taylor Branch, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement, once estimated that from 1954 to 1968, there was a church bombed almost every week. During the freedom summer of 1964, it is estimated that a bombing happened every other day.

In the summer of 2015, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and unloaded a handgun. In the days following, six black churches were damaged or destroyed.

I don’t know anything more about Sandra Bland than anyone else, other than the fact that I want her life to be one that is not forgotten. I want us to honor the living black women who fight and I want us to fight for the black women who no longer have the honor of living. I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of boundarypushing and I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of being alive and loved. I want these statements to not be “brave,” or “unique.” I want them to be expected.

We know that if the officer’s gun didn’t kill them, and poverty’s hunger didn’t kill them, and the violence of marginalized and silenced Black men didn’t kill them, there is no measure of swallowed smoke that will shake them free of the earth quickly and easily.

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 Southern Black church has always been a battleground in this history of violence. Most notably, of course, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, but even beyond. The church, if we are to believe that it still exists for this purpose, is a space of ultimate humbling and vulnerability. In the South, the Black church is also a place of fear. To attack the innocent where they feel most secure is cowardly, of course, but it is also a reminder. There is no safety from this. There will be no reprieve from the sickness that spreads and calls people to take up this level of violence. There will be no calm before the storm. There will only be the storm, and then another, louder storm. It will follow you to your homes, press itself between your sleeping children, hang over your shoulders at work, and yes, it will walk into your church, pray to the same God as you do, and then stand up and open fire. There is no way to talk about this without talking about the history of instilling fear in Black people in this country. Without closing our eyes and feeling the warmth from a flaming cross. Or smelling a wet body, limp and descending from a Southern plantation tree.

Last night, I think I prayed for a Southern Black church that didn’t also smell of smoke, of cooked flesh. Where the memories weren’t of burial. Where Black children could fall asleep in the front row, their small bodies still, but breathing.

The U.S. ignored the Geneva Convention, raping, sodomizing, and torturing prisoners of war at their black site bases around the world. The military bombed wedding parties consisting mostly of women and children in Iraq at Mukaradeeb, and in Afghanistan at Wech Baghtu and Deh Bala. Here, we are saying that we will tear your country apart, we will give birth to the terror within, and then we will leave you to drown in it. This feels, tonight, like a particularly immense type of evil. Real power, I am reminded, doesn’t need a new reason to stop pretending to be what it actually is underneath. All of the old reasons are enough to seduce. On my phone, a Muslim friend texts me to ask how my family is. If any of them are in danger. I tell her no, that I am standing, now, in the city where my mother and father were born. There is no border that my living family can be pushed to the edges of, even though a country glares at our name and wishes otherwise.

When I hear people talk about “the right things to do” to make sure that police don’t kill you, I imagine that I have learned to face police differently than they have. When you are asked to step out of a car that you own, and your body no longer belongs to you, but instead belongs to the lights drowning it, first one and then another, a harsh reality exists. There are two sides of a night that you can end up on: one where you get to see the sunrise again, and one where you do not. You don’t exactly consider this in the moment, which I think is important to point out. When demands and questions are being leveled at you, particularly at a high volume, particularly with skepticism in their tone and a light in your eyes, it is easy to fall into an idea of wanting to prove yourself. To reach for anything that might show that you are a whole person and worthy of staying that way. I recall becoming close with fear, with the instinct to stay alive.

As someone who observes culture in all of its forms, if the past three years since the death of Trayvon Martin have taught me anything, it’s that people have found so many new ways to say “silence.” It is what is meant when we look at a peaceful protest and hear people say, “Well, why can’t they just do it more peacefully?” It is perhaps what I mean when I look at a text that I am not too keen on returning and text back: “I’ll get back to you in the next hour.” And it is definitely what is meant when Serena Williams is looked at, careless and immersed in joy, and told, “Be more ‘humble’.”

I struggle with this, the public grief by white people over Black Death. I have been, and am still, a victim of what my guilt can drive me to. Depending on the day, on the cause, on who I love that might be affected. There is, however, a manner in which this guilt is performed that sets me to wondering what the value of living blackness is when it rests against white outrage centered on the ending of black life. It is both essential for us to turn toward our people and ask them to do better, while also realizing that there is a very real currency that comes with being the loudest person to do it in public. It is about going against expectation. I am black. I am supposed to be sad when the police kill someone who looks like me. I don’t gain much by being afraid, because the fear itself has worked its way into me, simply pushing its way to the surface when most appropriate. I want everyone to be appalled, taken aback by these injustices. A major failing of our ability to process these deaths is that people have, for too long, not allowed themselves to consider the problem as real and systemic. That is the other side of this: my desire for this outrage to exist, even if I think it needs to be reconsidered and perhaps reshaped. What I realize now about my friends who left the shadow of Ohio’s sometimes-obvious racism is that they were making themselves comfortable with the silent, liberal racism. The type that sometimes roots itself in faux-concern to present a question of you...

In this way, stillness and silence can turn the normally invisible or feared black person into a sort of mascot.

Us, all of us truly in this machine, know that the grief that comes with the killing sits heavy and never leaves.

For all of the talk about how art can open the human spirit up to empathy, years of black people rapping about what is happening in their communities hasn’t exactly softened much of America’s response to those communities or the people in them.

The real grief is silence in a place where there was once noise. Silence is the hard thing to block out, because it hovers, immovable, over whatever it occupies. Noise can be drowned out with more noise, but the right type of silence, even when drowning, can still sit inside of a person, unmoving.

The people I love are black. The people I love are Muslim and queer. The people I love can’t get people to use their proper pronouns. The people I love are all afraid, and because these are my people, I am afraid with them. I work, in times as urgent as these, to unlock the small pockets of joy that have kept us all surviving for so long. The small and silly things that aren’t death. I get on Twitter and make jokes about basketball, or I send a friend a video of a panda that we both remember laughing at once. I text the words “I love you” to people to whom I’ve owed phone calls. I spend a whole day writing poems in which no one dies.

Joy, in this way, can be a weapon—that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or months, or years. 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 a 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.