They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It is one thing to watch a people take a weapon out of your hands, but it is another to fashion it into something else entirely, something that doesn’t resemble a weapon at all.

We often see black people, more than any other demographic, restricted to what versions of themselves can be briefly loved and then discarded.

that a closeness for, or even a love for culture, puts you so far into it that you can embody all aspects without harm. That love is the great equalizer, even if there is blood underneath a word that no longer belongs to you.

This is a particular type of love. The type that has survived history and the weapons formed against the body and all of its lineage. The type that has turned the weapon back in on itself and now, that which welcomes violence can also welcome two arms, spread apart in a wide and waiting hug.

was jarring. Another example of how expendable the black body can be when in the way of needs that are greater than it, the range of those needs changing by the hour, or second.

What I really want to do is say that life is impossible, and the lie we tell ourselves is that it is too short. Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

Sometimes, that which does not kill you sits heavy over you until all of the things that did not kill you turn into a single counterforce that might.

No matter what comes out of a person in these times, the work that we make when we feel like we no longer want to be alive is not the best work if it is also not work that, little by little, is pushing us back toward perhaps staying, even if just for a moment.

What I’m mostly saying, friends, is that I’ve lost too much. And everything sounds good when you know it was the last thing a person would ever make. All of the words sit more p...

that, it’s easy to feel some distance from the kind of optimism that we’re taught to lean into during difficult times. Even now, I’m not as invested in things getting better as I am in things getting honest.

There is no evidence to suggest that humans are going to become any more kind this year, or more empathetic, or more loving toward each other. If anything, with our constant exposure to all of one another’s most intense moments, the bar for what we seem prepared to tolerate gets lower with every second we spend screaming into each other’s open windows.

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?

We are all going to die. That’s true, though I hope I get a few more trips on this sometimes wretched ride. I have tasted enough of its highs to know that they’re worth sticking around for, though not worth worshiping as a sole survival tool in the face of its lows. I’ve abandoned hopeless hope, but I am not rooting for the meteor.

The message of a universal grief, yours and mine, that we can acknowledge together and briefly make lighter for each other, is in that moment. That which does not kill you may certainly kill someone else. That which does not kill you may form a fresh layer of sadness on the shoulders of someone you do not know, but who still may need to press their ear to the same thing that told you everything was going to be all right when you didn’t feel like everything was going to be all right.

there are times when destruction is not as much of a choice as we think it is

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. A place where you still have a name.

And look, I know that memories don’t actually bring a person you love back to life. Real life, I mean. It doesn’t make them touchable in the way we most need them to be.

It helps, in the moment of the casket’s lowering, to think about suicide not as a desire for death, but a need to escape whatever suffering life has dealt.

It’s easy to convince people that you are really okay if they don’t have to actually hear what rattles you in the private silence of your own making.

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

history repeating itself wouldn’t be so bad if not for the chorus of violences accumulating along the landscapes where small miracles sometimes took place

Once you understand violence, once its presence is constant enough, it can become something you survive until survival becomes normalcy, and fear becomes something you lie about when your friends are listening.

A person is a whole person when they are good sometimes but not always, and loved by someone regardless.

We would do this for each other, despite anything in our pasts, because no one else would do it for us. We know that we are more than only good and only bad, despite what happens to the names of the dead after they are no longer around to speak them.

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.

Maybe all they ask is that we help hold back the darkness for as long as we can, and when we can’t anymore, they’ll save us a room.

In this way, heartbreak is akin to a brief and jarring madness. Keeping up the fight—any fight—to not have to reckon with your own sorrow isn’t ideal, but it might help to keep a familiar voice in your ears a bit longer than letting go would.

the human conflict of leaving and not leaving and trying to find some small mercy in the face of what has left you briefly torn apart.

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.

For some of us, denying what this country is, and what it is doing to our bodies, is impossible.

To bear witness to so much death that could easily be your own is to push toward redefining what it is to be a patriot in this country.

When I think about black freedom, I think about the small moments of it, in concert with a larger-scale version of liberation.

And then another, and one or two more. I imagined they were all taking in what I was taking in, even if they weren’t. I wanted, for a moment, to share in this small horror. What a country’s fear of blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking in joy, being promised that you would make it through.

The relief that people have when a protest centering on black lives aligns with their ideas of peace.

What possibilities would black people be allowed if their anger, and all of the ways it manifested itself, could be seen as a part of the human spectrum. The

It made me reconsider the true purpose of a funeral. To see it, instead, as something that makes death memorable for those still living, something less fearful to sit in. A way to show the dead that we’ll be all right, that we can go on without them just fine.

We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After emancipation, black Americans in the South built sanctuaries of their own as a way to find refuge in a country that still didn’t feel like the Promised Land.

The greatest mission of the black church, historically, has been to care for the spiritual needs of black people, with the understanding that since the inception of the American church, the spiritual needs of black people have been assigned a different tone, a different urgency. It is the difference in looking out on a land that you believe is yours, and a land that you were taken to, forced to build.

“Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.” —Ida B. Wells

want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of boundarypushing and I want us to respect the legacies that were remarkable by virtue of being alive and loved.

There is pretty much no violence in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history.

It is a luxury to be able to tear your gaze away from something; to only be made aware of old and consistent blood by a newer shedding of blood. It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary. It is a luxury to be unafraid and analyze the very real fear of others.

It is jarring, what we let fear do to each other; how we invent enemies and then make them so small that we are fine with wishing them dead. How we decide what “safety” is, how ours is only ours and must be gained at all costs. How we take that long coat of fear and throw it around the shoulders of anyone who doesn’t look like us, or prays to another God.

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 optics of equality, though not doing the same work as actual measures of equality, mean something. Particularly to any people who have been denied access or visibility, or any people who were made to feel like the work they created was not worthy of equal consideration in the eyes of the country it was created in.