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

by Hanif Abdurraqib

When I was young, after two or so funerals, I began to imagine the brief and structured funeral as a type of gift. A mercy placed upon someone who lived a life and now got to, perhaps, see whatever awaited on the other side of that life. I imagined the entire process of the funeral being quick as a service to the dead—to spare them being stuck here with our grief, and instead send them to the waiting arms of some heaven-like interior.

With a voice like Aretha’s, the distance between soul music and music of the soul is short,

It is good for a person to be remembered for the songs they choose to sing when they could’ve sung anything else.

A country is something that happens to you. History is a series of thefts, or migrations, or escapes, and along the way, new bodies are added to a lineage. Someone finds a place where they think themselves meant to be, and they stop moving.

am wondering always how one comes to love a country. Depending on who you are, or what your background is, or what trauma(s) you’ve inherited, it seems too complicated to unravel. It was not complicated for me to perform for a while, when I’d convinced myself in my teens and early twenties that my performance of love for a country would open itself up to some kind of safety for me and the people I held close. I also knew then, as I know now, that leaving felt immensely impractical. This is one of the biggest tricks of them all. You are burdened with a place, and then, by the time you realize that exit is a possibility, the options for exit can seem distant, or insurmountable.