They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Jose Olivarez invited his brother to join us. Pedro showed up proudly sporting a Carly Rae Jepson shirt paired with a chain and crisp Nikes, and explained that Hanif had been the one to put him on. Indeed, his passion for CRJ is legion, and I confess that for a while I thought it was an ornate joke (because People Like Me, People Like Us, don’t listen to Carly Rae Jepson) until I actually put on Emotion and when it was over, found myself putting it on again, and hitting repeat.

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.

Hanif would probably laugh at this because I don’t think he counts himself as any sort of optimist, but this book makes me almost believe in things I thought I’d given up on. I might even dance again, daring to move my legs across this wasted land.

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.

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.

Watching Carly Rae Jepsen play E•MO•TION 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: E•MO•TION, with its 1980s nostalgia and hazy shine, was never asking for hits.

ScHoolboy Q is not alone, but as a rap artist gets bigger, and their ticket prices become higher, their audiences become whiter. It’s a question of who can afford the show, which in the case of ScHoolboy Q, becomes a question of who can afford to be comfortable saying a word that comes with a violence they’ll never know. I wonder, sometimes, if the trade-off is worth it. If my desire to see young black artists “make it” is worth my desire to watch them bowing to the comfort of others in this way. People who may, for a moment, put food on a table for their family, but would also not always fight for that family’s right to not hear a word that, out of the wrong mouth, can still be a 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.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

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.

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

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. I think about this when I go to the gym and hand my gym card over to the same front desk person, always a white man. I ask how he’s doing. Most days, he says “Good. Really good.”

I’m saying that I wish I knew what joys could be unlocked by tragedy before my mother died, but I’m thankful to have learned it shortly after she was gone.

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.

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 don’t want my people to die in order to be loved, or even seen.

Here, I can’t tell who wishes for me to be gone. Sometimes it’s the ones who would mourn for me the loudest.

But that was a long time ago. The state is going to kill Dylann Roof, and my desire for his death has long passed. I don’t want him to die unless he can, somehow, carry the insidious spirit of his motivations, which rest deep inside of America’s architecture. Everything else feels like the cruel theater of revolving death, which the death penalty often falls into. But I knew what it felt like, for a moment, to wish for a death to cash in on. To want a body as sacrifice, something to help dull the noise, to even a score that could never be evened. I glimpsed, for a small moment, what it must be like to consider someone I didn’t know as less valuable living. And the impossible weight of it all.

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.

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.

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.