I used writing to get to the heart of why I felt that way.
People have an idea of what a writer is and how someone becomes a writer, but you know, I was someone who struggled to not only understand the world but also struggled to fit into the world, and through those struggles often felt very on the outside. In my late teens and early 20s, I was in trouble a lot. I grew up in a family that didn’t have a lot of money, but a good family, a family that cared deeply for me. The first section of your book is titled Performing Miracles. I was fascinated by that and by who then got to define what was and wasn’t shameful, and I got to thinking about how often black performance and black performers now are considered as shameful only when pushed through the lens of what whiteness deems as appropriate, as upstanding. But in a way, for these performers who were either recently enslaved or were coming from a people who were enslaved, the stage was where they had a little bit of power, even if they had to dehumanise themselves in the process. I was raised of course to imagine the minstrel show as only shameful. I’d gotten into reading about minstrelsy and minstrel shows – journals of old minstrel show performers, some of them talking about how they did not only feel shame when performing.
So what inspired you to write a book about black performance? His new book, A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance, weaves together moments of personal recollection with a profound meditation on the performances of black American artists from Josephine Baker to Beyoncé. His 2019 follow-up, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us(2017), was named a book of the year by O, the Oprah Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork and the Chicago Tribune among others. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (2016), was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer book prize and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright legacy award. H anif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.
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