At just 40 years old, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib has covered a hell of a lot of ground in his career. A 2021 MacArthur fellow, his work has earned him an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence (for A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance) as well as landed him on the National Book Award longlist (for Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest). He’s the subject of a mural in his hometown of Columbus, commissioned by Cbus Libraries, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the library system in central Ohio. He’s been a visiting professor at institutions including Butler University and the University of Iowa, and he holds an honorary degree in the field of human ecology from the College of the Atlantic.
That’s because, above all else, he is a cultural critic. He makes no secret of his passions and integrates the world around him into all that he does, in ways that elevate both his work and the discipline of cultural criticism.
Abdurraqib’s latest foray into the liminal space between essay and memoir is his seventh book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, out March 26 from Random House. It explores the Golden Age that basketball experienced in the 1990s, plucking at culturally accepted ideas of success and excellence.
Little Village spoke with Abdurraqib via phone ahead of his upcoming performance at the Mission Creek Festival in April.
I wanted to start out on a silly note: I know you’ve spent time in Iowa City before, and obviously your newest work is all about basketball. So I’m curious if you have thoughts or opinions about [record-breaking UI Hawkeye basketball star] Caitlin Clark, or if you follow that side of basketball at all.
Big women’s hoops fan. And I have been for a long time — the first basketball players I loved were women’s players, because Columbus had the Columbus Quest here before the WNBA began. So yeah, I’m a big fan. I had tickets to the Ohio State Iowa game that happened a few weeks ago, and at the last minute decided not to go, which was a real tragedy, because of the way that game unfolded … I watched from home. It was the best possible outcome: Caitlin was great. But Ohio State won.
I follow WNBA, as well. And the only team that’s really within driving distance is the [Indiana] Fever. And so there’s a really great opportunity on the horizon. Certainly, if she does come out here, we’ll get Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston as kind of a one-two punch, and I’ll get to go drive up and see those games. And I’m excited about that. [Clark is] a truly transcendent player, you know, thrilling to watch. Particularly because I like a player who, you kind of know what’s coming and you still can’t stop it. She finds ways to score.
You’ve done a book of essays on music, specifically, and then on Black performance. And now you’re talking in very personal terms about basketball. And I’m curious, from a cultural critic perspective, where do you see that line being crossed — where sports becomes performance in the same way that the arts are performance? … Is it the level of celebrity that an individual can hit? Is it a matter of style? What are your thoughts on that?
I think sports is performance just in the most literal sense of performance, right? It’s people performing an act for an audience. But there’s also performances within the performance of sport … The game itself is a performance, the individual performance itself as a performance, but also, the way a defender performs when locked in a one-on-one battle with an offensive player or the way that Stephen Curry, for example, runs around and screens to find a small sliver of light through which he can get open for a shot: That is a type of performance, that is a type of dance, if you will. … I consider basketball and all sports a performance just in the very literal sense, but also, like all of my obsessions with performances, I really love the internal dance within the dance.
In terms of the work that the artist or performer puts into it, and the conversations they have with themselves, or …?
Yeah, well, I mean, that kind of work. But also those kinds of small moments of a defender and an offensive player locked in a one-on-one battle, or an offensive player locked in a battle with an audience — somebody heckling, these kinds of things. These are also small versions of a larger performance.
How do you apply that to your own performance work? How do you find those intimate moments with the audience when you’re just one person on a stage with your work?
For me, at least, reading to an audience has to be a kind of communal act. So sure, I’m reading, and I’m on stage oftentimes alone with my work, but my hope is that it leads to or at least opens up to a larger conversation, which is why I enjoy a Q&A session. … I’m not very interested in one-sided performance, and that extends to my own reading. Yeah, when I’m on stage reading, I tend to feel very isolated — I think I’m required to, because I need to shut out what’s in front of me in order to perform well. But I’m not naïve to the fact that people are witnessing me, and through the act of witnessing, I think generous participation can arise. And I think it is up to me to bridge the gap from that hierarchy that a stage can create, to make it so that everyone in the room feels like they are participating in the act, even if they’re not reading work on stage.
Around 2012, I started doing poetry slam locally, mostly because I never wrote poems before, and this was giving me an incentive to write poems … I got very used to knowing what my voice sounded like, [and] knowing what my voice sounded like reading my work, which is kind of a superpower, I think. All these kinds of things that make a reading experience feel really robust, as opposed to something that people are kind of suffering through. Because it’s not easy to read one’s work well, and … for me, it is a requirement that I know how to read my work well, because I know what it’s like to sit through a reading that’s not exactly pleasurable.
When you get going on a piece, how do you know whether it’ll be an essay or a poem?
It usually clarifies itself for me about 500 words, 600 words in. It’s a question of, am I hitting a wall? Am I running into repetitions that might be better served by brevity? Or am I pulling out threads that deserve more room? And sometimes that answer is one thing and then it becomes another thing. This is why editing for me is a fluid process. Editing isn’t necessarily something that, you know, begins with a definitive goal and ends with the end result of that goal. Sometimes I go into editing an essay, and I come out of it with a poem. It’s just the way it goes. So I think editing has to be a fluid and curious process, just like the draft phase has to be a fluid and curious process. Because I really do love the idea of thinking I’m going one direction and being pushed in another.
When it comes to the two genres that you focus on, how does your approach differ, in both writing and in preparing for performance, between poetry and essay?
Oh, it doesn’t. I tend to take the same approach, within the writing especially, which is understanding that I am writing words that I intend to read out loud. And so I’m writing with an ear — not just an eye, but an ear — towards beautiful language that can maneuver in a lot of ways on stage coming out of my mouth. This is where slam poetry and really knowing what my own voice sounded like and all that was really important to me. I can pursue language with the understanding that it’s going to be read out loud and know exactly how it’s gonna sound. That approach, I think, serves me well, and that means that when I’m sitting down and writing, I’m really just in pursuit of that language and not in pursuit of any genre.
Is there anything that you would like to say ahead of the festival to our readers?
I’m just overjoyed to be back. It’s been since 2019, and I’m just overjoyed to be at Mission Creek again, in this capacity. You know, Iowa City means a lot to me — that’s a place that I spent some time as a young person going to punk shows, and I have been to Mission Creek both as a fan and a performer. And so really, truly to get to come back in this capacity is a dream come true. And I’m overjoyed.
What are you looking forward to most at the festival?
It’d be cool if I met Neko Case. So that’s the main thing.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2024 issue.
