Hanif Abdurraqib explores his relationship to memory through 1990s basketball culture
The Ohio-based writer spoke to The Next Chapter’s Antonio Michael Downing about his book, There’s Always This
Memory can often act as an unreliable narrator, as the process of remembering asks of us to rebuild our own stories. For American poet Hanif Abdurraqib, his memories of home and comfort growing up in Columbus in the 1990s are tied to his love of basketball.
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension is a collection of ruminations on the meaning of success, who is perceived to deserve it and the concept of role models all through the lens of basketball in the 1990s.
Through themes of comfort, hope and solidarity, Abdurraqib paints the rich history of the golden era of basketball through a personal telling of his own experience with the sport growing up.
Abdurraqib is an Ohio-based American poet and writer. His essay collection A Little Devil in America won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Obama previously included A Little Devil in America on his 2022 Summer Reading List.
Abdurraqib joined The Next Chapter's Antonio Michael Downing to talk about the power of nostalgia and how the city he was raised in has changed.
Your book manages to be about basketball yet it isn't a sports book. For those of us that aren't really into sports books, how do you pull this off?
Thinking about my relationship with the game, which is broad and all encompassing and tied to memory and affection, growing up in the neighbourhood I grew up in, playing basketball was a way to operate against and combat loneliness because everyone in the neighbourhood played it. And so at least being able to to know your way around the court was the way of saying that you wanted to belong in a place that you, if not loved, were in for the time being.
My relationship with the game is incredibly tied to memory, affection and home and that makes it easy to write about it through that lens and not write about it strictly as a capital S "sports book" or something that you even have to know about basketball to enjoy or spend time with. Ideally, my hope is that people will come to the book from a wide range of backgrounds and find something they enjoy in it.
My relationship with the game is incredibly tied to memory, affection and home.- Hanif Abdurraqib
There's a real connection to place that's happening in this book. I felt like I was walking through West Columbus, your hometown, when I was reading this book. What is it about your memory of these places that you grew up in that holds your imagination so well?
The reality is that I grew up in a place that is like many places in that gentrification is pulling it apart and making it somewhat unrecognizable to those of us who have lived here and loved it forever. And so memory for me, is not only just memory, but building, writing around memory.
Building narratives around memory is also creating an archive of that which does not exist or will not exist forever; it dignifies a people who live in a place who have had to watch it change and fight through those changes.
Memory is such an active thing because I don't take lightly the fact that I blink or I come back home from a stretch of book tour even and there's a different city than there was when I left.
Memory cannot rearrange or realign the material realities of gentrification.- Hanif Abdurraqib
I live in one of the last old great Black neighbourhoods in Columbus, Ohio and, much like a lot of the other neighbourhoods around it, it's being gentrified.
There was a point where I came home and my street was blocked off so I couldn't get to my house and then the detour was also blocked off site because they were building these condos. So literally the all-consuming material nature of gentrification says you cannot come to this place that you call home because we are making it less like your home. Memory cannot rearrange or realign the material realities of gentrification, of course.
But I believe that what memory does afford us is an opportunity to say there have been people here before me, even. There were people here while I was here. There were people here and we did not want what happened to this place to happen.
Is there something commemorative that you're trying to do with this book?
For me and for others, I'm trying to really wrestle with mortality in a clear and plain way and commemorate the time in front of us that is defined by the time behind us, which is another reason why this book is not solely a nostalgia exercise.
This book is not solely a nostalgia exercise.- Hanif Abdurraqib
I write a lot about the shame I felt with my past growing up in the times that I was not very excited about my time on Earth and I think that I have to confront those things in order to forgive the past version of myself for them.
Through that forgiveness, I become more attuned and grateful and eager for the life that I've got in the moment. There's also a commemorating of the past self that for a long time, I think for me was wrestling with a lot of shame.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
