On dealing with overwhelming sadness and exhilarating joy
+ In celebration of Hanif Abdurraqib's They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
1
When I first shared the name for this medium with my network, many people asked a simple question: why The Saddest Generation?
Even now, I don’t profess to have a grand idea of why I went with such a morose name; I’ve always mostly told people a variation of the “sadness, perhaps, is the spirit of our times” line. But to me, it has still often felt insufficient, because if sadness is the spirit of our times; so is hedonism; is happiness; is lust; is, maybe, some joy.
I really hope you get my point. I feel all these things, but of them all, I think I feel sadness the most intently.
2
In the week after the shooting that punctured the #EndSARS protests, my life was in turmoil. For people I didn’t know who lost their lives, for families I didn’t know who would never see their people alive again, I felt an overwhelming sadness.
I was disconsolate, broken, disjointed, grabbing at straws to maintain any grip on consciousness, and struggling with my mental health.
Often, I’d have dreams where I found myself believing the government’s propaganda that nobody died, anything to erase that terrible day from my consciousness.
Then I’d wake up, and ensure that I read enough tweets to wipe away government propaganda from my mind.
It’s a lot.
3
It’s been over 100 days since the shootings, since those darks weeks that followed, I’ve laughed again. I’ve gone outside without any headaches. There’s been hearty cheering with friends — mostly COVID-compliant!
Significantly, I’m writing these again. Back. Here. The only place on the Internet where my writing isn’t commodified.
It often feels like I’ve been chasing the shadow of something over these last weeks. I wasn’t quite sure what it was at first, but I think trying to find a way out of my labyrinth of sadness, just trying to feel joy at any cost, was too much of a fire brigade approach.
Sometimes you have to go through fire to appreciate the cold air. Sometimes you have to feel sadness to appreciate joy!
It’s just how utterly fucked life is.
In celebration of Hanif Abdurraqib and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Everyone who is everyone that likes reading needs to read Hanif Abdurraqib. The way he approaches everything — poems, tweets, and books — merits praise, but there is something about his book, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, that merits all our attention.
The subtle way Hanif merges the personal with the political with the communal to create a mosaic of commentary on Black life, Black joy and Black policing has its use among the wider, global Black community.
In many ways, this book is a love letter to some of the things that bind black people together even if it is decidedly rooted in the dynamics of the Black American experience.
We are blessed to live in the time of a master!