Sunday Morning! “A Little Devil in America” by Hanif Abdurraqib

In a thoughtful and heartfelt recent post, Dennis Sanders wrote:

If Black Pride was the name of the game when I was a kid, it is not any longer. Pride has given way to victimhood and resentment. I’m not sure that people think Black Is Beautiful.

In my youth, African Americans were defined really by a sense of perseverance. No matter what was thrown at us, we worked to thrive. Of course, not everyone was able to overcome barriers placed in their way, but there was this spirit to try. Over the last two decades or so, African Americans have become defined by slavery and discrimination. For African Americans, these two evils are part of our experience. They were part of who we are, but not all of who we are.

But now they are. We are defined by these experiences and we are viewed as damaged by the past. There’s a lot of talk about escaping whiteness, but the talk tells us we can’t escape it. Every accomplishment is diminished because of the white man.

I cannot speak to the Black experience, but I have felt as if I was immersed in and filled with Black genius by one of the books* I read this week, and maybe it could offer something like what Mr. Sanders is looking for.

To digress for a moment, there is something I imagine athletes must do, and I know from experience that musicians do it, when watching someone work who is truly beyond the range of normal experience: you take inspiration from their wonders, while you’re also taking notes. Not because you think you can repeat their work, mind you, but simply to wonder and delight at the choices they made. Even the great physical artists, the dancers and athletes who seem at times to be swept along by the spirit, are giving us gifts in their choices; and those choices are made as much from what they are capable of doing as what they are capable of imagining can be done.

Hanif Abdurraqib is watching the greats do their work in his new book A Little Devil in America, and it’s important to note a choice he’s made that shapes the entire trajectory of the book; as he relates in this interview, the writer chose not to center whiteness in this book “in praise of Black performance.” It’s a simple choice, but you realize as you read how infrequently this route is taken, how often stories of Black excellence in the American past are told within and about the overwhelming, smothering context of whiteness, or conversely about that one white person who redeemed himself through service to that excellence. And Abdurraqib does take time to talk about his favorite accomplishment of the pianist Don Shirley, which he specifies “is not that he once sat in the back of a car driven through the American south by someone white.” But also not that he, “endured racism and carried on with a measured calm.” Shirley was so much more than the story some people want to hear.

White audience members seemingly want art to find them not guilty. But even some of the angriest works of anti-racism seem to believe that whites and their consciousness form the central axis on which the world turns. In sense, this book is also about the things Abdurraqib is sick of hearing about, and so leaves silent. In one of my favorite passages, after remembering Whitney Houston’s many accomplishments of the 80s and how she overcame the limitations of different audiences’ imagination, he writes: “I don’t want to talk about the drugs anymore. I don’t want to immortalize the hotel room or the marriage, or all the things Whitney could be saved from.” This, too, is a choice; and it’s a reminder of just how long it’s been since we’ve talked about Whitney’s greatness.

If you put down the words in your mouth on paper, they had best be the truth. So it’s not to say that Abdurraqib elides racism or Black pain; an unavoidable framework within the architecture of America. His true subject, however, is Black miracles. He gives thanks; this book is a song of praise. He writes to the anonymous dancers he grew up watching on Soul Train, “I am haunted by your radiance.” How the Black Christian funeral is “a way to offer gratitude for the fullness of whatever years someone chose to have their lives intersect with your own.” On watching Aretha Franklin in Amazing Grace, “I surely wept though I did not know when my weeping began.” On the great singer Merry Clayton, who burned higher and hotter than Mick Jagger in “Gimme Shelter,” that he would like “to give Merry Clayton her roses now, while I can still hear her haunting my sonic memories.” His words are a way to give roses to a great many people who might not have gotten them the first time around.

One of the choices the writer makes is to start with the theme of “Black performance,” and then expand it in ways beyond what we probably expect. So, he discusses some figures we might expect to see, such as the visionary artist Sun Ra, or the legendary Josephine Baker; but then he focuses on her work as a spy for France, and what it must mean to risk your life for an adopted country that “treated you in a manner that your home country could never rise to.” Of the Black dancers “who Lindy Hopped in segregated ballrooms” while their white counterparts danced themselves for days in marathon endurance dance contests, he asks:

After all, what is endurance to a people who have already endured? What is it to someone who could, at that point, still touch the living hands of a family member who had survived being born into forced labor? Endurance, for some, was seeing what the dance floor could handle. It did not come down to the limits of the body when pushed toward an impossible feat of linear time. No. It was about having a powerful enough relationship with freedom that you understand its limitations.

He expands the theme as well in focusing on figures beyond ones like Don Cornelius or Beyoncé who we already love. Figures such as Ellen Armstrong, who literally and figuratively worked magic, first as a performer with her magician father, and then, after his death, performing her own show for Black audiences when integrated ones might have paid more, and “offering a sense of wonder to those who may otherwise have been denied it.” Or the great dancer Master Juba, who replaced a white man in blackface in P.T. Barnum’s circus; the white man then, angrily, challenged Juba to multiple dancing contests, and lost repeatedly.  Or how, when he saw the Black punk band Fuck U Pay Us, a band just getting started, Abdurraqib felt the collective catharsis of their music, how “the frustrations or micro-angers I’d pushed down to another place could live outside my body. And the feeling on the other side of that was where the healing was.”

He also expands the theme of “Black performance” to areas we might not expect, such as school dances and funerals, games of spades and beefs that may or may not lead to fights between men who are just now learning to “perform softness.” As may or may not be obvious by now, the book is also a memoir of Abdurraqib’s life and the things he’s pushed up against, from his mother’s death to shitty jobs to deep and dangerous depressions. And how the gifts of performance that other Black folks have given him, those Black miracles they have performed, have held him aloft when he might have sunk even lower.

And, as too must be obvious,  A Little Devil in America is also a miraculous work. After three books of prose and two of poetry, Abdurraqib has become my favorite living writer, and this book is his crowning accomplishment- at least, thus far; he’s in his early 30s. So, I read him to take inspiration and a few notes. This book had me spending hours on Google and Youtube, underlining passages in pretty much every page. And, yes, I surely wept as well, dear friends, although I did not know when my weeping began.

So, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, or being moved by this weekend?

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{* Note:I also read and wrote about Gina Nutt’s essay collection Night Rooms for Fangoria this week, which for the 10 year old monster kid in me, was the coolest thing imaginable.}