Hanif AbdurraqibCritiques

I am drawn to this memoir (which I almost never read) after watching an interview of the author on Pablo Torre Finds Out (video/podcast). He was just the most compelling and interesting writer/poet/critic I have listened to.

KIRKUS:

The acclaimed poet and cultural critic uses his lifelong relationship with basketball to muse on the ways in which we grow attached to our hometowns, even when they fail us.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America and Go Ahead in the Rain, was in awe of the talents of such local basketball players as the legendary LeBron James (“a 14-year-old, skinny and seemingly poured into an oversized basketball uniform that always suggested it was one quick move away from evicting him”) and Kenny Gregory, who went on to play college basketball for the Kansas Jayhawks. Abdurraqib’s complex love of the sport and its players mirrors the complexity of his love for his home state, where he’s spent time unhoused as well as incarcerated, and where his mother passed away when he was only a child. “It bears mentioning that I come from a place people leave,” he writes. Yet, despite witnessing the deaths of friends and watching the media deem his home a “war zone,” the author feels unable to leave. “Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be,” he writes. “When we were young, so many people I loved just wanted to live forever, where we were. And so yes, if you are scared, stay scared. Stay far enough away from where our kinfolk rest so that a city won’t get any ideas.” Structured as four quarters, delineated by time markers echoing a countdown clock, the narrative includes timeouts and intermissions that incorporate poetry. Lyrically stunning and profoundly moving, the confessional text wanders through a variety of topics without ever losing its vulnerability, insight, or focus. Abdurraqib’s use of second person is sometimes cloying, but overall, this is a formally inventive, gorgeously personal triumph.

An innovative memoir encompassing sports, mortality, belonging, and home.

The best kind of writing is the kind that challenges you, makes you feel uncomfortable, and elicits an emotional reaction that you didn't see coming.

Each and every piece in this collection exhibits the best kind of writing.

I tackled this book because it fell under the auspices of Black performers and their impact on culture and audiences. There is a justified rage permeating through the book that makes for an emotionally difficult read. Yet I was spellbound on the chapter about a female magician named Ellen Armstrong. The chapter ends with a treatise by the author that states, “You who might read this or hear this or stumble upon it and hope to find some answer or absolution within. This goes out to the sins; I cannot crawl myself out of in order to forgive the ones you might be buried under. This one goes out to all of the best stories I have never told. The ones I will hold close until I can pass them down to someone ese who pass them down. I have no real magic to promise any of you. I am praying for the most unspectacular exits.”
His impressions of Merry Clayton, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Joe Tex, and Aretha Franklin are gut wrenching discourses that will compel you to rethink these artists and how you have related to them.

Beautiful use of the page (think Kwame Alexander or Jason Reynolds, or even Sharon Creech). I would recommend this title to lovers of poetry and novel in verse, particularly those who are willing to take time to reflect, and want a short read that sticks with them for a while.

"I might undo the forest winding its way along the sides of my face so that I can more closely resemble a man worthy of waking to roses at his feet in a kill or be killed" (23)

I love how mr Abdurraqib speaks. I enjoy this book. This book is important to me because it helped me to regenerate broken inside me. The way it is written, you know, this book heals.

Remarkable. I don't think I've ever read such a poetic and informative work of nonfiction.

I received this book free in a Goodreads Giveway. As always, this did not impact my review. i can be bought, but it costs way more than a book, even a high quality hardcover.

I love Hanif Abdurraqib's work in all forms, and his are the only Spotify playlists I add to my feed without preview. His writing is taut and persuasive, personal and universal. His knowledge of music and modern American history is something beyond prodigious. He is, for me, the black Muslim Midwestern version of Jonathan Lethem's white Jewish New Yorker. As with Lethem this is not to say I agree with his every position or that I embrace his every analysis, but rather that I respect his positions and analysis, I follow and dissect them, and find they inspire in me new ways to think about very important things. They also entertain me. As he blended the historic with the personal I came to understand better his experience as a black Muslim man in America.

As with other Abdurraqib collections/articles/ podcasts/poems I have consumed before, my favorite pieces here were those that focused on music. The essay about Don Cornelius blew me away, but it was a distant second to the chapter on Merry Clayton/Gimme Shelter/the murder at Altamont. I was also intrigued by the Whitney Houston essay, though disappointed that the author chose not to look into the reasons that black audiences booed and heckled the singer. The same things happen when he writes of Dave Chapelle, and mentions in passing that the man spews hate toward those in the LGBT+ community, and laughs at them not with them -- the very thing that made him want to move away from comedy focused black culture aimed at white audiences. If Addurraqib had done a proper analysis rather than picking up his marbles and going home, the answers to his questions would not be pretty, but the truth matters. If he had been looking at the same issue with a white audience or white performer he would not have chosen to abandon ship (nor should he), and would have analyzed every utterance and act. That is my one beef with this book, that there are several times Abdurraqib's excellent analyses are cut short when they are not going in a direction in which he wants them to travel. This is not enough of an issue to cost a star, but I do think this would be a 4.5 if that were allowed.

Adurrqib left me smarter, better informed, more self-aware, and somewhat wiser. I cannot ask much more than that.

I'm at a loss for words. This was so very moving. I adore how Abdurraqib mixes social and personal commentary with his obvious love of music. I wouldn't dare be so bold as to claim I understood everything I just read. But I definitely experienced it.

5 stars plus infinity. I laughed, cried, reflected, raged, felt both massive guilt and massive pride. I have never read something so emotionally raw and truthful. I do not have the gift for words that Hanif does, so it is absolutely impossible for me to review this. All I can say is that I am grateful that this beautiful man shared his soul. I will read this book over and over.

A Fortune for Your Disaster is an overwhelmingly fantastic collection of contemporary poetry. Rich, meaningful images parade through every poem, taking readers into deeply understood emotions. The works express pain, turmoil, depravation at the hands of others. The poems elicit strong reactions in readers, growing stronger with every re-reading of the poems
Every poem tells about the experience of being marginalized by America's racist society. That racism exists not just in its most obvious forms but even more in its subtle forms, the forms we most like to ignore and pretend do not exist. It is this form of subtle racism that assigns waiters to be white and dish washers and busboys to be brown. It assigns lead roles in films to be played by one race and supporting roles by others. It allows peaceful protests to turn into riots and then be condemned instead of heard. It expresses surprise when a Black woman wins a Nobel Prize for Literature (Toni Morrison) or amasses a billion dollar personal fortune (Oprah Winfrey) while also being far more respected the a billionaire white man playing golf and sending tweets even as the country he leads descends into chaos.
Symbolism throughout each poem augments the very format of the book. Three divisions separate the poetry into sections: The Pledge, The Turn and The Prestige, terms taken from magicians symbolically stating the magical impact of poetry. The poetry works as a form of magic, casting spells on readers. It bring us to the awareness that we all share in the pain we create.
This use of symbolism also appears through the repeated poetry about Marvin Gaye, Nikola Tesla and in several poems carrying the same title used repeatedly with different content.
Abdurraquib also uses the tools of poems often unseen or unnoticed by readers: white space, positioning on a page, line breaks and other devices. Often, verses are separated by a slash rather than a line break, protecting the rhythm of the poem while highlighting its impact.
This is a rich collection from beginning to end. I found favorites, of course, as well as a few I simply did not quite understand, but I also found some I will not soon forget.
A recurring title, "How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This," carries with it the messages that pain exists in all times but that, on the other side of pain is hope and beauty. After all, we cannot admire the beauty of flowers carried to ur funerals.
"I Tend To Think Forgiveness Looks The Way It Does In The Movies," is the poem that strikes me the most and to which I have come back to that poem more than any others.
There is also some prophesy, some prescient understandings in the poetry. Our current times filled with pandemic, economic collapse, corrupt and incapable government and divisiveness between citizens rather than the unity we need is summed up, in three short phrases in the poem, "No Diggity," when it says, "party's over boys/where we going/for breakfast." Yes, the old party, the old life we have lived for so long is over. Where are we going as we start a new day in our lives?

Delirious and heartfelt poetic prose at the intersections of Black resilience, US culture, and music, skillfully narrated.

A really thought provoking book,mostly history, but much about the author's autobiographical story. The historical aspect is about Black performers and artists over the years who have had an impact on the suthor. Entertainers include people like Dave Chappelle, Joe Tex and Sun Ra ( a mucician who claimed aliens abducted him and took him to the planet Saturn) There is much to learn in this book (which I did) like the story of an extremely talented background singer for the Rolling Stones song Gimmie Shelter..A wonderful bookby a mega talented author.

Goodreads tells me that I've been reading They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us since 2017.

Which is to say I've been reading and rereading and afraid to mark as "read' a book that feels like something I can't put away. I'm marking it as read, but I think I'll just keep reading it forever.

If you haven't read it yet, I hope you do. I hope you don't figure out how to stop reading it for years.

Summary: A celebration of Black performance and its significance for Blacks in America.

Just over a year ago, I read a couple of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essays in an anthology of Columbus writers. Little did I realize how much I would encounter this Columbus writer’s name in the next year, culminating in his recent award of a MacArthur Fellowship (a five year, $625,000 grant) and this week’s award of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction by the American Library Association for A Little Devil in America. He was born and grew up in the same city we moved to thirty-one years ago. If nothing else, it’s exciting to see an Ohio author from Columbus do so well!

This is an extraordinary book. It’s major subject is a survey of black performance in many genres from dance to magic to music. The title is drawn from a statement by Josephine Baker, who by 1963 had danced across the stages of the world. Speaking at the March on Washington, she proclaimed, “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too. The statement speaks of the passionate, celebratory, and resistant character of Black performance.

Abdurraqib takes us through this history with chapters reflected well-researched descriptions of performers from the dance marathons of the ’20’s and the 30’s through to Don Cornelius’s Soul Train and how in Black neighborhoods across the land, young men and women danced, desired and sometimes found and sometimes lost love. In later chapters, he projects that forward to the clubs and masses of bodies moving together to the music.

Then there is Aretha. He looks back from her funeral to the film Amazing Grace and the short distance “between soul music and music of the soul.” One of the most riveting stories is that of Merry Clayton, who recorded the background vocals on the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter, even while very pregnant. The intensity in which she sings the words “Rape. Murder. It’s just a shot away” is something I never heard before reading Abdurraqib. I had to go back and listen to music I knew from my teens. I had never paid attention to what an extraordinary singer she was. Abdurraqib chronicles her efforts to move from the background to a solo career that never took off. But he also draws us into that moment, the third time she repeats the word “murder” in a “voice cracking howl”–no longer just fear, but anger, and even glee.

He takes us through the rivalry between Joe Tex and James Brown, the inability of Whitney Houston to dance and how Beyonce, a supporting act to Coldplay steals the show and owns the Super Bowl and makes a powerful Black power statement remembering the Black Panthers. Then there is the incomparable Michael Jackson, and Abdurraqib’s own miserable attempt to “moonwalk.”

He moves between the famous and the marginalized. We learn of Ellen Armstrong, a black female magician, and William Henry Lane, who out-danced the white performer John Diamond. Lane, under the stage name, Master Juba, wore blackface, perhaps a subtle or not so subtle criticism. He reflects on the actor Don Shirley, and the movie he wishes could be made where no Black suffers, where they simply live. He remembers fellow Columbus native Buster Douglas’s stunning defeat of Mike Tyson twenty-eight days after his mother’s death–and how he could see the change in the eyes of a man who no longer feared.

Abdurraqib dedicates the book to Josephine Baker and the book’s central chapter focuses on her extraordinary dancing career–the vaudeville performer who flees to France, first entertaining Black servicemen in World War I and then making it her performing home, and using her talent and celebrity to act as a spy in World War II. Abdurraqib reflects on his own departure and return to Columbus as he traces Baker’s return to the U. S. Each section begins with “On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance,” most of which reflect Abdurraqib’s poetry slam experience, having the feel of spoken word performance.

He moves seamlessly between profiles of performers and his varied life experiences. He reveals the kind of Black performance that goes on every day, whether in a game of spades or “beef” and the thin line that often runs between love and hate, closeness and violence, and the possibility that it could all end, as it had with so many friends. The book captures the range of emotion from exuberant joy to rage, from soulful hope to the gritty resistance that runs through both Black performance and Black life in America. There is the apprehension of the sweetness of life and love, made all the more so because it can be snuffed out in a moment and that “no job can stop a bullet.”

First book finished in 2022 and it was incredible. The author has a fascinating way of weaving together history and culture, and.then tying both into his own personal life. Nearly every essay found me researching online to find a performance, or a picture, or more information about a topic. The writing was strong and poetic and tender and alive. An absolutely fantastic read.

Really wonderful.

Hanif Abdurraqib writes prose like a poet, with a sense of sound and rhythm, his language both loose and precise. The performance referred to in his subtitle encompasses not only song and dance on stage, in juke-joint basements and church, but performance as survival, as going home, as misdirection and dissimulation, a way of turning the absurdity of black experience inside out.

Abdurraqib’s essays in A Little Devil in America combine a wide-ranging consideration of popular culture with an acute historical awareness. He writes of how the Harlem Hellfighters and jazz musicians arrived in France at the same time, about the rivalry of Joe Tex and James Brown and the audience at the Apollo Theatre, about how Don Shirley abandoned a musical career for a psychology practice in Chicago then combined the two in a nightclub study of how piano music affected the behavior of at-risk juveniles.

In a chapter called “Nine Considerations of Black People in Space,” Abdurraqib writes of Octavia Butler’s science fiction speaking to people who have long survived by learning to adapt until something better comes along, and of his fascination with Sun Ra’s claim to knowledge of another world and the performance that he wrought from it.

What I loved was that none of it seemed outlandish. It didn’t seem like a particularly excruciating performance, nor did it seem like the ramblings of someone suffering from some mental detachment. It all seemed very measured, calm, matter of fact. Sun Ra was from somewhere else and he’d seen things none of us could fathom, and yet here he was, sharing what he had to give with us anyway.

The Gordon Burn Prize every year throws up a really interesting shortlist of books that are recognised as being interesting and different, perhaps in that grey area between fiction and non-fiction. This year’s winner, announced last week as part of the Durham Book Festival, is A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (Allen Lane) by Hanif Abdurraqib. It’s a series of essays about significant black figures in American history and moments that struck the author as important in shaping the USA and its part in the world. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Ellen Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Merry Clayton are some of the dozens of people whose lives resonated, and the author narrates the impact of key moments and their effect on him with poignance and dynamism, and with exactly the flow and craft that one might hope for from a prize-winning poet.

Essay collections, like their short story brethren, are often a mixed bag, and that is true here. I was enthralled by some, like the one on the art of the schoolyard fight, and the lead essay on the history of dance marathons, but I didn't connect as well with the fellowship of those who play Spades or Abdurraqib's ampersand-laden "poetry".

Far and away the piece that has stuck with me most is the one about Ben Vereen. I do not use this expression often because it rarely happens, but my mind was blown. The piece on Merry Clayton was also high impact. Though I have had heard parts of her story before, Abdurraqib managed to bring out some aspects that caught me unawares.

Invigorating and joyful in some parts and somber and weighty in others, A Little Devil in America is not always enjoyable, but for the most part the work is in insightful. Using performance as a unifying theme to address some of the things he does is an eloquent touch.

I don't always like memoirs, but when I do, I like memoirs that weave together a broad understanding of history and culture with the memoirist's personal experience of that history and culture. Abdurraqib is brilliant at this. This weaving combined with my interest in reading about how other Ohioans experience Ohio (and while there is overlap, Abdurraqib's experience is quite different from mine) made this book an excellent way to spend some time. It had me taking breaks to look up performances both familiar and new to me, enriched by the context of the author's interpretation.

This book encompassed so much more than I realized it would, which shouldn't have surprised me knowing that Abdurraqib can expand every sentence into a universe. I loved how the essays meandered around one or several topics--it's so easy to get lost in his words until you take a step back and get that "oh shit, this is it" feeling. He is one of our best writers and certainly one of my favorites.

There is so much here.

This book was everything I wanted from a music history and has really got me thinking about writing about music. I've been feeling dreamy all week thinking about this book, made a playlist for it on Google Play (Abdurraqib said he made a playlist on Spotify of songs sampled by Tribe, so you should definitely check that out), and wish now that Abdurraqib could write all history for me. This was great, too, because I think I may be a hair older than the author, but we're essentially the same age, so it was cool to get his take on things as someone who came of age in the same era. Anywho, if you love music, love reading about music, love Tribe, are only a little familiar with Tribe, have no idea who Tribe is, love history and social commentary, love memoir, love beautiful writing...this book is for you.

Abdurraqib is so dang READABLE that I really had to make myself slow down because every essay in this collection is so powerful. This is a book I wish I could give to everybody because I want to discuss it and every other possible conversation that might come out of it.

Abdurraqib’s self-possessed introspection is a balm to soothe 21st century American malaise. His anger, sorrow, and humor are never compromised despite the restraint he shows in his extremely readable prose. One might assume this self control comes from a lifetime of conditioning to keep a cool head no matter the trigger. His observations on seemingly frivolous aspects of pop culture and music present themselves as anything but, often building up to an insightful take on deeper social issues that the music reflects back on us.