They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I may not come down on the same side of that as everyone who listens to Chance, but 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.

I, like so many of you, spent 2016 trying to hold on to what joy I could. I, like so many of you, am now looking to get my joy 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. There is optimism in that, too, in knowing that more happiness is possible.

If this year was bad, next year might be even worse, or at the very least it might be harder. We are nothing without our quick and simple blessings, without those willing to drag optimism by its neck to the gates of grief and ask to be let in, an entire choir of voices singing at their back.

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. Jepsen is trying to unlock the hard door, the one with all of the other feelings behind it.

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.

it seems the nightmares about drowning have again mounted my dreaming hours & have left me gasping into the stillness before morning & yet I still have not learned to swim. In the bath, I sit with the water just below my chin, a height that would not cushion my hunger for sleep. The world is undoing itself & I must tend to my vast & growing field of fears. In this new country, a nightmare is nothing but a brief rental home for the mind to ransack & leave the sleeping body unharmed.

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.

It’s all a myth, especially if you are of any marginalized group in America. The only answer is to dispose of that which will not save you. What Foxx was really saying, I think, is that it doesn’t matter how one gets home in a room full of people they love. You make your home wherever you and your people stop.

The shared machinery of love and trust has many parts and therefore many flaws, and therefore many opportunities for disaster.

I don’t enjoy being heartbroken, but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until a week becomes a year. It is the madness that both seduces and offers you your own window out once it’s done with you.

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.

For anyone who has ever loved someone and then stopped loving them, or for anyone who has stopped being loved by someone, it’s a reminder that the immediate exit can be the hardest part. Admitting the end is one thing, but making the decision to walk into it is another, particularly when an option to remain tethered can mean cheaper rent, or a hit album, or at the very least, a small and tense place that you can go to turn your sadness into something more than sadness. It’s all so immovable, our endless need for someone to desire us enough to keep us around.

I like to think of this as the great lesson hiding in Rumours: there are people we need so much that we can’t imagine turning away from them. People we’ve built entire homes inside of ourselves for, that cannot stand empty. People we still find a way to make magic with, even when the lights flicker, and the love runs entirely out.

I think about that expectation, to hold off injustice with one arm while still consistently offering forgiveness with the other. I think about how often that is what blackness in America amounts to. Even when grandmothers are burying their children, and their children’s children. What forgiveness looks like when there are still churches being blown apart, still black bodies who arrived to pray, and ended up murdered. When the right arm is reaching into a fire to push away decades of injustice that still presents itself, how long before the whole body is engulfed in flames?

Hasn’t that always been the way of it? We all choose our sins, and their measure. The ones we believe will render us unforgivable, and the ones that we will wash off with a morning prayer. This is something that I find particularly hard to ignore as we again look upon an act of terror that has overshadowed all other acts of terror. Even the ones that have spanned decades, or centuries. As we again discuss selective outrage. Rather, the merit of life, or what we do with how others choose to mourn. Most importantly, as we again ask questions of what Muslims around the world “deserve” and what they “need to do.” Then again, have we ever really stopped doing this?

It is an odd thing to imagine yourself as someone who may have more value dead, or dying. But surely, if the emotions attached to your vanishing can be currency, isn’t your vanishing, itself, something to trade? I don’t know what to make of this: the white man who posts on the internet, vigorously, about his disgust with our country’s racism. When I approach him about an inappropriate, boundary-crossing behavior, he pretends to not hear me. This is all, it seems, deeper than simply an idea of liberal performance for point scoring. It is the inability to see a body as worthwhile if it doesn’t have a value you can trade in on, some sentimental cash out.

When you allow something to grow a shadow at your back, anything that distracts you from it is going to need severing.

I remember staring at him, the glow of the red light bleeding into the car and resting on his briefly sleeping face. I remember thinking that, instead of waking him up, I should let him rest. That maybe, what we see when we close our eyes is better than anything the living world could offer us in our waking hours. I imagine this is why Future has become obsessed with losing track of time. It is hard to keep missing someone when there’s no way to tell how long you’ve been without them. When everything blurs into a singular and brilliant darkness.

Joy, in these moments, is the sweetest meal that we keep chasing the perfect recipe for, among a world trying to gather all of the ingredients for itself.