They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

I think, though, that a natural reaction to black people being murdered on camera is the notion that living black joy becomes a commodity—something that everyone feels like they should be able to consume as a type of relief point. 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.

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 perhaps that is freedom, more than anything. To turn your eye back on the community you love and articulate it for an entire world that may not understand it as you do.

But I imagine this as a problem with how black people sit in the imagination of people who are not black, and not entirely a content or genre issue. We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded.

I instead ask to consider the impact of continuing to glorify a very specific type of white violence and invisibility of all others in an era where there is a very real and very violent erasure of the bodies most frequently excluded from the language, culture, and visuals of punk rock.

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.

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.

I’m not sold on pessimism as the new optimism. I need something that allows us to hope for something greater while confronting the mess of whatever all this blind hopefulness has driven us to. America is not what people thought it was before, even for those of us who were already familiar with some of its many flaws. What good is endless hope in a country that never runs out of ways to drain you of it? What does it mean to claim that a president is not your own as he pushes the lives of those you love closer to the brink? What is it to avoid acknowledging the target but still come, ready, to the resistance?

It is true, yes, that joy in a violent world can be rebellion. Sex can be rebellion. Turning off the news and watching two hours of a mindless action film can be rebellion. But without being coupled with any actual HARD rebellion, without reaching our hands into revolutionary action, all you’ve done is had a pretty fun day of joy, sex, and a movie. There is no moment in America when I do not feel like I am fighting. When I do not feel like I’m pushing back against a machine that asks me to prove that I belong here. It is almost a second language, and one that I take pride in, though I wish I did not need to be so fluent in it. I know what it is to feel that urge to build a small heaven, or many small heavens. Ones that you cannot take with you, but ones that cannot be taken from you.

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. The silence may reward you briefly, but it always comes at the risk of something greater: your safety, your family, how the world sets its eyes upon you and everyone you love. When

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.

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.

I think of how foolish I was, to once pray for a country’s mercy, and how thankful I am that those prayers were not answered. How, through this resistance, we might find a freedom where no mercy is required. We might find a humanity that is not asking to be seen, but demanding instead. How we all pray for the wrong things sometimes, but somehow, God is greater.

Yet, here, I still write about the living while so many continue to die. I write about music while bodies are prepared for burial. I write about fear from the safety of my apartment, and someone may call it brave. Me, a man who no longer bows to anything five times a day, who had pork just yesterday, who only speaks light Arabic when visiting his family, still writing about how I wish for Muslims, especially young Muslims, to be safe. To have a haven, a place where they can find each other and say I see you. I’m still here.

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.