How to find belonging (w/ Hanif Abdurraqib)

0:02You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Today on the show, we are thinking through something that seems so simple, but is increasingly a huge challenge for many of us. How to be in community. How do you create roots in a place? How are you influenced by where you are from? How do you care for your community? And how does your community care for you? These are really big, heady questions. These are the kinds of questions that only a genius or a poet could fully answer. And good news, because today's guest is both a poet and a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient. Hanif Abdur-Aqib is a writer who proudly comes from and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

0:41And to get us started in this conversation, I want to give you a taste of Hanif's work. So let's set the tone with a clip from one of my favorite poems of all time. This is a poem from Hanif's book, A Fortune for Your Disaster. And this particular poem is called, It is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent, and this is how we do it. It is once again the summer of my discontent, and this is how we do it. It's creeping out of some open window, same way it was in the summer of 95, when my heartbreak was a different animal howling at the same clouds, and the cops broke up the block party at Franklin Park, right before the song hit the last verse, because someone from the right hood locked eyes with someone from the wrong one, And me and my boys ran into the corner store and tucked the chocolate bars into the humid caverns of our pants pockets.

1:32And later licked the melted chocolate from its sterling wrappers in the woods behind Mario's crib with the girls we liked too much to want to know if they liked us back. And there it was, the summer I learned to kiss the air and imagine it bending into a mouth. And here it is again, the summer everything I love outside is melting. and I tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival and it's because the heart and tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories and I'm kind of buzzed. I'm kind of buzzing. I'm kind of a hive with no begging and hollow cavities.

2:10There is intimacy in the moment where the eyes of two enemies meet. There is a tenderness in knowing what desire ties you to a person even if you have spent your dreaming hours cutting them a casket from the tree in their mother's front yard. It is a blessing to know someone wants a funeral for you. A coming together of your people from their faraway corners to tell some story about your thefts and triumphs. All of your better selves shaking their heads over a table, chocolate staining their teeth. I suppose there is also intimacy in the moment when a lover becomes an enemy. though it is tougher to say when it happens.

3:16the people around him and the history that he has in that city have had on his work and his life in so many different ways. And we're going to talk about that and so much more in just a moment after this break.

3:46Today, we are talking about how to cultivate and how to live intentionally in the community around you with Hanif Abdurraqib. In Hanif's poetry, in his nonfiction essays, in his writing and his speaking, the love of his hometown and his friends and the people who live around him, that comes up again and again and again. We are recording this in Hanif's hometown, Columbus, Ohio, at his favorite record shop, Spoonfall Records. Hi, I'm Hanif Abdurraqib. I'm an author and a cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. So a big reason why we're here with you in Columbus to interview you is because I've been thinking a lot about the idea of like when the world is really overwhelming and there's so much going on, how one of the ways that we can ground ourselves is like to be in a specific place, to be in a community and with people we care about, taking care of them and having them take care of us.

4:35So with that in mind, why do you love Columbus so much? You know, we're filming this and recording this in June. It's like a massive heat wave that has gripped the city. And last night, my neighborhood lost power. Like, my street lost power. And a funny thing happens when you lose power, at least for me, where I had, like, 10 solid minutes of being like, maybe this is just affecting me. Maybe I am just an unlucky individual who has lost power and everyone around me is thriving. But I, like, gradually, like, peeked out my window and saw one of my neighbors gathering in the kind of, we have, like, a pocket park in a gazebo in the middle of our street.

5:09and that's just the unspoken gathering point whenever something pops off in the neighborhood. You know what I mean? Like something small, something large or someone has some extra muffins they baked. It's like, you know, come out to the gazebo, we got some muffins. And so it was wonderful in a sense to go out to this gathering point and have everyone kind of like, we all don't have power. What are the most immediate needs? And also there are kids on the street and there are elders on the street. How can we take care of people in this window of time that could be two hours, It could be two days.

5:40This is maybe not the best answer to why do I love Columbus, but there is something that requires me to feel a responsibility for others that I perhaps would not feel if I lived in a city that felt so large that I could not touch or be touched by others if I didn't want to. I tend to think that my most joyful experiences living in Columbus are mirrored by the fact that people just talk to me in a way that is also familiar and comfortable. I was on book tour for like a year. This past year, I was on book tour for actually 13 months, right? And there's a kind of agreed upon exchange and interaction that happens when you are a person on a stage and then not on a stage, or you're a person who someone saw on like a TV show, or you're a person someone saw on a commercial, these kind of things, where the exchange is, you know you have given something to the world that someone else enjoys and there's a sense of awe or wonder or deep gratitude that is beautiful and those exchanges are wonderful but like when i'm here i could just be at whole foods getting my fruit and someone will just pop up and want to talk to me about an album you know i mean or talk to me about the nba finals and there's no kind of hierarchical point of you have made something and even if i admire that thing you made.

6:58I have to kind of defer to you in a way. And that's because I think people in this city know me well and know that my main engine for existing in a place like this is to connect with people who I consider to be my neighbors. So I grew up in New York City, which is kind of famous for like the anonymity of the city, right? Even in my building, there are plenty of people that I just had no clue who they were. You know, you could be in the elevator with a stranger and be like, are you visiting someone or do you live within a thousand feet of me? As I've moved to other places, is something that I've tried really hard to do is to like meet my neighbors.

7:31And it always feels kind of like different and unusual because that's so not the environment that I grew up in. But as I get older, it feels like really important. The story I always tell is, you know, in the winter, and I feel like folks who are from certain parts of the Midwest understand this, Columbus, you tend to get winter in these bursts. And the final burst is sometimes the hardest for me, like mentally, emotionally, because it comes in like February or March, or if you're very unlucky, April. If the snow accumulates in say March and I am in my bedroom and I'm like, I do not want to go outside and I am feeling very depressed about the circumstances of the world and the weather and all of these things.

8:13There's a neighbor who lives next to me who I don't actually speak to that much. Like we don't really, we nod, you know what I mean? We out in the street. He'll just shovel my portion of the sidewalk because I do the same for him. if I'm out with a shovel and his sidewalk's not, you know, like, because usually real talk, we're like the last two on the block to shovel our sidewalks, you know, and we don't talk about it. We don't make a thing about it. It's just that I think to shrink my universe to the point where I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I'm not the only person in it means that I feel a connection and responsibility to the other people who I am directly pressed up against.

8:47If I were to say I am just like a small speck in this grand universe, I would very easily and quickly fall into this individualism. Instead of me saying, well, I step outside of my house and I see either a person or I see the result of a person's living reflected directly to me. I look across the street and I see my neighbor's garden and what is planted in the garden reflects that neighbor's interest, their sub-interest, what is motivating their life at the moment. I also love that on my street, like people don't really, people don't really fuck with Christmas decorations all that much, but they really get freaky for Halloween.

9:28Like really weird ass, like gigantic skeletons in suits and like massive horses, not real horses, like, you know, like fake horse. And that is so endearing to me because it reminds me I live around a bunch of weirdos who, like me, have, you know, I don't really decorate for Halloween or Christmas because I was raised Muslim and, you know, holidays aren't really our thing. But it reminds me that I'm living amongst people who have real personality that I want to have access to. I want my personality to press up against theirs and make something meaningful in the process. I feel like this idea of community, right?

10:02There's like the geographic community, the people who you live close to and in the same place with. but also a lot of the things that you write about right you've written about music you've written about sports you are a poet those are all really powerful communities too can you draw a little bit of a line for us between like the community of columbus and your neighborhood and the community of art or sports or music it's all right now we're in spoonful records right and the minute i walked in my man elijah's behind the counter it's like what are you working on he's in a band and he's like you know works on his own music and all that stuff and and we don't see each other a ton but when i do i'm like what are you working on what are you listening to you know i picked up a record just because elijah was like i've been really fucking with this band and because i trust him and i trust his taste and he knows what i would be into he can look at me and say take this record in every city i would stop on tour i would go digging i would go record shopping but it's so it's kind of isolating like to record shop on your own in a city where you're not familiar with the people who are behind the counter in the shop and they are not familiar with you is an actually isolating experience because there is no one introducing anything new to your palate because they don't know your tastes well enough.

11:14I know my own tastes. Left to my own devices, I would just be delving through the crates in search of whatever would satiate and satisfy my own tastes. It requires someone, be it a friend you bring to the shop with you or a person behind the counter like Brett or Amy or Elijah here at Spoonful who can say, I remember we had this talk about Sly Stone. I got these Sly Stone B-sides you want to hear. But this idea of community, I think, is just the people who know you with a depth of curiosity and care. And so there's a way that if you offer yourself up, I think, if I offer myself up freely and eagerly to others, it informs our collective, our shared interests in each other, so that when we come across something that we think might delight the other person, we hold on to it for a while until they re-enter our lives again.

12:02And that is beautiful to me. And I think that has really mapped itself out through my life in Columbus, because, you know, there was a point where like all my friends were in bands and none of the bands were that good, but they were playing at like the basement because you could book the basement for nothing. And through that universe, it defines like a part of my artistic life. The whole reason my writing career exists in a very real way is because my pal Brett who was in a band called Emily in the Complexes back when I was like on the scene started working at two dollar radio who put out they can't kill us till they kill us and he called me and was like do you want to put out an essay collection with this publisher I just started working for that on its own that phone call unlocked the whole thing in my life that would not have existed if Brett wasn't in a band that I loved and believed in when we were young you know it's so fundamentally important for me to engage with people not because I believe that there is some future version of them that could serve me but engage with people because I think the present moment that we are in is deeply interesting and can offer me an insight into a world that I otherwise might not access.

13:09I feel like increasingly when I think about like what is the moral question of the time that we live in. I think that a lot of it boils down to like, who do you consider to be in your community? And who do you think is not part of your community? Like, who do you care for? And who do you decide is not worthy of care? That feels like the, to me, like one of the big moral challenges is to expand who you care about so that you don't draw that line too close and start not caring about so many other people. But then there's also this challenge, right? Because care takes effort, it takes time, it takes knowledge, so you can't care for everyone.

13:51Like, how do you decide who is in your circle of care and who is not? I don't know if I do any math, like, material math around it. So I was unhoused for a stretch. Like, when I was, you know, there was a stretch where I, like, had nowhere to sleep. I was, like, sleeping in a storage unit for a while and then just, like, very much on the streets, right? and on Broad Street, like I think like literally right around the corner from us, we could walk to it. There's this very large church and every morning I would walk by it just because, you know, in the moments where I had nowhere to sleep, I would just walk the streets at night and I would walk by this church in the morning.

14:32I would like circle around through the neighborhoods and end up in downtown in the morning. So I'd go spend my days at the library. And there was a person who who was like a maintenance person at the church who would notice me. And after a while, again, without a lot of language or a lot of intention, he would start unlocking the door at 6 a.m. He would start his work around 9, but he would unlock the door at 6 a.m. and let me and a couple other people come in and sleep in the pews for three hours. And that was the only sleep I would get for that stretch. And it wasn't a gesture that was taking a lot out of his life or his labor.

15:07It was saying, like, I have a key. The key opens a door. Inside, on the other side of the door is a place where you'll be safe for three hours. And that is it. And so I tend to think that, for me, I've been lucky enough in my life where I feel like I've been in community with elders and younger folks. And I've also been in, of course, like just a broad swath of people who I'm in community with. the degree of peril that people face in these wide ranges of things. For example, every year, I do like a voluntary once a month writing workshop with like 16, 17 year olds, Columbus City School kids, usually seven, eight of them.

15:47And the crises that they're facing don't always look like the crises that a 75 year old is facing. Not just because the central crisis of the elder person is time, an awareness of time. But also because to a 17-year-old, it might be deeply devastating that the musician they love took a position that they cannot tolerate. And so, or that they cannot access the tickets to the concert of the musician they love. And I demand myself to take that equally as seriously as the 75-year-old who was in the hospital bed who's like, I have a year if I'm lucky. Because it is for me a question of not how seriously do I take a concern, it's how much do I give of myself.

16:34And oftentimes, it does not feel like to give of myself in a way that serves or feeds others is that difficult or challenging. It feels instead like this very simple thing of, I have a key to something, I'm going to unlock something, and we're going to sit in a place that feels comfortable and safe for us for as long as it takes and then recharge ourselves and get back into the world that is not really deserving of our presence but we're going to do our best with it I don't know I mean I also didn't grow up with a lot like I grew up with not a lot of money and not a lot of resources and yet I think my mother and father were very just like made miracles out of their time my father like never missed anything my mother died when I was 13 and my brother and I were in all kinds of stuff and he was like we're one grade you know one grade difference my dad just went to everything he like didn't miss a sporting event didn't miss a play didn't miss a like national you know and in some ways the miracle is is to say I will surrender my time to you and to do it in a way that is to understand that through the surrendering of my time I hope to love you better and I also hope to be renewed in a way that helps me love others better because if I move through the world with a very clear understanding of the fact that my time is not only my own, then I think I make the most of it in the moments where it is my own.

17:54I think it's a beautiful answer. It's not an either or. It's how do you think about it as a whole, right? It's not like some I do care and some I don't care. It's when I care, what does it look like? It's always for me a question of like how I show up when things excite me or make me. I also, quite frankly, have done enough years of political organizing in my life where I'm just distinctly aware of the fact that everyone can't go. Like, you know what I mean? If it's like the goal is to build a better world, some of these motherfuckers aren't going to get there. You know what I mean? I tend to think, you know, one of my homies, we were talking about this large existential question of how, is it abolitionist to believe in hell?

18:36Like, is that an abolitionist politic? And I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know if one should weave their faith into their radical politics, although maybe you should. But the thing about it is, if I believe in heaven, or if I'm requiring myself to say I've lost a lot of people and they're in a place and I would like to see them again, then I certainly want to, by default, believe in hell. Because some of these motherfuckers can't be in the entire afterlife with me. That would be horrible. and I know that that goes against this idea of my core belief of like people should not be punished in these ways but then again if I live long enough and I get to spend an eternity with my mother and then it's like the worst person I've ever known on earth is also just chilling you know it feels as though there has to be this motivation of an understanding where if the mission is to build a better world a better earthly world like an actual inch by inch build a better earthly world there's some people you just can't you know i'm not gonna drag anybody across the finish line and so to lead by example and say follow me if you'd like or to not even lead but to follow the example that others have set for me and say i'm acting in a lineage of care and deep feeling that was built for me to understand in a very unique way and you can come along if you want but if you aren't like i just don't have the energy to drag you there because i would like to spend my energy moving with everyone else going in this other direction i mean like my most cartoon version of heaven is kind of like a college campus or just like a cul-de-sac where you can't pick your neighbors and so it's like oh man this guy sucks he's just in the house next to me all for the rest of time and no one ever moves you can't it's not like the earthly world you can be like all right I'm gonna sell my heaven house and move like down heaven block two or three it's like no you're you're affixed to this place you get to pick a house you can have like a 10 bedroom house and the 10 people you miss most are living in that house with you.

20:27And it's like a real world-y situation. But then you can't control the other 10 people in the house. And it's like, oh man, they're loud all the time. They're listening to the music I hate. They're throwing beer bottles in the yard. I feel like that is perhaps the worst version of heaven I can imagine. But I can't imagine that it would be all good up there. There's something going on up there. It's not all good. That's incredible. There's definitely a spin-off version that's just, and you've described heaven as in increasingly bad ways.

20:56We're going to take a short break, but then we will be right back with more from Hanif, so don't go anywhere.

21:14And we are back. Okay, I am someone who I grew up, born and raised in New York City, and I left. I moved somewhere else. you have such a deep connection to Ohio. You were raised here. You still live here. What do you think makes people, some people leave their hometowns and some people stay? And what do you lose and what do you gain? I think the relationship with one's place of origin is by definition, I think, a contentious one because you don't choose it. Place is something that happens to you. It's not something that you, at least at the point of entry into the world it's not like you're a baby in your mother's womb I would like to live in Seattle because place is something that happens to you and you don't have a choice in it I think that from the jump fosters a kind of adversarial relationship with it because there's a way that you are not an autonomous being and therefore you have to make the most out of a landscape that you did not pick.

22:21And that comes with complications and frustrations and a desire for exit. The minute you can regain some of that autonomy for yourself, I can understand a firm desire for exit. I played college soccer and I had, in playing college soccer, I grew up in a very black neighborhood, like pretty much all black people. And I grew up bordering a suburb that was very white and very wealthy. And so in a way, that was like my binary understanding of the world. When I got to college, one of my soccer teammates was from a small farm town in Ohio, a white kid from a small farm town. And one weekend, he was like, you know, come, you should come home, like come back to my house and meet, you know, hang up my family.

23:03And I was like, yeah, for sure. And I remember I went back and on a Friday and I met his family and they were all wonderful. And then I went to sleep. And that Saturday I was woken up at like 536 in the morning. and his mom was like well I mean you're here and so we have farm work that we do on Saturday mornings and this is what we do this is and so if you're here this is what you do with us and it wasn't confrontational or it was like we are showing this is actually showing you affection to say that welcome to this place with us this is how we carry ourselves with the people we love and I remember thinking like that's a whole different language that has been afforded to me by my moving through a different place.

23:46And there's a whole different vocabulary for what it is to show love to people in this place that I didn't know existed. And I tend to think like for me, what keeps me here, I guess I can't speak to why people leave. I suppose that if you are like my buddy Chris who came up on that farm, that language doesn't always seem affectionate anymore. Like there's a way that that language becomes a language of pure labor and not affection. There's a way that that's kind of, it becomes staticky in a sense. And it becomes staticky perhaps the further away you are from it. Like any song on any radio, if you drive away from the tower, it becomes a bit flimsy.

24:22And for me, I think I find that I'm still trying to decode all the sounds that make up this place for me. Whenever I meet someone from Columbus, so much of what we were talking about was like, I love this place at this point and then something happened. I loved this area and then something happened. And I can both define the something and I can't. I can define the something in a broad sense where it's like the capitalist impulses of developers. But you also cannot define what happened in the sense of there was something emotionally lost. The heart of something was lost when this happened. when this building became a bistro and the people who lived in that building had to go elsewhere there was a real material history of a place that was lost gentrification is a lot of things but it is a dismantling of history because if you're saying you who has lived in this place for 20 years you now or more you now have to leave you're not just removing you're not just uprooting the physical person, you're uprooting the actual internal and external histories that that person carries with them that they can use to help maintain the realities of place.

25:34So in a way, to stay is to try to build an archive of a history that otherwise would be geographically and materially deconstructed. People have asked me before, like, who's the audience for your work? And that's a bad question, I think, probably. But there is one woman on a street in East Columbus who has held onto her house no matter what. She's been offered so much money, been offered so much to move out of that house. Because if she moves out of that house, it is the entry point to kind of raise that neighborhood and make it something else. She refuses to leave. Her refusal, I think, is an action that my work is pointing towards.

26:20My work is pointing towards this thing that says, if I stay here, then my very presence is stopping the worst designs of a city that has no idea who its population actually is. And my staying here means I'm actually keeping a history that existed before me and a history that I want to exist after me. But I also think people leave because they no longer recognize the places they love. like people leave because what's the point of staying in a neighborhood if the neighborhood no longer feels like it's a place where you're welcome or if you cannot be translated through the new population of that neighborhood like thankfully the neighborhood i grew up in is still kind of what it was so i can go back there and be who i am and people like oh that's just you know we know we know who you are we know but there are a lot of corners like where i went to high school where it's like i'm no longer that person who i was in that place and so a part of me.

27:15There are versions of myself that have diminished by just not having the visual access to my own history. And if enough pieces of you diminish by not having that access, then you have to go rebuild a history somewhere else. You obviously care so much about like the roots of a place and the history and the community. What would you say to someone who is from a place where they kind of feel like, I don't feel that around me? I would say that's fine. I think it's like, I think so much of my fundamental work is never to convince anyone to love the place they're at. If you don't love the place you're in, that's, I think, a very natural thing.

27:48I would say, at this point, over 50 % of people might not love their hometown. I encounter so many people who are like, I don't love where I'm from. Or I do this, it's not even an exercise. Whenever I get in front of a room, either doing a writing workshop or whatever, there's 20, 30 people in the room, I always say, well, tell me where you're from. Introduce yourself, tell me your name, where you're from, these type of things. and it's always interesting to watch people through their body language or through just their plain responses where someone will be like oh i'm from virginia and i'd be like well virginia is a big ass state you know i mean like what part of virginia are you from and they're like oh i'm from a town outside of richmond and i'd be like well what's the name of the town you know i mean like what's i in in so much of that is just the thing that is embedded in you that says i am not proud of i don't have a loving relationship with where i'm from so i don't want to share it which makes sense to me.

28:40And then you get people who are like, okay, I am from, you know, like I'm from like the eastern part of Magadocious, Texas, you know what I mean? And it's a different thing, because they're saying this corner of the world means a lot to me. I really try to specify the fact that I'm not just from Columbus, I'm from the east side of Columbus, Ohio, because when I was a kid, our greatest artist, the greatest artist who's ever lived in Columbus is Amina Robinson. Like I think the greatest artist who's ever lived in Ohio is Amina Robinson. Beautiful visual artist, and when I was a kid, you could go watch her work.

29:12She was just posted up at the King Arts Complex in the basement working on these things and she would tell you to come close and she'd be like, well, go to your house and bring me the things that your parents are going to throw away. Bring me paper towel rolls or milk cartons or these things and just dig in the trash and get something out that I can use. And what she would do is she would make these giant canvases out of found materials and she would make renderings of the neighborhood we were in, Mount Vernon and Crumb Park and East Columbus. And this was at a time when these areas were seen as disposable.

29:49The city was treating them as though no one lived there who loved their home or their neighbors. I grew up in a neighborhood that was referred to as Uzi Alley, but we did not give it that nickname. The black people who lived there did not give it that nickname. and if you are only told about how your neighborhood is a war zone or unlivable you begin to fear your neighbors when you begin to fear yourself you begin to fear your streets and what amita robinson was doing in that exercise like you know was saying bring me the things that others would consider disposable and i'm going to make something that throughout this landscape makes this place we live look like an actual kingdom you know and so the milk carton would become a house and that house would look majestic, you know?

30:35And it was saying like, we do not throw things away and we do not throw each other away. And that to me is the entire ethos of what it is to stay somewhere and make these hard decisions that say, I'm often at odds with this city. I hated like every single mayor that we've ever had. And the one that we have now, I probably hate more than the other ones. That's just like one example. There are so many things this city does it displeases me, right? But I still remain. And I think that remaining is important. Well, Hanif Abdurraqib, thank you so much for being on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure.

31:07Thank you for having me. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to Hanif Abdurraqib. His most recent book is There's Always This Year, but he has written so many books and has more coming out. And every single thing that he writes is spectacular. And I read it all voraciously. You can find out more information about all of Hanif's writing and his upcoming publications at abdurakib.com. The audiobook sample you heard in the intro of A Fortune for Your Disaster, poems by Hanif Abdurakib, narrated by the author, was provided with permission of Highbridge Audio, an RB Media Audio brand, copyright 2019.

31:45I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book, Humor Me, about how to laugh more every day, is available for pre-order now. You can find out more about my book and also all of my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who know the value of community and care, and also a deeply felt playlist. On the TED side, we've got Daniela Balarezzo, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tenzika Soong, Manibong, Antonia Leigh, and Joseph Debrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who appreciate that many of Hanif's essays have already been fact-checked by The New Yorker, so he is making life easy for them.

32:19On the PRX side, we've got the all-star team of audio, Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks again to you for listening. Check out the video that goes along with this podcast on Ted's YouTube channel. It is a perfect accompaniment to this extended conversation you just heard. And it's so fun to see the places that he's talking about. Share this episode with someone who reminds you of how good it is to be in community or even just someone who you know who has a connection to Columbus, Ohio. We will be back next week though with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks for listening.