Poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib will be reading in the Athenaeum on Tuesday, May 15th, from 5-6 pm! Ahead of his visit to Carleton, he kindly agreed to answer a few questions on his writing and reading for the Miscellany, which you will find below. We hope to see you at the reading!
Your latest book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, is a collection of essays. How was creating this book and the pieces in it different from your experience with your earlier poetry collection The Crown Ain’t Worth Much?
Well, I mostly found myself trying to find longer ways to unravel my curiosities, with somewhat more freedom than the brevity of a poem could allow for me. I got really excited about the opportunities to hammer away at some of the emotional rattling I had been trying to work through, and the way the essay afforded me that was really exciting.
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us has been described as “a definitive meditation on contemporary black dying,” and speaks to a very real inequality in mortality. In the America of today, what does resilience look like for you and in your writing?
I think for me, resilience looks like pushing through the language of death to also paint a rich portrait of living, when I can.
Music is a unifying principle in much of your writing, and your next book, Go Ahead In The Rain, is a biography of A Tribe Called Quest. What, for you, is music’s potency, and how do you go about distilling that on the page?
I think music is a massively unifying force, one that I try to honor in my work by eschewing old ideas of the “good vs. bad” criticism binary, and trying to offer up ways to discuss music as a bridge to feeling, and not necessarily a place to appear smarter than other people.
You’ve recently been traveling extensively and reading your poetry. Do you write with the spoken word in mind, and what is it like to be expressing yourself to an audience in such intimate proximity?
I write definitely with language that sounds good in mind. I think of language as a sonic pleasure — words as instrumentation. And so, yes, I think about sharing that intimacy with an audience in a similar fashion.
Do you see your writing as a call to action? What do you hope your readers and listeners will take away from your work?
I think writing can be a call to action, but certainly not a substitute for action, if that makes sense. So, ultimately, I want my work to push people closer to a wider viewing of the world, in the hopes that the world might look shocking enough for them to want to change it.