4.5/5

I did not anticipate to love this book as much as I did (even though Hanif Abdurraqib is one of my favorite authors and can do no wrong) mainly because I thought this book would just be about dancing. Man was I wrong. I waited too long to do this review because I forgot any coherent thoughts other than I loved this book and cannot get enough of Abdurraqib's writing.


-A people cannot only see themselves suffering, lest they believe themselves only worthy of pain, or only celebrated when that pain is overcome.
-I consider… the difference between showing off and showing out. How showing off is something you do for the world at large and showing out is something you do strictly for your people. The people who might not need to be reminded how good you are but will take the reminder when they can.
-The stakes for me were sometimes depression, sometimes loneliness, sometimes a morning I didn’t think I could make it to. I am in love with the idea of partnering as a means of survival, or a brief thrill, or a chance to conquer a moment.
-Death simply opening its mouth to a wide yawn and drinking in a life that certainly had more to give. (discussing Michael Jackson’s death)
-“Well, we have two mothers. The one we keep with us in our hearts, and the corpse we can’t put down. There is the putting down of the metaphorical corpse, and then there is the carrying of the physical, but the hesitation to part with both comes from a similar place… I mourn both the actual body and the potential for the whole person it held. How much better my time in the world could have been spent with all of the once-living people I’ve loved, still here. The drawn-out funeral, or the pictures on the wall, or the remembrances yelled into a night sky are all a part of that carrying. It is all fighting for the same message: holding on to the memory of someone with two hands and saying, I refuse to let you sink.
-…our grief decides when it is done with us.
-It is funny how the interactions become transactional between those we decide are our people and those we decide are not
-[on magic tricks] Until people don’t think of the physics of it all. Until the people who have been aching for a vision see only that vision and nothing else. You know that trick. I’m sure you’ve seen it a hundred times.
-There is a reason the idea of white people bringing up a Black friend when faced with accountability for some small or large racism doesn’t resonate. It’s because the Black friend exists only to give permission, and then absolution. Not that this would offer absolution, but it is never about the framing of a relationship’s interior, or gratitude of having loved and being loved by, paired with grief for whatever trust has been portrayed. It is just the naming of someone who has breezed through a life in some past or current moment. Chappelle was unique because even through what appeared to be a deep love for his people, he still fulfilled this particular fantasy of permission granting.
-I wondered how many of them were the type of people who asked their Black friends questions about the minutiae of everyday Blackness–what is good to say or not say, to listen to or not listen to. Questions, I imagine, that rarely get volleyed back in return, as to know whiteness is an infinite task.
-In doing what he imagines as flying in the face of critics, Chappelle is once again confirming those who wish to be confirmed. Showing people that someone can say whatever they want, however they want, privileges and all be damned. There are many ways to vanish, and there are many ways to reappear somewhere else.
-Magic relies on what a viewer is willing to see, and what a viewer is willing to see relies on what the world has afforded them to be witness to.
-When the summer of my worst depression set in, I wished to drown myself in the shouts and jokes and card games of whatever jubilant corners I could find to keep myself alive just a bit longer…I know of that desire to be solved and absolved. I know that in the moment, it might not feel as if you’ve fashioned a tool out of someone breathing and living a whole life outside your reckless agony.
-If there is some kind of loophole in the rules of magic, it might be this: the one where a person is able to be invisible until they are desired. Where they are an echo of nonexistence until they can fulfill a need, or tell a story, or be a thread in the fabric of someone else’s grand design. The flawed magic of desiring a body more than an actual person. The magical negro is so replaceable that there is nothing left of them to mourn.
-Due in part to America’s comforts with slavery and violence… there is a universal distrust in anything other than individualism as a pathway to survival in the country. The path to success for the American, he observed, meant to carry a healthy desire to set oneself apart from the ideals of others.
-It is almost impossible for anyone with any semblance of rhythm to make a mistake if they just move in the direction the room is already carrying them in, and I suppose that is something like love, or something like trust.
-…consumption and love are not equal parts of the same machine. To consume is not to love, and ideally love is not rooted solely in consumption.
-Everyone putting on different masks for different worlds and calling it freedom.
-I will come to you in this hour, when sleep paces the room like an eager dog, daring someone to make the first move.
-The way Black people danced in the basements of juke joints because those were the only places that were safe. Consider what it is to want to escape something on fire to summon a different kind of fire.
-There are Black artists who are not just packaged and marketed to white people, but–and more importantly–to the white imagination, and the limits of Black people within it… COnsumers know when they aren’t a part of the intended conversation, and they opt in or out, depending on that knowledge.
-I first learned to code-switch through the musical movements of my people, and done among my people in this way, it didn’t feel like a shameful burden. It felt like a generosity–a celebration of the many modes we could all fit into.
-We are all outside the borders of someone else’s idea of what Blackness is…if Blackness and the varied performance of it are to be embraced, then what also has to be embraced is the flawed fluidity of it.
-Miss Zora… says I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background, which is true sometimes on the train and true sometimes at the birthday party…
-To die in one’s sleep must be to unfold a dream that never stops unfolding & then it is hard to say where sleep ends & death begins & how close to the edge each night drags the unassuming lives it holds in a trembling palm
-Inheritance is the gift of someone to spread the news of a morning you didn’t wake up for
-Afrofuturism exists as a genre because the white American imagination rarely thought to insert Black people into futuristic settings, even when the settings are rooted in the past, like Star Wars
-Maybe Billy Dee Williams was pointing us to the future all along. A future where being Black is so cool, everyone who isn’t wants to try it on for a night. Just never for a lifetime.
I had a sneaking suspicion that Chewbacca might have been Black… so many of the Black people I knew would shout about all of their woes but no one would seem to understand what they were saying.
-The fundamental flaw, of course, is in this: proving to the public that someone did not deserve to die, or did not deserve the violence that chased them down.
-A foolish thing is when writers, or curious people who hold information, insist loudly that they wish more people would be talking about a topic and then continue to withhold vehicles for the starting of that conversation..
-To look a familiar place in the eye in detail, all of its old and unattractive blemishes–that, too, is a type of love for a place. A love not wedded to permanence or wrapped up in the memory of times past, as so much of my love is foolishly wrapped up in. To return to the site of the world coming into focus for you and offering newer, better eyes.
-…the seemingly endless hands of summer are trimming autumn’s once-long hair.
-To attach identity to love for a place you didn’t ask to be in, and a place that was not ever and will never be “yours,” is a fool’s errand, but it is one I have taken to. Because oh, how I adore knowing the corners of a place.
-…as there are many ways to be of a place, there are many ways to slowly be erased from it. One way or another, detached from the ground you first danced on.
-I have been thinking about what it is for a person to shift in worth depending on who might be doing the looking and in what city they are doing the looking
-I am maybe not the best spades player in the world because I am the youngest of 4, which means that -I cannot conceal the excitement that comes with having some small bit of power over an outcome. I cannot conceal the joy of anticipation that comes with wanting to open my palms, draw someone close, and show them something I believe to be miraculous.
-I suppose I can live with a less than stellar win-loss record if it means that I don’t overturn the tables every time a partner of mine has made an error that might suggest they have no idea what they’re doing but wanted to be close to where the laughter and the table slapping and the swift talk was coming from.
-These movies [often period pieces that sanitize race relations] don’t really work to deconstruct the design of racial superiority, or how a country arrived at the point it arrived at. They’re films that start a few inches away from a perceived finish line and then spend two hours slowly crawling across it before throwing up hands while the waves of applause rain down from the sky… Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies–in part–on people being willing to give up power.
-History, both the arm holding down the drowning body and the voice claiming the water is holy.
-My favorite thing about Don Shirley is not that he was a genius who led a sometimes spectacular life. -It is that in the moments in between, he likely led a life that was very normal. And that is spectacular too.
-I would like roses to come out of the ground somewhere any time a person’s voice cracks under the weight of what it has been asked to carry. I would like to do this while the living are still the living.
-I knew if someone locked eyes with mine–unblinking and unmoving–then there wouldn’t be much of an actual physical fight to be had. Just the performance of perceived dominance. I wish more people talked about the moments that build up to a potential brawl as intimacy. The way it begs of closeness and anticipation and yes, the eye contact, tracing the interior of a person you may hate but still try to know, even if the knowing is simply a way to keep yourself safe.
-It’s easier to circle someone in an endless waltz of volume and eye contact than it is to tell them that they’ve made you very plainly sad. And so, there is beef, the concoction of which at least promises a new type of relationship to fill the absence.
-…power–particularly for men–means having access to bodies that are not yours as collateral. Countless options for remaining unscathed.
-It was the simplicity of Tyson’s entry that haunts. I do not fear harm as much as I fear the man who takes pleasure in doing it.
-None of them considered that the gang operates in multiple ways. One of the ways, for that neighborhood, was to keep unwanted hands off the land. To keep the buildings standing for as long as they could. Even if it meant wearing the face of the dead on a shirt.
-Those who don’t understand death may not understand how it flushes the system of any fear that might exist. Even before I’d buried anyone, I knew.
-It is always in descent when I come to grips with being mortal. On airplanes… A therapist once told me that it isn’t heights I fear, but the idea of falling from a high place…I am most anxious about the living world I know best when I am miles above it but coming close to the horrors of returning.
-The horrors of returning to the world make for desirable escapes, but also a shrinking window to enjoy those escapes in. If I turn away too long, I might forget what it is to mourn. The newest thing that cloaks me in fear is the idea that I’ve become too numb to a world that increasingly demands furious engagement.
-On the internet, someone mentions all of the things our collective grief can turn into: rage, hope, something useful against the exhausting scroll of violence. Friends, I come to you very plainly afraid that I am losing faith in the idea that grief can become anything but grief. The way old neighborhoods are torn to the ground and new ones sprout from that same ground, it feels, most days, like my grief is simply being rebuilt and restructured along my one interior landscape. There is not enough distance between tragedies for my sadness to mature into anything else but another new monument obscuring the last new monument.
-I have drawn the tattoo a thousand times, boys. I haven’t yet found the skin worthy of your names.
-And so I don’t know if I believe in rage as something always acting in opposition to tenderness. I believe, more often, in the two as braided together. Two elements of trying to survive in a world once you have an understanding of that world’s capacity for violence.
-When someone loves loudly, with everything they have in them, the withholding of that loud love, even briefly, feels impossible to endure.
-When you find yourself chasing the tail of representation at all costs, you’d be surprised what speeds past you while you aren’t even looking. And you’ll be surprised by what you’ll accept for yourself when you get the narrowest idea of representation fulfilled.
-I’m also talking about divesting from giving a scene my energy and, specifically, my rage. The withholding of rage is a powerful tool–one that I have found more useful than the withholding of love. It is rage that propels me most vigorously to the work of serving my people, and so I don’t feel it useful to waste it in front of or in service of people I do not have an investment in.
-There is no other mode of expression for understanding all of the things that have held people back from understanding freedom, and there is no other volume at which one can say to their people, I want all of us to be free, and I cannot do it alone.
-I have wanted to die enough times in my life to understand the idea that wanting to die is not a foolish thing.
-I can’t live as I once did, telling people that I was doing fine and desperately wanting them to wade through the language and see that I was in pain.
-I am thankful for what it is to grow up with a life fastened to another life, even as you both age upward and outward from whatever paths you began on. I am thankful for how the fastening of those lives creates a type of understanding of the unspoken, and I am thankful for how the fastening of those lives creates a type of urgency around that understanding.
-Rather, in silence, to help me understand that things were not fine, but this was him, dragging me back from the brink. Holding me until the ledge became solid ground again.
-I have grown weary of talking about life as if it is deserved, or earned, or gifted, or wasted. I’m going to be honest about my scorecard and just say that the math on me being here and the people who have kept me here doesn’t add up when weighed against the person I’ve been and the person I can still be sometimes. But isn't that the entire point of gratitude? To have a relentless understanding of all the ways you could have vanished, but haven’t? The possibilities for my exits have been endless, and so the gratitude for my staying must be equally endless. I am sorry that this one is not about movement, or history, or dance. But instead about stillness. About all of the frozen moments that I have been pulled back from, in service of attempting another day.