Review of The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
- blueshiftjournal
- Sep 15, 2016
- 3 min read
by brianna albers, reviews editor
And isn’t this how each story starts? With a list of things we know we cannot take back? And, still. Everything has an end. This is where I tell you what I most want to hear myself: none of it was real.
– Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, “The Story of the Last Punk Rock Show Before the City Tore Down Little Brother’s,” The Crown Ain’t Worth Much
There are many things to be said about the début collection of Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much: intimate; haunting; an experiment in lyricality, rife with beauty imagery and stunning turns of language. However, perhaps the most striking aspect of the work is its complexity. Each piece is a world unto itself, and yet, each piece is simultaneously a quiet unspooling. In the end, readers are left with what remains – a story of loss, grief, and the sites at which the two intersect.
Willis-Abdurraqib guides us through a menagerie of narratives – warped by memory, and reflected by time itself. We give witness to the author’s social life, and the aggressions – both micro and macro – undergone. We give witness to a community, blistering beneath the weight of a gasping city. We give witness to a fall of seasons, softened by nostalgia, but given urgency through the act of recollection and remembrance. In this, we are not just readers; we are participants. We are entrusted with something timeless, desperate, and human.
In the series of pieces entitled “Dispatches from the Black Barbershop, Tony’s Chair. …,” readers are introduced to a barber, narrating the landscape of an urban neighborhood; in this, Willis-Abdurraqib discusses the violence of a cityscape, and how that violence manifests itself via communal grief. The barber gives several monologues throughout the work, combining the monotony of everyday life with the rippling undercurrent of sociocultural tension: “they got a fancy ice cream shop where the corner store was they got a sports bar where the record store was and what we supposed to do for records where we supposed to go for that old school shit how we supposed to heal ….” The barber also mentions the overarching prevalence of death: “the blood ain’t stop for like four hours the blood was everywhere the blood was a river the blood ran on to the street was like that shit had legs ….” In both cases, Willis-Abdurraqib navigates the topics with honesty and a sense of wizened grace.
Readers are also introduced to the author’s mother, in conversation with the author’s wife. This is a particularly strange site – a meeting of the past and present; evidence of the author’s attempt to grieve and move on, all in the space of the same breath. “I wish I could fix this for you,” the mother says. “I’m sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn’t remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties.” Thus, we see the author acknowledge his process of grief, and how that process has affected – and will continue to affect – his interpersonal relationships. Again, we are given a taste of loss as it is embodied in Willis-Abdurraqib’s work: heavy with cultural significance, and never in isolation.
Ultimately, though, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is a story of movement. Willis-Abdurraqib gives form and voice to his grief, and yet, refuses to turn his loss into something sedimentary. Rather, Willis-Abdurraqib speaks to healing. In “The Story of the Last Punk Rock Show Before the City Tore Down Little Brother’s,” Willis-Abdurraqib writes:
“I do not tell him that I know death. I do not tell him that I have crawled into that hollow mouth and exited through the other side. I do not tell him that death is not when a city makes a strip mall out of where you bled once. That is the other death. The one that wears your name, but does not ask you to wear its own. The nostalgia is killing me again.”
Here, the desolation of a life; the way loss can stain a landscape, razing it to the ground. Grief is blinding. All-consuming. But, as with all things, grief – death – is surmountable. Something to move through, and on from. The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, then, is a testament to that journey. There is no denial of pain. In truth, there is only this: survival, in its gutted, bloody form.
