They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Joy, or the concept of joy, is often toothless and vague because it needs to be. It is both hollow and touchable, in part because it is something that can’t be explained as well as it can be visualized and experienced.

To watch Bruce Springsteen step onto a stage in New Jersey is to watch Moses walk to the edge of the Red Sea, so confident in his ability to perform a miracle, to carry his people to the Promised Land.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life.

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

So many of us begin tortured and end tortured, with only brief bursts of light in between, and I’d rather have average art and survival than miracles that come at the cost of someone’s life.

The Black Parade works because it doesn’t imagine death as romantic. The Patient goes, fighting, to the gates of whatever is on the other side. The album, for all of its wild and operatic fantasies, stays honest. When faced with all that is being left behind, even when death is inevitable, there are so many who will still fight against it.

I couldn’t decide if I thought something was wrong with her, or if something was wrong to me—the way I learned to cling to my relationship with death as if loving it hard enough would make it into a full person. A person who looked, at least a little, like everyone I had loved and lost.

The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over. I will take healing in whatever form I can, and I heard my mother’s voice singing underneath that music. I heard her slowly making her way back home.

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.

America, so frequently, is excited about the stories of black people but not the black people themselves. Everything is a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote, or a march where no one was beaten or killed. This is why the telling of our own stories has always been important. The idea of black folklore as community is still how we connect to our past, locking in on our heroes and making them larger than life.

We do get to reflect on what it means to live in a world where little girls can get dressed up to go to church and not make it out alive. But there isn’t the satisfaction of knowing that we live in a world where this could never happen again.

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.

Survival is truly a language in which the Black matriarch is fluent. Much like this country’s violence, there is no survival in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history. A grandmother who has maybe stared down death more than once, passing that burden on to the child of her child. I don’t know if there is a name for what it is when you are moved to praise something as impossibly sad as this.

There is no retaliation like American retaliation, for it is long, drawn out, and willing to strike relentlessly, regardless of the damage it has done.

Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction, even though all of us know we are watching a performance. So much music is made by someone steeped in persona, building a digestible image. Because of rap’s roots, and because so many people who saw it at the start are still alive to turn a critical eye toward it, it comes under fire for turning away from what feels real. Additionally, when black people singing songs about guns and drugs make it to number one in a country where black people are arrested and killed for guns or drugs or less than that, it can feel a bit like life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience. I understand these things and also say that we’ve allowed the rappers we grew up with to grow up and still rap about selling drugs with platinum records and sold out tours at their backs, but a suburban zip code is where we draw the line, as if growing up all kinds of black in all kinds of ways doesn’t carry its own unique and varied weight.

Obama, as much as we sometimes imagined him otherwise, was a politician. He was an American President, which means that he was tied into all of America’s machinery, which means that he was operating with a proximity to some level of violence at all times. But he was more than this, too, a complex and fullstoried person. The problem with the way visible and complicated people of color and their histories are approached by the world around them is that they are, all too often, not afforded the mosaic of a full and nuanced history.

What often doesn’t get talked about with real and deep heartbreak after a romantic relationship falls apart is that it isn’t always just a single moment. It’s an accumulation of moments, sometimes spread out over years. It is more than just the person you love leaving; it’s also seeing them happy after they’ve left, seeing them beginning to love someone else, seeing them build a life that you perhaps hoped to build with them.

There are sometimes wide and splitting paths that take us away from the people we aspire to love, even if we know they are loving us in the best way they can, with all of the worldview that their world has afforded them.

How do we explain to a child that children have been buried and we were sad but could not let go of our principles and our history and the violence that is born and reborn from it—that we clung to our guns, those small deadly gods, more tightly than to our neighbors?

I want to be immensely clear about the fact that we need more than love and joy. Love and joy alone will not rid America of its multilayered history of violence that has existed for longer than any of us have been alive. That violent culture, no matter the amount of prayers and grief we throw at it, remains unshakable.

The violence is, in some ways, inescapable. It isn’t always done with a gun, and is sometimes done with a pen.

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.