Hanif Abdurraqib Discusses Zora Neale Hurston, Childish Gambino, & Ohio at The Public

Kevin Thurston interviews Hanif Abdurraqib on the eve of Abdurraqib's appearance at Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Silo City Reading Series. Although he'll likely read poetry or prose at the event, Abdurraqib notes that one of his favorite aspects of reading in a new city is talking to new people about music: "I was on tour from January until early May which was pretty exhausting, but also really good to get out there. I really enjoyed meeting and talking to people. People would talk to me, quite passionately, about pop culture, or music, or whatever specific thing they were into. Reading out of the book is a bonus in some ways." We'll pick up with Thurston's next question from there: 

Who are you reading? Who are you looking forward to reading now that you are done with your tour?

Actually, travelling gave me plenty of opportunity to read. I have a new book of poems I’m working on so I’ve been reading a lot of poems: Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen, Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed, and revisiting a book called Cruelty by Ai. On the non-fiction tip, I did read the new book by Zora Neale Hurston because I had to review it.

Talk to me about the Hurston book.

It’s called Barracoon and it is pretty brief. It’s an account of her several interviews with the last living slave that was one of the last slaves to be brought over on a slave ship. She wrote it and archived it in the late 1920s. We are to believe that this unearthed book is in the form that Hurston wanted it to be in.

Right. Wasn’t the deal with that that there was pushback from the editors because they wanted her to, essentially, “clean up” the language and essentially turn it into standard, academic English and she wasn’t interested in that?

Correct. They wanted her to change the language and she wasn’t having it so the book just sat there.

Thankfully we’ve found the moment for the book to be published. We read They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us for our Rowhouse Reads program and we were discussing the ambivalence in your essay, “Chance the Rapper’s Golden Year.” Right around the same time Childish Gambino’s video for “This is America” came out and it struck me like a response to your essay’s response to “Sunday Candy.” What do you think of the video and the enormous amount of response it has gotten?

I think the video is bad. But I also don’t think the video is for me, so then I start to wonder who the video is for. I get that the idea is that if we show America at large, or let’s be frank, he is angling towards white America, this harsh violence will it change things? I don’t think it will. We’ve been trying to take that angle since Mamie Till showed Emmett Till’s body to the world. I’m beginning to think that the more people of color, black people perhaps specifically, insist on showing oppressors the violence being done to them, the more likely their oppressors might come up even worse things to do. So, I didn’t love “This Is America”, I think the song is great, and I loved the Saturday Night Live performance, but in the same way I just don’t need to see any more body or dash cam videos of black people getting shot, I don’t need this video.

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