They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

When people squint at my name on something in front of them and then ask where I’m from, I tell them “Columbus, Ohio.” When they look again and then, perhaps more urgently, ask where my parents are from, I tell them “New York,” smiling more slightly. Occasionally, I’ll get a person who asks where THEIR parents were from, and I humor that as well. No one has ever gone beyond two generations before me, but I look forward to the day where it all plays out: me in line at the bank, or at a deli, someone attempting to trace my lineage to a place they feel makes sense. Me, eventually saying, “Well, I’d imagine Africa came into play at some point, but now I’m here, so who can say really?” 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. The answer they are digging for is less exciting: my parents converted to Islam in the 1970s, when many young black American-born New Yorkers found their way to the religion. A desire for reconnecting their roots to something that felt more like home than Christianity. My father, before Islam, was Catholic, though I’m not sure of my mother’s religion. They took new names. The name “Abdurraqib” means “servant of the observer” in Arabic. It is hard, even now, for people to imagine that any Muslim people are not people who came here from ano...

find it amazing that I didn’t imagine the path that the September 11 attacks would set us down, and how that path would open up the door to global violences against Muslims. The greatest emotional impact on Americans toward American Muslims is that it took curiosity out of the timeline. There was now only fear, turning rapidly to anger. In an age before rapidly updating social media sites, I would read about attacks on Muslims in schoolyards or mosques being set on fire, sometimes days after it happened.

The thing about praying five times a day is that it gives you five distinct opportunities to talk to God. To bow and ask for forgiveness, even if you’re only returning after an hour. I was bad at sticking to a prayer schedule as a child. When you are young, and everything outside is beckoning, it’s hard to not look at that which brings you inside as a task and nothing else. But I appreciated the idea and routine of it, nonetheless. Even when it didn’t feel useful, the persistence of bringing myself before some higher power and asking to be made clean, again and again.