Make Them Endure. Give Them Space.

“We Become What We Normalize is a carefully considered and curated collection of ideas that push back against the waves of despair that might otherwise overwhelm anyone who is in any way immersed and sinking into a world that increasingly feels overwhelmingly treacherous. This collection of writing is a real generosity, a light flickering in the midst of darkness.”

Hanif Abdurraqib, poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, A Fortune For Your Disaster, Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, and They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Editor’s Note: We Become What We Normalize: What We Owe Each Other In World’s That Demand Our Silence is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indies Bookshop, and wherever eye-rubbingly awesome books like We Become What We Normalize are sold.

This…my fellow creatures, is the second of a number of Substack posts in which I hold aloft my own work while also calling your attention to someone I admire who’s agreed to hold aloft my work with their words. One of my best memories in the state of Michigan was watching to Jessica Hopper conduct a public conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib on a stage, approaching him afterwards to introduce myself and my son, Peter, and being asked…by him…if I’m the David Dark who wrote Everyday Apocalypse. Can you imagine, readers, how awesome that made me feel?

In my experience, Hanif brings specific love of specific people and their specific efforts wherever he goes. I’ve beheld this at poetry readings and the standing around that precedes and follows poetry readings and the parties that follow poetry readings. His curiosity is an empowering curiosity. I try to emulate it myself. It works.

And all that empowering curiosity can be discerned and felt in Hanif’s publicly available written work. I could point you lots of different places. Today, I’ll point you here.

Have you ever heard it said that there are no wrong turns in Barcelona? This is how I feel. There are no wrong turns in Barcelona. I secured the image above on my last night there. It was a months-long stay. It was transformative. I want to live there again. Still processing. More on this later.

But I’ll say this now. And I can only speak for myself. The times are unprecedented but only so much. There are ways of conducting ourselves honestly and therefore artfully. The avenues for being less horrible are endless. And there are people who are so relentlessly honest that they're absolutely useless in the strategies of abusive people. I look for those people. I want to be in that number.

I wrote this on a board in a classroom in Barcelona.

I offer it as material for meditation.

Thank you for you reading.