The Midwest Regionalism of Hanif Abdurraqib
In late May of 2016, Hanif Abdurraqib traveled from his home in Columbus, Ohio to the beacon of Midwestern modernism: Chicago. He arrived at an address where a large group had gathered. They were all loaded onto school buses and then driven to an undisclosed location. Arriving at a brick warehouse, the inside burst with fans of Chance the Rapper and the sounds of the Chicago rapper’s new album, Coloring Book. The curious event is an early scene in Abdurraqib’s book They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, recently re-released in a five-year anniversary hardcover edition by the Columbus publisher Two Dollar Radio. Here, he reflects on the importance of Chance and his cultural, political, and geographical impact:
What about the feel-good aspects of Chance’s story, the Midwest kid made good? And it’s not as though he rose from the cornfields of central Iowa. Unlike any other city in its region, Chicago sits at the center of the national conversation, taking up space in exciting, uncomfortable ways. Its name is deployed by politicians who imagine any place black people live as a war zone. Black people live and die in Chicago; they create and thrive in Chicago.
It’s common to find out toward the end of a literary event that Abdurraqib was in attendance the whole time—he always finds a way to glide smoothly out before the occasion descends into awkward standing around. Abdurraqib is not a physically imposing individual. His presence is as inviting as his prose is personal. Despite being in the same room as Hanif on more than three occasions, I’ve never actually met the man as it’s not his priority to be seen. In the leadup to an event at the main branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, he is hidden to the side as a shy observer, a position he occupies often at author talks and poetry slams. When he’s called to the stage, his voice is honest, his stories are personal, and his speech is guided by a special attentiveness to the swaying emotions of the crowd; the crowd recognizes his attentiveness and grants him exceptional space. I’ve never played Spades, for example, but I have felt a warmness when Abdurraqib recites a story about the game.
Abdurraqib was born in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Beechcroft High School on the city’s north side, a fact that he shares often and with an ardent pride, and he attended the private Christian college in Columbus’ Bexley neighborhood called Capital University where he played on the school’s soccer team and began writing for punk zines. He dropped out of Capital and found himself in and out of jail and sleeping in a storage unit before diving into Columbus’ vibrant poetry scene, putting him on a literary path to becoming the poet, essayist, and author we read today.
Abdurraqib is swift to remind the reader that the charismatic optimism of someone like Chance the Rapper is not discharged carelessly within a vacuum. Chance’s music and activism is set within a very specific geographical and political context, specifically the Chicago of 2016. The city’s violence was weaponized by Trump in his first campaign, where it was a central talking point as a racist dog-whistle and partisan tactic to smear Democrat-run cities—a narrative counteracted recently at a hearing that observed that crime in red cities and states is far higher. Through these and other Rust Belt characterizations, Chicago’s reputation has been reduced to that of a second-rate city, one to be ignored in the shadow of NYC and LA. It was important that the Trump era, with the GOP’s right-wing populist emphasis on the Rust Belt, shed a light, albeit a distorted one, on the forgotten region.
Chance the Rapper, like Abdurraqib, offers a counternarrative to opportunistically simplified paintings of the Midwest. Chance’s work paints Chicago in a positive light just as Abdurraqib’s essays like Defiance, Ohio Is The Name Of A Band, which, like so many of his pieces, creates some mystifying union of personal reflection, historical observation, and cultural appreciation—the town, Defiance, Ohio, is both a relaxing refuge from Columbus and a run-down place with the occasional confederate flag. Abdurraqib urges us to push past simplified reputations: “Everyone turn your eyes to the city you are told to imagine on the news and, instead, listen to the actual voices inside of it.”
Abdurraqib recognizes that space is at the center of culture, even pop culture on a national scale: “With rap in the midst of what may become its greatest generational shift, geography has taken on a new importance,” Abdurraqib observes—his examination is not far off from the French philosopher and Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre, who said in an article titled “Reflections on the Politics of Space” that “space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.”
Writers, Abdurraqib argues, are literally shaped by their homes. Chicago’s poets, Abdurraqib says in an interview with Belt Magazine, are noticeably different from poets in Columbus and Cleveland. “There’s a vastness to even the writing of and around [Chicago] that feels really vast because Chicago sprawls in so many ways,” he says.
As a twentieth-century cultural movement, regionalism largely confined literature and art to two geographical-cultural poles: the urban and the rural. Late nineteenth century novelists set their honest stories in small Midwestern towns. Painters in the 1930s, like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, idealized aspects of rural Midwestern life in their work. Critics of Midwestern regionalism, known as the “revolt from the village” (a moment in the early twentieth century well-detailed in Jon K. Lauck’s From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism) favored Manhattan and Hollywood. Books that might be considered staples of the Midwest today were actually bundled into the revolt from the village, seen as mocking the region. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street and Babbitt, James Thurber’s stories of Columbus, and other New Yorker-types who crudely caricatured the region were, during a time of industrialization and urbanization, clearing the way for capitalism’s cultural overtaking of a declining agrarian economy. It was the small town life of the Midwest against the big city of Manhattan. But the Midwest couldn’t be confined solely to the rural. Industrialization rapidly reshaped the region’s cityscapes and countryside alike. And so a debate thrived until deindustrialization created the now infamous Rust Belt.
These cultural debates, however lively and heated, meant little to the average worker who was just trying to survive. This was certainly the case for many Black Americans after the Great Migration, spreading across the Midwest to sell their labor in another segregated landscape. “The wind may bring its perfume from the south,” the Ohio poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in Lyrics of the Hearthside. The wind pushing them north was made up primarily of economic and racial factors, not literary movements.
Abdurraqib, like many Black Midwestern writers before him, did not choose to be born here. He did not consciously select the coordinates of his birth. In his book A Little Devil in America, Abdurraqib admits that “had the first job my father interviewed for come through at the start of the ’80s, I would have been born in Providence, Rhode Island, instead of Columbus, Ohio, where work at the time was more plentiful.” The Detroit-born writer Nelson Algren, who primarily wrote about working-class Black Americans, once wrote a letter to Chicago’s Richard Wright, saying that “we live here pretty much on the grim verge of ourselves,” and therefore regionalism, regardless of the liveliness of the discourse, wasn’t a pressing topic for Black Midwesterners. But Abdurraqib believes that a lack of choice in the geography of one's youth does not erase one’s connection to it. “I love Columbus, Ohio,” he wrote, “and I say this understanding that love would be mapped onto any place that I hadn’t left, or stayed in long enough to build a shrine of memories.” It’s worth noting that after Abdurraqib lived in Connecticut for a few years, presented with the freedom of moving anywhere due to his remote work and the internet, he nonetheless chose to move back to Columbus.
Almost every story in They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is shaped around Hanif’s residence in Columbus, or a road trip to other Midwestern cities—his article about Treyvon Martin begins, “The drive from Columbus, Ohio, to the middle of Minnesota isn’t particularly a simple undertaking.” He tracks Midwestern bands from the interior of the country to the coasts, most notably Fall Out Boy. He grounds pop culture moments like “the night Allen Iverson hit Michael Jordan with a mean crossover” in the subjectively experienced Columbus:
If you believe that it rained in Ohio on the night Allen Iverson hit Michael Jordan with a mean crossover, you will also believe that I know this by the sound that lingered in the air after my small cheering, the way rain can sometimes sound like an echo of applause if it hits a roof hard enough.
But the Midwest is not a monolith. Abdurraqib often finds himself in a state of apology when speaking of Columbus, “a city adorned with the name of a violent colonizer.” In A Little Devil in America he tells the story of Josephine Baker, the famous Black singer who left St. Louis and America for Paris, eventually renouncing her US citizenship. St. Louis was both her birthplace, a place to find pride, but also the place where she watched Black residents escaping the fires of the East St. Louis race riot. Although building a successful career in the old city of Paris, she returned to St. Louis for a fundraiser to fight segregation in schools in 1952. “Friends,” she leveled with the audience, “to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear . . . humiliation . . . misery and terror . . . a city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.” But it was also a place of appreciation and pride. Abdurraqib considers the prideful criticism of home as a type of love, as an effort “to return to the site of the world coming into focus for you and offering newer, better eyes.”
Abdurraqib’s work delivers a new kind of nuance to conversations of space, culture, and race. By connecting the subjective, often tender experiences of his Columbus life with pop culture moments that are usually confined to NYC, LA, or cyberspace, and by accepting both pride and critique in a place, Abdurraqib synthesizes the domineering regionalist debates of the twentieth century. He rejects both a cosmopolitan disregard for regional traditions and a regionalist dismissal of a mass national culture, offering a dialectical regionalism that gives and takes from each. As Abdurraqib puts it, “There is global activism, but there is also the work of turning and facing your people, which has to become harder with the more distance put between you and those people.” It’s a message that has echoes in revolutionary cultural theorists throughout the twentieth century. The Minnesota Communist writer Meridel Le Sueur emphasized that internationalism starts by connecting local struggles to general struggles. It’s from the local and the regional, Le Sueur argues, that “extends out from its own local and community experience to a much more general movement.” It is a dialectic of the universal and the specific, humankind and nature, the external and subjective. Reality is never as flat as it’s often cast and Abdurraqib expresses to us a regionalist dialectic for the twenty-first century.
As an Ohio writer, Abdurraqib is continuing the legacy of poets like long-time Ohio resident Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and playwright Langston Hughes, and Ohio-born novelist Toni Morrison, all of whom, without blind pride or rage, credit the state and their places within it as a home. The city of Columbus long ago birthed national figures such as humorist James Thurber and painter George Bellows—who said that he might one day travel the world, but “would not expect to find very many better pictures than have been brought to me here [in Columbus]”—and continues with writers like Maggie Smith, Prince Shakur, and of course Abdurraqib.
The Kansas-born poet William Stafford recommended that people “welcome any region you live in or come to or think of, for that is where life happens to be–right where you are.” We would do well to follow Abdurraqib’s advice to, in a similar vein:
Turn your eye back on the community you love and articulate it for an entire world that may not understand it as you do. That feels like freedom because you are the one who controls the language of your time and your people, especially if there are outside forces looking to control and commodify both.