Celebrated poet, MacArthur genius – but Hanif Abdurraqib is just glad to have survived past 25
Hanif Abdurraqib contains multitudes. Poet, essayist, cultural critic, curator, dog parent; for all his roles and mounting accolades, he is charmed above all to be alive.
In his most recent book, There’s Always This Year, Abdurraqib reckons with the realization that he has lived beyond the timeline he had once imagined for himself. His upbringing was cut through with heartbreak - his mother died when he was 13, and he lost friends to suicide and drug overdoses. In the years before he “made it”, he spent time in jail and unhoused.
Abdurraqib, a 2021 MacArthur fellow, admits to having a sometimes ambivalent relationship with his success. “I have to be future facing, which is challenging for me,” he said over Zoom. “It’s hard to go from I didn’t think I would survive past 25 to ‘how do I build a life for myself into a fifth or sixth decade, if I’m lucky enough to have it’.”
There’s Always This Year is nominally about basketball. It’s about LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, and people who never catapulted to the stars, despite their promise. But it is also about surviving, and transformation, and the documentation of beauty. It is a love song to Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib’s home town – an ode to the virtues of staying in place, and a meditation on gravity, grief and loss.
Abdurraqib, 40, is on tour – navigating weeks on the road, with sold-out venues and added dates. This means having to inhabit, however briefly, a more public role than he is accustomed to (although he travels continually for talks and interviews, and his face now graces a mural on East Main Street in Columbus).
In preparation, he is doing extra therapy sessions. “I’m trying to stay grounded in who I know and understand myself to be,” he said, “because otherwise I will become a funhouse mirror version of myself.”
He laughed when I said that the book was rather like the one that preceded it, in that it is about everything. But he can pull it all off, depositing, as he says, more into the “ever-widening satchel that helps me inform my obsessions”.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
We’re now in Ramadan. How are you observing that while also launching into the tumult and thrill of going on tour to promote a new book?
Hanif Abdurraqib: It feels very refreshing to have the realities of that acknowledged. Thank you. One thing that defines my life is that I’m really disciplined. I’m very beholden to my disciplines.
Ramadan heightens that because I don’t really disrupt any of my practices. For example, I’m a runner, and so I get up at 4am to start my runs, so I can run, hydrate and then eat.
The thing that excites me is affixing myself to these disciplines, even if they don’t have a reward. The reward is that I show up to something repetitively and that showing up is a reminder that I have endured, that I’ve survived enough to have the will and excitement to show up for something else. Sometimes that discipline is how I simply survive from sunrise to sunset.
Ramadan aligns with that for me. It has always been less about the consumption of food or drink and lack thereof, and more about mental discipline, rigor and focus on a kind of care and selflessness that I hope floods into my everyday living.
Have you always been this disciplined?
No, not at all. Most people who know me would say that for much of my life I’ve been rigorously undisciplined. I’m very lazy. I’m just more disciplined than I am lazy. It used to be the inverse.
But a big part of this book, quite frankly, is about living beyond a time period where I thought I would be alive. I’m always taking stock of how I feel about being alive in the world. That is an everyday, all-day examination. And part of that revolves around these small disciplines that propel me ... because each one is like a little life unto itself.
My running life is a life unto itself. My writing life is a life unto itself. My life of dog parenting is a life unto itself. They’re not siloed, they’re all interconnected. But the disciplines that bring me to them are like little lives unto themselves. And so I feel like I’m not just surviving beyond one version of my past self, I’m surviving in multiple ways. I’ve outlived myself not just once, but several times. And by surviving, I’ve gifted myself many new lives at once to pursue.
What was the first practice that you affixed yourself to?
I was an athlete growing up and by default there are disciplines involved in being on a team of other people who are relying on you.
Soccer was the first sport that aligned my brain towards the kind of creative impulses I have now. I love soccer because of how you operate in your third of the pitch. I like thinking about the defensive third of the soccer field as my corner of the world that I could master, that I could be an expert in.
That shows up in my everyday life today, because what I’m invested in is becoming an expert in my own interior curiosities and figuring out how to articulate those curiosities effectively.
In the opening of the book, you present this great image of a cartoon version of heaven, with your beloveds smiling down on you. How does this relate to your spiritual identity?
Despite my rigorous approach to Ramadan, I am not a very spiritual person. I’m not a very committed religious person. But I am someone who is committed most vigorously to a belief in the afterlife.
I feel that’s a requirement for me because I’ve lost so many people, and it would be troubling for me to imagine a world wherein I never get to see them or never have access to them ever again. It would be troubling to me to imagine that they left this world and went nowhere.
If I’m honest with myself about what I feel, it is most easy for me to say when we die, nothing happens. We die and we’re gone, and that is the end. But I’m beholden to the spiritual understanding of an afterlife, because it would perhaps guarantee that I would see the people I love again.
I do find myself less interested in an afterlife that one has to earn their way into. That feels like an intense cruelty, to say that there are people you love behind a fence and you perhaps cannot get into the fence, depending on these arbitrary natures of what goodness is or what goodness is not. I believe in the potential to see the people I love again, because I need to.
In your work, there is movement between extremes. There is the waiting miracle, but there’s also the lurking apocalypse. There’s ascension, but also relentless gravity.
I was initially invested in the immortality, or the supposed immortality, of LeBron James. That was the original seed. People were talking about how he is ageless and is going to live for ever and play for ever. And I thought, yeah, that’d be cool, but also I don’t know if anyone should want to live for ever or have the ambitions of living for ever.
I was pondering this idea of immortality and how just unappealing immortality feels to me, and how it would be a betrayal of what Mary Oliver calls “one wild and precious life”, because it would lead, at least to me, to having a desire to take so much for granted.
But then I started to think most importantly about what it is to have a place that you consider yours and to not want to leave it. You know, I love Columbus, Ohio, a lot. I don’t have any ambitions of leaving it. And so I really wanted to have a body of work that was also considering what it is to say I am here, and I’m really thrilled to be here, and I can’t and don’t want to imagine a world outside of here.
It warrants being said that there are some tensions surrounding the here that you are talking about. You write, for example, about visiting the patch of sidewalk where Henry Green was shot and killed by plainclothes officers in 2016 and of the East Side of Columbus being referred to as a “war zone”.
When you name the conditions of war, when you create the conditions of war, you get to name where it happens and you get to name how it happens. And the impacts of that are far-reaching, in that there are people who are at the mercy of being labeled in this way, of their survival seeming like it is only a miracle because they are surviving the brutalities of a war zone. In a lot of cases in the United States, a lot of these are infrastructural issues that are due to neighborhood neglect.
No one in the neighborhood that I grew up in thought of it as this unbearable war zone. It was our neighborhood and we built a loving place.
I think maybe that’s the real sin: people who don’t live where you live and who don’t understand where you live attempting to name places as evil or dangerous, when you know better and when you know there are multitudes beneath that.
At one point in the book, you write about Daniel Gibson [who played for the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team] and how punishing it can be to try to live up to expectations. And you put forth this idea that the crime of failing the imagination of others is the crime from which all others are born. What do you mean by that?
When people project upon you what they need, and it’s not who you are, that opens up a doorway to all kinds of feelings of betrayal.
There’s the imagined person, and then there’s the actual person. And I think sometimes even in love, even in our desire to love someone in a very big way, we are perhaps rushing to love the imagined person. Sometimes in my rush to love someone, I can see myself rushing past the actual person and trying to love the imagined person because the imagined person is a little bit easier for me to love. It is a person who I’ve made. It’s detrimental to you, the lover of the person, and it’s detrimental to the person who is wondering why they cannot be loved well.
How do you cleave away those imaginings so that you actually see the person before you?
One of my heroes is the late great Greg Tate [a writer, musician and critic for the Village Voice]. He was always more interested in you than you could have ever been in him. And that is something that I think is a requirement to live by.
What I’m always reaching for is: I want to know your interior world. I understand all of us, to some degree, perform different versions of ourselves for the many exterior worlds we inhabit.
Once we get comfortable with our exterior worlds and how we maneuver them, I’m like: what else is there? What else is in the interior world that will help me actually understand you? And not just understand the way you present to the world, but actually understand the shape and form of your living and how I can make it easier. How can I offer grace to both you and myself?
That is, I think, a requirement to function in the world, that I find increasingly brutal, that I find increasingly isolationist, and that I find increasingly challenging to actively, eagerly get to know people.
Expressing interest, expressing genuine curiosity in other people is what sustains me. And it also just gives me a blueprint for how to love people well. I want to keep people around. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. And so, it feels possible to build at least a world that is my world that people don’t want to exit so quickly.
You keep mentioning loss, and it’s a major thread running through the book. How do you keep grief from swamping you?
I think grief is also an occasion for gratitude. Grief is a feeling that is simply knocking at the door of memory repeatedly. Grief knocks and then if you are fortunate, if your memories are intact and alive enough, the door opens and then you get to revel in what is revealed through that door’s opening.
Grief arrives to me in many pieces. And yes, sometimes it is me grieving the fact that some days I can’t remember the sound of my mother’s voice. That is an occasion for grief that is large, right? But I can remember my mother’s laugh, and I feel like that is going to
echo in my brain for ever.
For a lot of people grief is only weight. The weight of grief is immeasurable and impossible. But I wonder, too, if there’s an opportunity to consider the way grief operates within us as something that is occasion for us to say, “How wonderful that I have loved and through my loving there is this visceral feeling that exists.”