A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

It occurs to me now that this was the real joy of dancing: to enter a world unlike the one you find yourself burdened with, and move your body toward nothing but a prayer that time might slow down.

And I think this is how I would most like to imagine romance, friends, or should I say lovers. In praise of all my body can and cannot do, I wish to figure out how it can best sing with all of yours for a moment in a room where the walls sweat. I wish to lock eyes across a dance floor from you while something our mothers sang in the kitchen plays over the speakers. I want us to find each

other among the forest of writhing and make a deal. Okay, lover. It is just us now. The only way out is through.

a river must be built out of what the dancing can offer so that we might float once again off grief’s island.

I want the feeling of walking out of a hot, sweat-drenched dance party and into a cool night bottled and sold.

our grief decides when it is done with us.

Due in part to America’s comforts with slavery and violence, he stated, there is a universal distrust in anything other than individualism as a pathway to survival in the country.

Anyone who speaks a language inside a language can see when that dialect is presenting a challenge for someone who perhaps had to google the correct word to use and the placement of it.

consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is

not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.

the bet was already bad but the dealer had the cards in his hand to make it worse,

What it is to go looking for beef in the only way you know how, inside a world that has moved on from what you know. Everything is a show, until the show moves on without you.

When Donika won the award for her book, she gave thanks for the fact that she had survived all of the things that have tried to kill her, including herself.