Hanif Abdurraqib is the author of two poetry collections — The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016) and A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019) — and three essay collections, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017, Two Dollar Radio), Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas, 2019), and the forthcoming collection A Little Devil in America (Random House, 2021). He is from Columbus, Ohio and writes explores grief, performance, music, and being Black in America, entwining his personal experiences with a larger collective history.
In his forthcoming essay collection, A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib explores the history of Black performance, from Josephine Baker to Dave Chapelle, examining how Black performance exists in and is consumed by the world.
In an email interview, Abdurraqib and I talked about inspiration for his forthcoming collection and what writing about performance can reveal about a larger human truth.
Mialise Carney: The cover of your forthcoming essay collection, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, includes a photograph of Willa Mae Ricker and Leon James doing the Lindy Hop, shot by Gjon Mili in 1943. Why did you choose this photograph, and how did it inspire or reflect the essays in this collection?
Hanif Abdurraqib: I was very excited about the idea of showing Black people in motion, immersed in the joy and ecstasy of achievement. I love that the two are in the air, and in Ms. Ricker’s eyes, you can see the absolute thrill of achieving something with a partner that not everyone could achieve.
Lindy Hop aerials are not easy, at all. I wanted this book to reflect and meditate on many modes of Black excellence, the excellence that many would consider “mundane” and the excellence that revels in singular achievements. But for the cover, I wanted an example of the latter. In the original photo, it is just a black background, like it is on the book. It looks like Ms. Ricker and Mr. James are floating, or being pulled up by some heavenly influence. I love it so much.
MC: I read that the title of this collection comes from a speech by activist and entertainer Josephine Baker at the March on Washington. Could you talk a little about why you chose this as the title?
HA: I love Josephine Baker a great deal, and I love that speech a great deal — it is something that doesn’t always make it into the history that is told about the March on Washington. But here she was, significantly older than she was when she left the states, coming back and confronting her legacy and her life. What she’d given and what she had left.
There is something impressive to me about the naked and honest confrontation of one’s legacy. It is hard to do and almost unfair to do, in some ways. I like the full sentiment of the quote. Suggesting that no matter where she moved in the world, Josephine Baker was seen as both alluring and evil.
MC: All of your collections of poetry and essays examine, among other themes, the act, importance, and flaws of performances, from the 2000s punk bands in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us to the ghost poems of Marvin Gaye and the movie The Prestige in A Fortune for Your Disaster. Why do you write about performance, and what do you think performance reveals about a larger human truth?
HA: Oh, simply I think I just enjoy how many people can perceive the same performance in different ways, and how those ways might be directly linked to the way those people are perceived by the public when not performing anything beyond simply living. And I think the flaws are what tie all of that together. It’s important for me to not think of flaws as something insurmountable, but as something celebratory. Our flaws sometimes reveal our desires, and that is a gift.
MC: In an episode of the Tin House podcast, Between the Covers, you mention a few of the Black performers you write about in A Little Devil in America, particularly Josephine Baker, the first Black woman magician Ellen Armstrong, and Dave Chapelle. You say that the book is about, “How Black performance sits in the world and how it is consumed by the world.” Could you tell me a little bit more about this? How do you think Black performance should be consumed?
HA: Oh, I don’t have any directives for how it should be consumed, and I’d hate to issue any, especially because the definition of what Black performance is varies by Black performer, by Black watcher or listener or reader. I think that’s sort of the beauty of it.
MC: Your poems and essays are intensely lyrical and often end on gut-punching lines, particularly the, “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This,” series which always leaves me speechless. How do you arrive at this musical quality?
HA: I think I was so lucky to find my poetic voice by entering in through poetry slam. I figured out how my voice sounded, how to read my work out loud, I learned what words were my words, and what words weren’t. I kind of became invested in sound, in my responsibility to craft work that owed a great deal to instrumentation. I read all of my first drafts out loud, and record myself reading them. I play them back in edits.
Few things are more revelatory than our own voices, the excitement we might organically arrive at when approaching a word we’re especially feeling good about. I don’t love hearing my own voice all that much, but there is something about the difficult embrace of it that has made me choose language more carefully, more thoughtfully.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Mialise Carney is a writer and MFA student at California State University, Fresno. She is an editor at The Normal School, and her writing has appeared in Hobart, Atlas and Alice, and Menacing Hedge, among others.