Colgate University welcomed poet, essayist and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib to speak with the Hamilton community. The event, held on Thursday, Sept. 12, featured Abdurraqib’s latest nonfiction book, “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” written shortly after Abdurraqib was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Abdurraqib’s previous book, “A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. The morning of his visit to Colgate, “There’s Always This Year” was longlisted for the very same award, his third time on the longlist.
Professor of English and Creative Writing Jennifer Brice, who organizes the Living Writers series and teaches the associated classes, introduced Abdurraqib and attempted to describe his uncategorizable work.
“The best I can do is to say it is a linguistically playful, by terms joyous and devastating romp through the writer’s labyrinthine and capacious intellect, his tender and generous heart,” Brice said. “To read it is to be reminded that reading literature, meaning a book written for the ages but also for this particular moment — all of 2024 and all that it means — […] is never a passive act. It’s a creative collaboration. It’s an experience. It absolutely should change your life.”
And it did.
Reading his book was a transformative experience, but engaging in profound conversation with the writer himself was nothing short of magical. Abdurraqib walked his audience through the intimate pains and resurrections of being alive, braiding together lessons of grief, home, change, time, memory, hope, anger and so much more, relating these ideas to his writing.
“A book is a physical space: a kingdom, a country,” Abdurraqib said. “I’m building a world that I want you to enter, and it isn’t just mine. It’s ours. Yes, I’m the architect of the physical space, but you are not without autonomy.”
He discussed the events that have shaped him including the death of his mother, which happened when he was only 13 years old.
“Hell, I sometimes think closure is the responsibility of the living. Grief is something that lives within us and transforms,” Abdurraqib said. “I got no closure from my mother and I never will. I get to [revisit] my grief as much as possible, and I get to return to her.”
Abdurraqib talked about how he maintains a sentimentality and nostalgia for his childhood that protects his sense of wonder.
“I don’t subscribe to the idea that we lose our sense of wonder when we get older. It just takes a different kind of rigor to access our wonder as we age,” Abdurraqib said.
He then also identified gentrification as an obstacle in preserving people’s histories.
“Gentrification is so merciless in so many ways. It strips us of the ability to say, ‘I was young here once,’” Abdurraqib said. “Our geographies become myths, and then so do we.”
Abdurraqib read an excerpt from “There’s Always This Year” to an overflowing audience in Persson Auditorium. In the excerpt, he recounts a Nike commercial that aired when Lebron James returned to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014. Abdurraqib’s reading was rabbit-like, racing and relentless. He spoke as if he was running out of time to tell you what matters, grabbing the crowds’ attention and holding it. Senior Vishnu Anandraj, a student in Brice’s Living Writers class, related the intimacy of the following conversation.
“Hanif Abdurraqib had such an incredible and unique presence when he spoke to the Living Writers class and to the broader Colgate community at Persson Hall. He seemed entirely at ease with himself and his surroundings,” Anandraj said. “It didn’t feel like a traditional, academic, uptight event where there was a clear distance between the speaker and the audience. Like with his book, he was very willing to close that distance from the beginning.”
Anandraj continued to describe Abdurraqib’s character and skill as a writer.
“It’s easy to tell Abdurraqib has a background in poetry because his writing has a clear rhythm and flow that makes it very playful and digestible,” Anandraj said. “The biggest impression the book left on me, though, was how Abdurraqib is able to draw powerful and constructive lessons from painful experiences.”
Anandraj shared that Abdurraqib’s writing places common experiences of change within the author’s own life.
“I felt like he takes heavy topics I’ve had some level of exposure to at some point in my life — grief, the end of a relationship, changes in communities I love — and holds them to a light to show me a different side of those experiences I haven’t considered for myself. Then, Abdurraqib is able to place these emotions in a broader context of how he has survived the passage of time and, by proxy, moments of pain or sorrow.”
Colgate students are lucky to engage with some of the best writers of our time. Their influential words encourage students to explore new perspectives and cling to hope.
“Never dies in his dreams / In his dreams he is infinite,” Abdurraqib wrote, describing himself in the closing pages of “There’s Always This Year.”
