57 pages • 1 hour read
Hanif AbdurraqibThey Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Epigraph
An epigraph is a quote from another author or source that precedes the body of a text. Including an epigraph creates a conversation between the quoted work and the text, allowing the author to highlight similarities or provide background information.
Hanif Abdurraqib begins They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us with two epigraphs: one from the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry and one from the Black rapper Lil Uzi Vert. At first glance, it appears that these two artists have nothing in common. However, both artists are talking about the same concept: living and surviving. By choosing two artists from radically different genres and time periods, Abdurraqib shows that this essay collection will span multiple time periods and genres while exploring the Black experience in America. He also suggests the continuity of that experience due to the persistence of racism across time.
Direct Address
Abdurraqib often speaks to the reader using the second-person singular pronoun “you.” This operates as a direct address—a specific address to a specific person. By choosing to directly address the reader, Abdurraqib intensifies the intimacy of his work, asking the reader to actively participate with him in the text.
These direct addresses also invite the reader to imagine or empathize, often encouraging them to rethink popular narratives about Black people and thus supporting the theme of Rewriting Narratives and Incorrect Perceptions. At the end of “February 26, 2012,” Abdurraqib invites the reader to think of “[w]hat a country’s fear of Blackness can do while you are inside a room, soaking in joy, being promised that you would make it through” (172). This direct address asks the reader to feel the juxtaposition of dancing joyfully while someone outside is murdered for being Black; it is harder to look away from the violence once one has been invited into it.
Elegy
An elegy is a poem memorializing the dead. Typically, these poems are full of mourning and grief. Abdurraqib highlights the popularity of the elegy form among marginalized groups, including LGBTQIA+ poets and poets of color: “[T]he contemporary elegy often exists as half-memorial, half-statement of existence” (271). The elegy form allows the dead to be remembered while reminding the living that they themselves are still alive and valued.
Many of the essays in the collection can be read as elegies for people, time periods, or ideas. Abdurraqib dedicates whole essays to the deaths of his mother and his good friend Tyler, but he also dedicates essays to other kinds of loss. For example, “My First Police Stop” operates as an elegy for teenage innocence and invincibility. Through remembering these losses, Abdurraqib reemphasizes his continued survival.
Related Titles
By Hanif Abdurraqib
