Hanif Abdurraqib is a multi-genre author whose recent books include his acclaimed essay collection They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, his New York Times bestselling biography of A Tribe Called Quest, Go Ahead in the Rain, and his second poetry collection, A Fortune For Your Disaster. As the NWP’s Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor, he joined the NWP community in Spring 2020, teaching two courses. Writer and NWP student Andrew Cardenas, NWP 2022, talked with him about the experience—and the many facets of Hanif’s own writing—this summer.
AC: You came to writing essays without any “formal” education in creative nonfiction workshops. Can you talk a little about what that self-education looked like, and how you think it impacted your writing?
HA: So, I think it allowed for a lot of exploration that was paced well and also limitless. With poetry, for example, I had no idea what I was doing. I came from an era different than the one now, where teachers are generously teaching a lot of contemporary poets. I’d only ever known old/white/dead poets. But then, when I dug into poetry in 2011, a whole new world was opened up to me. There was an excitement in not only the discovery of poems I loved, but tracing the lineage of these writers back to poets they loved, and the poets who inspired the poets they loved. That type of freeing engagement didn’t feel, to me, like it could have existed in the classrooms as I came to understand them. They often felt stifling to me, or like places I couldn’t bring my best, most curious self to. Which, undoubtedly, was some of my fault. But in my own bedroom, as an adult, I felt like that exploration had a lot of rewards at the end of it. I carry that with me now. I don’t really write assuming that I have answers for much of anything. Writing takes on this really thrilling mode of constant searching, constant surprise.
AC: During your time in the NWP, what did you see as most valuable about the workshop experience? What would you encourage writers to figure out on their own?
HA: I mostly just love a space where I can read people’s work that isn’t my own, and where I can get comfortable
with a variety of voices at once. You know, the saddest thing for me was that I didn’t feel like I got to celebrate all of the evolutions people’s voices could take. There’s something kind of sad about dipping in and out of a place, you know? The small exciting things bursting out of everyone’s work feels like a distant memory now, in this hellish year. But my excitement was always in wanting to watch it grow, and I’m sad I had to depart before getting to watch it grow further. I also, generally, think that getting people to a place where they can comfortably and confidently talk about their work with their peers is always exciting to see. That’s why I’m not really with the shit where people don’t talk while being workshopped. It always felt so counterintuitive to me, as someone who never came of age as a writer with that workshop model. I want people to be in the mix, talking about what they made. I want there to be shared, generous discourse. I can’t really tell people what to figure out on their own because I haven’t figured out shit. But I will say, it has always helped me to know when to stop writing. It’s always helped me to know that I should feel good about myself even on the days I don’t write, or don’t feel like it.
AC: Was there any particular discussion, in either workshop or your reading seminar, that you found especially enlightening or generative?
HA: Well, the reading seminar was really thrilling for me. Because we got through books that were extremely different, and books that I had different investments in. One, the Lester Bangs book, was a book I’d once loved and then became frustrated with. Nothing ages well, really. But I wanted to bring it into the room to share in that wrestling–how can any of us still take something from this book despite its obvious problems (its transphobia, its attempts at goodness that stumble towards something significantly less than good, etc.) and I really loved how that book was held by the folks in the room, particularly pieces like “The White Noise Supremacists.” And then there was Dictee, a book I love, but a book that is a challenge, surely. And as someone who is positioned firmly outside of academia, I can’t say how much I appreciated the conversation that was had in week one with that book, talking about the discomforts of spaces where books like that one are lauded. The reading seminar was so wonderful for me. I don’t really know shit, as we’ve established. And so it was good to be pushed on some things.
AC: With regard to personal essays, you’ve said that you would rather read someone who looks at the world in an interesting way rather than someone who looks at themself in an interesting way. Could you elaborate a bit on how you make that distinction?
HA: Well, I think I mean that in the sense that I’m interested in someone who believes the world as a curious, challenging, sometimes beautiful place, whether or not they or their narratives are in it. When I write with that in mind, it allows me to be a better critic, and it allows me to be someone more invested in celebration. I don’t feel like I have to carry or justify the weight of my own story, even when it does, eventually, make it in. I’m working on a long thing right now about basketball, and am specifically writing about old Black basketball movies. And I love Above The Rim. I love it so much that I can detach it from the story of my first seeing it, through the cracks in a couch positioned in a living room I wasn’t supposed to be in. Sure, there’s a story there. But there’s also a story in the magic of the film and what came after it, and that story is arguably more interesting than my illicit first viewing. And so, what I’m mostly talking about, as often, is decision making. When to remove oneself and marvel at a world without them in it.
AC: The crises of the current moment are, of course, many and various, and in times of crisis there’s pressure on writers—especially writers of nonfiction—to provide “answers.” How, in your view, can writers best resist that pressure while still producing politically engaged work?
HA: I’d say the pressure is mostly on Black writers of everything and anything to provide answers. You know, there were all of these white and non-Black folks who kind of latched on to any black writer/thinker when the
uprising began, and I found myself thinking a lot about how my justice work in the city I love alongside people I love is so often detached from my work as a writer. And that’s not saying that abolitionist politics don’t come alive at times in my poetry/essays/etc. But it’s saying that I am so used to showing up for folks not as a writer, but as an organizer first. And so when I’m on the page, I’m not exactly changing my tone or mission for the moment. I had to tell folks like “alright now, you’re tracking with me because you’re looking for answers, but listen I am still gonna be writing about 90s pop music so what then?”—and all that is to say that I think Black writers deserve to be as politically engaged in their work on the page as they do or don’t want to be. I think, even more, that for those who don’t want to be, they should be in the focus of editors even when those editors aren’t looking for answers about this country’s Problems With Race.
AC: Among essayists writing today, whose work do you find most exciting?
HA: Well, y’all are lucky to have Melissa Febos, I’ll say that. Natalie Lima is a great essayist who I think does some really formally interesting work. Emily Lordi is someone I turn to when I want to think about music differently. Of course, Saidiya Hartman has taught me a lot about how to both honor research and honor the imagination. Beyond that, I’m looking forward to seeing more work from everyone I had the honor of learning from at the NWP this past year.
– Interview by Andrew Cardenas, NWP 2022