57 pages • 1 hour read
Hanif AbdurraqibThey Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Public Versus Private Grief
Throughout the text, Hanif Abdurraqib wonders what happens when typically private grief is shared publicly. Multiple essays explore the murders of unarmed Black men by police and “the force feeding of mugshots we get when a dead victim is Black” (53). There is a concern that the consumption of these murders as media can result in a performative response from the public, particularly when the grief is commercialized: “The daughter of a Black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father” (140). Abdurraqib is skeptical of tokenizing this woman’s public grief to sway the public one way or another.
On the other hand, the mere fact that one performs grief publicly—even calculatedly—does not necessarily undermine that grief’s authenticity. Abdurraqib praises artists who have taken their private grief and created art, including Future’s use of his very public breakup with Ciara to create a prolific and critically acclaimed series of albums and mixtapes. Part of the allure of the album is “that it is exceptionally difficult to be both public-facing and sad” (260). However, the fascination is not simply voyeurism. Abdurraqib emphasizes that grief is a universal human experience. In this sense, it is inherently public, so the artist who airs their grief publicly enters into a kind of community with their audience, who feel the artist’s pain and feel less lonely as a result. However, Abdurraqib implies that there is a danger in publicizing one’s own grief in order to numb it, mentioning that “the hiding from that which hurts, maybe leads to some unforeseen success” (264), creating a vicious cycle in which one never properly reckons with one’s feelings.
Despite the risks and costs of publicizing grief, Abdurraqib does so himself in multiple essays. Abdurraqib is never too far away from his background as a poet, and much of the book borrows from the tradition of the elegy: a public demonstration of private grief. The essay “In the Summer of 1997, Everyone Took to the Streets In Shiny Suits” operates as one long elegy for his mother. Abdurraqib does not shy away from sharing moments of extreme vulnerability and intimacy, such as a description of his younger self weeping following his mother’s death. Part of public grief is that it is public, implying that once one decides to share their private grief, everything must be shared.
Performativity and Fitting In
Performing—an identity, an act, or a belief—is central to this collection focused on music. Abdurraqib focuses particularly on the ways performance can lead to inclusion or exclusion. For example, many essays reference the ways in which Black people perform a kind of Blackness that makes white people comfortable or minimizes the danger of racist backlash. This often takes the form of compliance with implicit or explicit demands—for example, when Abdurraqib’s mother forces a smile onto her face because a white man accuses her of being angry, or the suit-and-tie-wearing press conferences of Michael Jordan. Though Abdurraqib recognizes that such performances can be necessary for survival, he also implies that they are self-perpetuating. As a boy, Abdurraqib looked up to Allen Iverson in part because Iverson’s refusal to kowtow to NBA ideas of how Black men should behave gave Abdurraqib permission to be himself. Similarly, Abdurraqib’s discussion of abandoning many Islamic traditions in college illustrates the drawbacks of performing in order to fit in; such performativity cuts one off from one’s community, excluding even as it aims at inclusion.
Another problematic type of performativity Abdurraqib addresses involves white people co-opting the Black experience—in essence, performing Blackness. When considering white rappers, Abdurraqib wonders if the reason white rapper Bubba Sparxxx isn’t more popular is because he writes about his own experience “instead of pulling a white lens over [Black] communities” (251). This implies that other, more popular white rappers—such as Machine Gun Kelly—perform Blackness to gain popularity and wealth. Closely related to this cultural appropriation is the phenomenon of white people acting more anti-racist than they really are. For example, in the essay “They Will Speak Loudest of You After You’ve Gone,” Abdurraqib describes a white woman with a “COEXIST” bumper sticker who drops her grocery bags on top of him while she talks on the phone about police murders of Black people. The woman performs anti-racism and inclusivity, but her instinctive actions reveal the hollowness of her professed politics. She quite literally acts like Abdurraqib is invisible.
However, Abdurraqib does not suggest that performativity is always problematic. Even an insincere performance may have value. Part 4, for example, discusses how the performance of wealth can be aspirational, escapist, and subversive for members of marginalized groups. Authentic or not, such performances ultimately create community. Similarly, Abdurraqib adopts a nuanced stance on the Migos’s and Johnny Cash’s songs about crime and incarceration. To be sure, there is a danger of appropriation in describing experiences that aren’t one’s own, but Abdurraqib implies that these artists’ fascination with dark material speaks to a real darkness within them: a self-destructive impulse that would play out in their relationships with substance use. The line between performing and being is blurry in such instances, as one can easily become one’s own persona.
Rewriting Narratives and Incorrect Perceptions
Abdurraqib emphasizes the importance and necessity of looking below the surface—and past stereotypes—to appreciate a person’s gifts and story fully. For Abdurraqib, this entails a shift in “narrative” (a word that recurs often in the collection). Many of the essays are about reclaiming or correcting stories mistold by the media or by history.
The most obvious example of narratives in need of revision are those that are overtly racist—e.g., the “thug” label with which the media saddled Iverson. One form of racist narrative to which Abdurraqib devotes particular attention is erasure, which he suggests particularly affects Black women. His discussion of the biopic Nina shows that even a story that ostensibly centers a Black woman may nevertheless end up overwriting her, making her nothing more than a vessel for the racism and sexism of the storytellers.
However, Abdurraqib also locates racism in the tendency to collapse the Black experience entirely to one of racism. Many of the essays reference unarmed Black people murdered by the police and subsequently known only for their violent deaths. Abdurraqib instead stresses that such people are more than just the “all-too-familiar death, the dead body that this country has come to know” (194). By exploring the full experience of Blackness—grief, joy, and rage—Abdurraqib aims to recreate Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and all the others on the page, letting them be seen in all their complexities and flaws. Abdurraqib seeks something similar for the Black community at large in his efforts to imagine an optimism that does not erase the realities of suffering but that also holds out hope. While essays such as “Tell ’Em to Come and Get Me” acknowledge the challenges of maintaining these two perspectives simultaneously, they suggest that living with that tension is part of what gives Black experience its richness.
The difficulty of balancing hope and realism also speaks to another kind of narrative that needs rewriting: the stories that people tell themselves. Abdurraqib gestures toward this especially in “Surviving on Small Joy,” which closed out the collection before the 2023 reissue. Though he acknowledges the power of elegy for marginalized groups, Abdurraqib also urges such people to reclaim other modes of storytelling—ones rooted in happiness, humor, love, etc. rather than sorrow and defiance.
Enthusiasm, Joy, and Community in Music
Abdurraqib presents music in large part as a vehicle for enthusiasm. While the musical artists he features vary in genre, age, and popularity, all share one commonality: their audience’s emotional engagement, whether that takes the form of joy in a celebration of new love (e.g., Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”) or catharsis in an extended meditation on death (e.g., My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade). Abdurraqib therefore rejects musical elitism, writing of a Carly Rae Jepsen concert that “shame falls to dust” in the wake of such pure joy (26). Even when writing about bands that are controversial, Abdurraqib highlights that they speak to someone at some time and thus have value. In “The Return of the Loneliest Boys in Town,” Abdurraqib does not shy away from criticizing Cute Is What We Aim For’s misogynistic lyrics, but he also remembers the comfort their music provided him when he was younger. Indeed, he finds value in attending the concert despite his newfound discomfort with the material, as doing so helps him realize how far his worldview has expanded.
For Abdurraqib, part of what makes music so powerful is its ability to explore or cement cultural identity. “I Wasn’t Brought Here, I Was Born: Surviving Punk Rock Long Enough to Find Afropunk” considers how exclusion and discrimination in the punk rock scene are ironic given the genre’s reputation for rebellion. However, this exclusion led to the formation of a new community: Afropunk. Indeed, much music actively aims for inclusivity. For example, Chance the Rapper “makes music facing his people while also leaving the door open for everyone else to try and work their way in” (8). Kendrick Lamar’s song “Alright” operates as “the warm nod and knowing smile from a Black face emerging in a sea of white” (142), acknowledging the community’s hardships and its perseverance. When describing how some rappers have reclaimed the n-word to retake power, Abdurraqib writes, “I am comfortable here, shouting at my n****s across a card table with a hand of cards during a spades game at its tense climax” (37). Through its reclamation, a word that has caused incredible violence becomes a demonstration of the bonds within the Black community.
Indeed, music facilitates and mediates relationships not only on a societal level but also on a personal one. Abdurraqib meets some of his closest friends at concerts, which he calls places where he “found safety and comfort” (211). His friend Tyler operates as a sanctuary he can return to even after his death by listening to Fall Out Boy’s music. Similarly, “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” is for Abdurraqib indelibly associated with his mother and provides him with a path through his ongoing grief over her loss.
Abdurraqib suggests music’s ability to create community by associating it with religious spaces. He refers to a Bruce Springsteen concert as “the church of Bruce Springsteen” (16), implying that, for all its flaws, Springsteen’s music creates a sacred, communal space for its listeners. Lamar’s use of the first-person plural pronoun—something Abdurraqib also frequently employs—strikes Abdurraqib as similar to the call and response preaching common in many Black churches: “Kendrick Lamar says ‘God got Us’ […] [t]he way a good preacher might say ‘We’ in a Black church and the congregation hums” (142-43). Such references to church are not explicitly religious—Abdurraqib is not even Christian—but rather suggest music’s transcendent appeal to what is most human in people.
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By Hanif Abdurraqib
