By Vrinda Jagota
Throughout my 20s, when romances have fizzled or my career trajectory has felt unmappable, my deep passion for my home of New York City and my belief that I will always live here has been an emotional anchor. But in reading poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing about his home state of Ohio, I’ve reconsidered what a hometown is and how we can relate to these places.
Our experience of a place is not ours alone and cannot only serve our needs. There is a communal history and future to any city that people and institutions have worked hard to imagine, establish, or erase. To make up for what has been erased and to foster what is being imagined, we must view our homes as mutat- ing, constantly in flux to accommodate the dreams and needs of residents. What Abdurraqib does exceptionally well is position his deep, personal love for Ohio within this broader framework. He wants us to think about what has been and what we can build together if we invest in each other.
In his 2020 essay “The Vanishing Monuments of Columbus, Ohio,” Abdurraqib uses the recent removal of a Christopher Columbus statue in the city to write about what it feels like to continue loving his hometown even as he watches it change. “To love any place has always seemed to me to involve a series of calculated choices, ones that must be continually weighed and measured,” he writes. “And, as in any other relationship, one must be prepared to reckon with the pos- sibility of withdrawing one’s affections if the math stops adding up.”
As high-rises popped up in Columbus and suburban sprawl crept outward, the red lights of the Super Duper market near Abdurraqib’s old job disappeared and the white nets on the basketball hoops at a nearby elementary school stopped being replaced. To love something that never changes is easy; it’s inertia, it’s a safe bet, it gives you total control. But to try to love a city given the uncertainty of what it will be, to know that the conditions under which you fell in love could change so much that you may have to reevaluate how you feel, is an act of bravery. It’s also a decision that recognizes a world outside of yourself. Though the changes Abdurraqib witnesses in his city fill him with sadness, he remembers the toppled statue and the way its removal symbolizes the tireless work of activists over many years, the very people who lost the places that were important to them as the city expanded. Abdurraqib’s choice to keep loving Columbus is an investment in this activism and these people who see the faults in the city’s history and its priorities and keep working to fix it anyway. It’s an act of hope, that even as “personal monuments” topple, we band together to erect new ones that are just as beautiful.
In “Just Some Kids From Northeast Ohio,” his profile of LeBron James’ I Promise School—located in Akron, Ohio—Abdurraqib once again explores the idea of transformation in his home state. James grew up in northeastern Ohio, and in fourth grade, he missed 83 days of school due to disruptive moves and instability at home. He found a support network that helped him thrive, and by the time he was in high school, people were driving from all over the state to watch him play basketball. He started the I Promise School in order to create a space where kids going through what he did can find genuine care from their teachers and administrators. As Abdurraqib puts it, the school is “the bridge from one past to several futures.”
Abdurraqib writes with familiarity and warmth. He marvels at sidewalk chalk art made by students and joyfully observes the early morning rush as the doors of the school open. He also describes firsthand how it felt to be minimized by a descriptor like “at risk,” which he says, “simply meant that no one wanted to put up with us” and that “your potential is often determined by myths perpetuated by those who don’t know you, your people or your passions.” Like James, he pulls from his past as a child growing up in Ohio to determine how to build a future for the next generation that elevates the excitement he observes in the students. While Abdurraqib is direct about structural barriers at play, he is also poetic in how he describes the interpersonal: “James comes from a long line of people who believed in him, and a city that believed in him, and here he is, widening a path,” he writes. “It is impossible to look upon the I Promise School without seeing where James comes from. The small and hopeful circle to which he’s always returned.” That small, hopeful circle could be family, or Akron, or Ohio itself. We’re never alone when we’re in this kind of home, when we’re near the places that made us.
Abdurraqib’s concept of home is also about what we owe, what we dream for the future, what we have to pay forward to a new generation. It’s about the wrongs from the past that we have yet to fix. During the pandemic, Abdurraqib made a regular practice of watching the sun set in Columbus, which he details in his essay “Columbus Sunsets.” It helped him process the passage of time, reminded him “of both endings and beauty.” “I’d like to think that I could happily find those reminders anywhere,” he continues, “but I’m happiest to find them in this city. When people who don’t live here ask me why I still live here, I barely even offer a real answer anymore.” The sunsets allow him to consider his home city in solitude while still hearing “the echoes of children laughing or the low murmur of collective conversation or the occasional song bending through the air from a car’s open window.”
Columbus is a city that Abdurraqib knows deeply: he writes that he watched “planes fly into the newly kaleidoscopic sky” when he was a child. He made a ritual of driving around 270 in his 20s, “starting about an hour before the sun was slated to go down, watching the sunset from every angle.” And yet, despite the deep knowledge that can make some of us cynical about our home cities, he remains open to his town’s unlimited potential to be and become something new to him, to be transformed by the other people living there. In remaining curious about the conversations happening and songs playing right outside his frame of perception, he celebrates the city as not just his, but as an interconnected web of individual, “fluorescent moment[s]” of joy and yearning. At the end of the essay, he says he doesn’t “mind making a little room at the edge of the circle for anyone who might want to join me for an evening.” That circle around Columbus may be a small one, but no one makes the city as complex and hopeful as Hanif Abdurraqib. He honors what has been and what will be, and if we ever see him on the hood of his car watching as one day ends and a new night begins, we should sit next to him. “We don’t have to talk much,” he writes. “Just enough to remind each other we’re there.”
Vrinda Jagota is a Brooklyn-based culture writer who covers fandom, pop music, South Asian culture, and experimental music.
New Ohio Review 