Hanif Abdurraqib

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.… (mere)

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.
… (mere)