Ideas - Grief and the cost of outsourcing feeling

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Hanif Abdurraqib lives his life heart-forward. His writing is informed by the many losses he's endured, but also by his commitment to "love deeply" and to not let machines do his thinking and feeling for him. Doing so, he says, risks atrophying our hearts and minds. "For me, the cost of a heart that's fraying at the edges is too high."Abdurraqib is the 2026 Weston International Award winner, presented by the Writers Trust of Canada for a body of work by a nonfiction author. He is a poet, essayist, cultural critic, and author of eight books, including, There’s Always Next Year and A Little Devil in America.

Hey, I'm Matea from the show Bookends. If you want a front row seat to heated rivalry, keep listening. You heard me right. I'm talking about that heated rivalry, starring Hudson Williams and Connor's story. You probably know that the heated rivalry series was based on a book by Rachel Reed, and the next book in that series is on its way. If you want an inside look, Rachel Reed is joining me on stage for a special live event at Massey Hall on October 13th. We'll be talking all things heated rivalry in a room full of fans, so come join the party. You can find tickets and more details at cBCbooks.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Today, we start with a story about a storyteller. Two decades ago when he was in his

early 20s, Hanif Abdul-Rakib didn't appear destined to become an award-winning author. He was an avid reader, but not interested in writing. He'd spent time on the street. without a home and in jail for petty crimes. But he started writing about the local punk scene and participating in poetry slams in his native Columbus, Ohio. Within a few years, Abdul-Rqib was an accomplished poet as well as a music and cultural critic, writing celebratory essays about black performance in hip-hop, jazz, soul, dance,

film, literature, and basketball, and writing about the commuter. funer pleasures of top 40 music. But a darker undercurrent runs through his acclaimed books, like they can't kill us until they kill us, and a little devil in America, where he probes a society that enjoys, imitates, and appropriates the culture of black people,

while discriminating and committing brutal acts of violence against them. Hanif Abdul-Rakib is now the author of eight books, with an impressive list of awards and awards. honors. The latest prize is the 2026 Western International Award, presented annually by the Writers' Trust of Canada for a body of work by a non-fiction author. Hanif Abdu Rakib received the award at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in September 26, and as you'll hear, he speaks the same way he writes, in a rhythm of thoughtful pauses bursting into torrents of poetically phrased ideas, insights and deeply felt emotion.

It's really good to be here. I was on a run yesterday, and someone stopped me, and they said, hey, do you write things? And I thought, oh, no, this person's going to try to give me their manuscript. And he said, my partner reads passages from your books to me while we're in bed together at night. It's very sweet, also a compliment that I get off in. And that is very flattering. I will say when I read my own passages to my partners in bed,

it hasn't worked that well for my relationships. So I'm glad it's working out better for all you. Also, on a run today, I promise I'm not just going to give you a catalog of my runs. But on my run today, I saw someone with like a flipped-up 90s hat reminiscent of Wesley Snipes and White Men Can't Jump. And I was thinking about how White Men Can't Jump is one of my favorite films of all time. And my favorite line in White Men Can't Jump is the line. that Woody Harrelson gives to Wesley Snipes when he hustles him the first time,

where he responds to Wesley Snipes's exuberant shouting of, it's hard, goddamn work to be this good. And Woody Harrelson, in response to after he hustles him, says, it's hard, goddamn work to make something this pretty look like a chump. And I love that line. And I think about it often when I look at cities I once love just becoming gray towers of gentrification, right? And how hard the work is to strip down the organic beauty of a place

and make it look like nothing. It is hard, goddamn work. But everyone seems up for it, unfortunately. When I was a child, I lived in these old townhouses with my family. And what I most remember about said townhouses was that we had very thick red carpet that I think if I had in my home now, I would be very averse to because it was gross and horrible.

But as a child, I loved running my hands through the thickness of it and getting my fingers tangled up in the thick loops of it. And why I love that is probably less about the carpet itself and more about my mother, who, while I was running my hand through the carpet, would be one room over, which was the kitchen, singing, often. In a song that my mother loved to sing when it came on the radio, although I would never hear the radio.

I'd only hear her singing was Whitney Houston's, I want to dance with somebody. And my mother sang that song was such enthusiasm and such clarity and beauty and brilliance that I thought it was her song. I mean, literally, I thought my mother wrote this song was performing an original song. And I don't know, I cannot tell you today,

if my mother's singing voice was traditionally beautiful, but I knew that back then it was the only singing voice I knew, and so I loved it. And I knew that it was a sweeter tone than the tone that she sometimes spoke with, and she would sometimes turn the sweetness of that tone towards my ear and sing in my ear when I was unsettled or couldn't sleep.

And so to me, it was the greatest singing voice that existed in the world. And I say this to say, that the first time I heard, I want to dance with somebody, on the radio was on the school bus when I was maybe seven years old. And I remember leaning over to someone and saying, that's my mom's song. I had no other framework for it other than to say, my mother sings that song. How did it get on the radio? And this person's singing doesn't sound like my mother. And everyone, you know, kind of laughed. But I remember thinking how much gratitude I had for that window of time, which was maybe about a year and a half, where I believed

fully in the mythology of this one thing before it became another thing. I have, still to this day, so much gratitude for the sense of wonder that childhood afforded me before time and the passage of time interrupted that wonder with a harsher reality. One thing that that baffles my mind is that none of us asked to be here, right? We just showed up because two people decided we should show up. and in the minute that we show up, the sole requirement of our presence is that we are going away. We are born, and then we begin the process of going away.

And I had decided a long time ago, when I first started writing work that meant something to me, and when I first started living in a way that allowed for the work to mean something to me, which meant in my case when I first started turning to others with deep curiosity and not necessarily asking what I could get out of them or what I could extract from them to further my own gains. When I first started committing myself to the idea that I almost am required to be more

curious about the person across from me than I am about my own place in the world, I really committed myself to treating my going away as a sacred action and not a passive one. It's very funny, by the way, to see the red dinosaur bones back there. I once went on a date with someone who didn't believe in dinosaurs. And it was one of those things where, like, you know how, like, some people have a little playful conspiracy they dabble in? Some of you likely do. I'm not knocking that. But sometimes the playful conspiracy becomes, like, something someone has formed in an entire identity around.

Whereas, like, you know, early in day, she's like, I don't believe dinosaurs exist. And I was like, yeah, you know, maybe, ha-ha, L-O-L, you know what I mean? But hour and a half in, she's still like, I got some things if you want to read them. I was like, I don't know if I want literature. I wish her well. She lived here for a time. She should come to the museum and see the bones. I have endless gratitude for my commitment to tie my time up in the time of others. Because I think to make time your God and to say I want to hoard time for myself, and yet I have nothing to do with it except hoard it. It's detrimental to the already fraying edges of the heart.

that has turned itself over to machinery. And so the only way I know how to act in opposition to that is to really fiercely, through robust and relentless curiosity, tie my time up with the time of others. We've only been together all of us for a few minutes, but I have so much gratitude for those few minutes because I think that I am already feeling more full than I would be had I not had them with you.

For a moment now, our lives are time. tied up together. By that I mean, is that should I make it through the evening, I'll step outside into the night and I will still deeply miss my mother's voice. I'll go back to my hotel and I will long for the sound of my mother's voice.

However, I have in the little bit of time we've gotten together gotten to tell you a story, and the next time you hear I want to dance with somebody for a brief moment, you might think this reminds me for one second of the story that guy told about his mom. And now my mother

gets to live with you for a split second in an undetermined future, and our lives are tied up together. When I was younger, I was incarcerated often because I was both bad at stealing things and bad at lying about it. I would recommend, not that I'm trying to steer anyone towards a life of crime, but be good at one or the other. You can't be bad at both. And I never got good at one or the other, so I was in jail often. And because of this, one of my major, organizing political principles is correspondence with incarcerated people. I correspond with political prisoners in Gaza. I correspond with anarchists in Sudan, and I correspond with folks who are incarcerated across

the United States, largely Muslim folks, you know, because when I was incarcerated, I got a letter from a young Muslim brother who I didn't even know. I was raised Muslim, by the way. Shout out to other Muslims in the room if they're already. I'm in Toronto, so there are some. I have a regular correspondent. with this incarcerated brother who is incarcerated in upstate New York. And what I love about these letters, no matter where they come from, is that we're laying our suffering

atop our pleasures, and that strips us of this hierarchy that enforces these individualistic ideas that say, because you are suffering more than I am suffering, your life or story holds a certain level of value that mind cannot attain and all I have to feel is guilt, right? I'm more interested in saying, I would like to feel a depth of gratitude for what we are sharing together because our lives, again, are tied up in each other's lives. I correspond with this Carcered Brother in Upstate New York. And I won a different award a couple years back. And he and I were talking on the phone.

And he was telling me about how his daughter was driving up to visit him. The day I won the award, you know, and he was like, I haven't seen my daughter in so many years. My daughter's coming up to visit, you know. You know, I'm like, you know what I mean? This is beautiful. And I remember feeling so small and ashamed, weirdly. I was like, I can't bring up this material award. Like, he has a thing that is so large.

And we talked on the phone about a month later. And by that point, he had gotten word of the award because it was in the papers and whatnot. And he said, brother, brother, why didn't you tell me about this thing that you won? And I went, I did this whole silly, guilt trippy thing of, oh, you know, I didn't want to disrupt this, this beautiful moment of your daughter coming to visit. And I just wanted to give you the floor and seed the ground to your beautiful news. And he said this thing that I always think about, which is that's not how it works. My life is tied to your life.

And because of this, we are both larger in the eyes of the eyes of. those who want us gone. And I think about that all the time because my biggest responsibility, I believe, is to create a life that is so open to interweaving into the lives of other people. Other people I don't know, other people I want to know, other people I might encounter, people who stop me on the street. When people stop me and say, like, I read a book of yours and I liked it, my first question is, what's your name? When I'm dead, I would like people to say, I ran into that guy on the street once and he seemed way more interested in me than I was in him.

He seemed interested in making something of this interaction that served both of us. That is the kind of life that I would like to live and I would like to commit to. And I'm going to tell one last thing about birds. Two sets of birds who found their way to my house. There's like prime real estate on my roof for birds to build nests.

and when I go into my closet, you hear them. And I don't disrupt them, but I would go into my closet and I would hear birds, baby birds, wailing, screaming, right? Freshly born child birds, wailing and screaming at the fresh horror of being born into a world they don't understand and cannot fly anywhere in. Or wailing and screaming at the fact of their beloved parent's absence while their parent is scouring for food somewhere. And as time goes on, the birds screaming and wailing, as I got a little bit older, they found their voices a little bit.

And the screaming would become something that slightly resembled singing. And that's when I knew they'd be ready to fly off soon. And that happened once this summer and then a month later it happened again. A new set of birds came. And I heard the wailing and the screaming. And then I heard them slowly transitioned into singing before they took to the sky. And I thought, what an arc. of life that there is, I think, the world and its intersecting apocalypsees require of me

both singing and screaming and the kind of limitless belief that I have not yet found every inch of the wings I require to navigate a sky that is terrifying to me and one that I feel unequipped to handle. And writing is the way that I build the feathers that hopefully equip me for an actual life. I'm not foolish enough to believe that what I do on the page is distinct or unique enough to be all I care about. I care about living a life that sends me running back to the page with urgency and excitement. I love the song Maggot Brain. The story, as it's told, is that George Clinton told Eddie Hazel, who was then like a 22-year-old

guitarist, who played, by the way, if you love Maggot Brain. and fun fact, Eddie Hazel played that in one take, single take. Can you imagine if you've heard that song playing that in a single take? George Clinton told Eddie Hazel, play like your mama died, or at least that's the lure, but it's not the full scope of what he told him. He told him, and I think this is vital, to play as if he had just received the news that his mother was dead, and play as if he had to take a full measure of his life, the life he had before, and the life he then had after, a life where his time, this part is me talking,

a life where his time was once ornamented by a presence and the reality of his time after was now ornamented by loss. And that is why if you listen to Maggot Brain closely, it sounds like someone grappling with that. There are moments in the instrumental Magogain

where it sounds like the guitar is running up against the wall that it can't break through. And it sounds like the guitar is pacing the outskirts of a land that is familiar, but it can't quite decipher it. And I think that's essential context. because it asks you, one, to press your ear closer to what you are listening to. But it also asks you to have a depth of curiosity that says, what does my relationship with loss with grief sound like?

What does it feel like when I hear something that reminds me of someone I can no longer touch in a material sense? What does this sound send me crawling back to? What does this open up my world to? I desperately want to know what you, is the sound you miss when you press your ear to a wall. That informs me about you and your life and what you've lost and what you want back.

And I don't want to do anything with that other than say, again, let's tie our lives up together so that when I hear that sound, I might think of you. And my life becomes bigger by the capability I have to think of you for a moment and say, this is something that exists outside of me. And therefore, I am a little less significant than I thought I was, which is beautiful. My dear elder, Miss Anna, I'm in community with elders because when I was in and out of jail in my 20s,

I had gotten arrested so many times for things that are like bad but not so bad you can do like real time. It was like a couple months of time. But I had gotten in so much trouble that a judge was like, listen, man, either you go do a year in jail or you volunteer at the senior center. Those are your only two options. And of course, being a 23-year-old where I was, again, a baby, I was like, I'll do the year. I'll do the year. I don't want to be around old people. I'll do a year.

Fortunately, I had a public defender who was like, he will go to the senior center. And now, for 20 years of my life, I've never left. I did the first year reluctantly and angrily. I did the second year with some hesitation. And I've never left. And one of the seniors at that center is my beloved elder, Miss Anna,

who, at 88 years old, is always asking me why I'm not married. And I think she has a very low standard what a husband can be because I'll like bake a cinnamon roll out of a Pillsbury thing and bring it to her. And she'll be like, you made this? Why ain't you married? I'm like, well, I mean, anytime I get a haircut, she's like, you look like you took care of yourself today. Why aren't you married? It's like, I think the bar should be higher than a man's showering. You know what I mean? I love Ms. Anna, who at 88 years old. She recently had a very minor surgery that I had to drive her to the hospital for because I am one of the few people she has left. She has lost two husbands. She's at an age where the majority of her

friends have died before her, and she has, I think, every reason to say, I think I've gotten all I can out of this life. This is what people ask us to believe about elders, that they hit a certain age and then they're greening for an exit. Some are, to be clear, Ms. Anna, what I love about her and why she teaches me every day, I know no one who wants life more than her. I have never met a person who wants to continue living with the ferocity and urgency of Ms. Anna, and she wants to keep living because she firmly believes that upon each day she may encounter something that illuminates a thing that she has in her 88 years otherwise never experience. And my nihilism and my cynicism shrinks at the altar of that kind of urgency.

And my doom spiraling shrinks at the altar of an 88, almost now 89, her birthdays in two weeks. I haven't gotten her a gift yet. Maybe I'll get married for her. I'll just marry someone. I'll just like marry someone. You're like, happy birthday. At almost 89 years old, who says, I don't want to die yet.

I haven't seen everything that could possibly move me. She is so aware of her going away and so aware of the desire to cling to, our going away must be sacred. It can't be passive. It doesn't matter for me if I am in my 40s, 50, 60s, I live beyond that, my going away has to remain sacred. And I think about Ms. Anna often, and I will say this, I think,

so much of what is demanded of the writer now, I think, is to write these sprawling elegies for a future they can no longer have instead of demanding perhaps the possibility that a new world can be built out of the materials that we have at our disposal if we look towards each other with real curiosity and a depth of wonder and a depth of care and a depth of questioning. And therefore, I think that my purpose is not, to tell you about the future that is going to escape us all. There's a lot of that, and I understand that that is an important part of where we are.

But the way I see it, death is the only certainty we've got. And so, yes, I would like to not accelerate towards it, but I'm also not going to spend my time steeped in writing elegies for a certainty. I am instead committing in my writing to a deep affection for the vibrant and decadent, unimaginable next hour or next minute, which might, in its passing, offer a revelation of deficit or of delight or of heartbreak. And I've been thinking lately, too, what gratitude I have for a heart that is still capable of breaking. One crisis that I think helps fold into all these other larger crises is that people have refused themselves,

the possibility that their heart is still capable of breaking in unique ways, that it has not yet broken, or that it has broken in ways that are beyond repair and therefore can never break effectively again. But there is so much to break our hearts every day and not just in ways that are devastating. My heart breaks when my dog chases a squirrel up, and the squirrel runs up a tree,

and my dog sits at the foot of the tree and stares up every morning, realizing that she does not have the capability to climb it. That breaks my heart. But I also know that to have a heart that open for breaking, to be open for the business of breaking also means it's open for the business of repair. And I have to look

upon the breaking with the same frosty I look upon the repair with. And I have gratitude for a heart which refuses apathy and which refuses atrophy. And I guess the last thing I'll say is I want that heart for you all. I hope you all still have that heart and I want that heart for whomever you love.

And I don't know. We're in a time I think where we owe ourselves an expansive ability to refuse and a desire to refuse what is being forced upon us and what we are being told about what our futures are and what we're being told about the limits of our futures. And so maybe our refusals will make us brave and they will carry us to newer and better affections upon which a new world will be built. And it is going to take a very long time. It will, to quote Woody Harrelson,

it'll be hard, goddamn work. Thank you. Hard work, yes. But that's the kind of new world I think we could all get behind. Hanif Abdul-Rakiv's most recent book is There's Always This Year on Basketball and Ascension, the winner of a 2026 National Book Critic Circle Award. And he's the 2026 winner of the Western International Award for Nonfiction. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey, I'm Matea from the show Bookends. If you want a front row seat to heated rivalry, keep listening. You heard me right, I'm talking about that heated rivalry, starring Hudson Williams and Connor's story. You probably know that the heated rivalry series was based on a book by Rachel

Reed, and the next book in that series is on its way. If you want an inside look, Rachel Reed is joining me on stage for a special live event at Massey Hall on October 13th. We'll be talking all things heated rivalry in a room full of fans, so come join the party. You can find tickets and more details at cbcbooks.ca. Reflections on loss, longing, and belonging are constants in Hanif Abdulrakheb's writing, along with the abiding presence of his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. When Hanif joined me in the Ideas Studio, I asked him how those themes have coalesced around the idea of home in his work.

You know, my first book of poems is a book called The Crown Ain't Worth Much. It came out in 2016. I started working on it around 2014, and I remembered thinking about how I, I grew up in this golden era of, or one golden era, of a very specific kind of black film. The black film that was telling a story of young black men primarily surviving in neighborhoods, something like men of society, boys in the hood, juice, these kind of things. And I was growing up in that era of film while also understanding my surroundings to not be wholly different than, you know, that which I was witnessing. And I think that that kind of fueled me, this idea that, you know, in the places that people consider,

to fly over states. There are really rich narratives about people trying to survive. But as I got kind of more, particularly with my last book, there's always this year, I think the concern expanded significantly and it wasn't just trying to bludgeon people with Ohio in the stories of Ohio. And it became more fascinating to me to ask questions of what it means to have a place when it no longer reflects you or what it is to stay in love with a place through just your continued presence in it. What does it mean to choose a place back? You know, none of us choose where we begin. Very true.

Place is kind of something that initially happens to you. And then after it's immediate happening, you may, if you're fortunate, have the chance to choose it back. You did. But I did, yeah. And I think that has to me less to do with kind of pounding my chest about how great Ohio is and more to do with a deeper consideration of of what it is to kind of try to rewrite your history in a place that's trying to write over it. On that, if I recall correctly,

you said somewhere in one of your essays that home is where the heart is, but the heart doesn't always stay home or something like that. Yeah, yeah. How much would you say that Columbus actually feels like home to you? It feels like home a great deal to me. So much so that I think sometimes

other places can feel bewildering, not in a bad way, but in a way where I just don't understand the human rhythms. The architecture itself is architecture, but the human rhythms of other places can be disorienting for me because I have gotten so attuned to the music and the heartbeat of Central Ohio. Also, Columbus feels like home to me because I've gotten to build what I think is a pretty robust community of people multi-generational. And so in that way, I feel most of the most of the clearly translated in Columbus.

You know, people in Columbus, I think they are proud of the work I do, but they don't really define me by that. And I think that actually doesn't happen in most other places. I'm defined first by what I've produced, which is understandable. But in Columbus, I'm defined first by who I am because so many of those people have known me for years before I wrote anything. And so I think oftentimes that my sense of belonging is not necessarily tied to a geographic location. It's instead tied to the people who arrive to wherever I am and see me most clearly.

I have a lot of gratitude for the fact that I get to read things in front of many, many, many more people now than I used to. But there is something about me that still loves that early sense of I'm reading in a room of 50 people and I'm not sure how they're going to react to work, right? That to me is not tied to any home in a literal sense. It's tied to what we can build collectively in a room, you know, on a stage or in an audience. I want to go back to the beginning, if I may, and ask you just how you came to writing. What made it something that you were not just able to do, but something that you needed or wanted desperately to do?

Yeah, well, I started so much later, I think, than a lot of my peers. I wasn't very interested in writing growing up. I was very interested in reading, but not at all interested in writing. in my teens in early 20s, I found the punk and hardcore scene in the early mid-2000s when it was kind of flourishing and in having a moment. And at that point, every micro scene geographically or what have you had zines. That would, you know, now I think there's a beautiful revival of zine making. And I thought that it would be important to report on the movements of the scene I was in because these scenes were intertwined, you know, Columbus and Dayton and Detroit and Pittsburgh. I remember one zine I got out of a,

it was like a Detroit black punk zine, had like a scene report. It was just kind of the reports of what was going down in the interior universe of that scene. I thought, well, someone should do this where I am. And that's how I got into writing, because it was an act of service for the people I cared about to say, I know that you, reader, are not here where I am, but I would like to offer you a window into what's happening where I am, and so that might be enticing enough for you to come see us. That was it. I didn't want a career out of writing. For me, it was just an act of service. Sounds like a mission. Yeah, it felt like no one else wanted to do this thing, and I was capable of doing it, and so I did it. And from there, I began to write album reviews for regional and local newspapers. I got to review

all of the big pop albums that no one else wanted to touch, which was great for me, because I don't know if I think criticism for me is something where the critic sits on high and dictates to an audience what they should or should not be hearing or listening to or feeling. I begin to ask myself the greater question of, is this album achieving what it seems like it's setting out to do? Because a lot of those albums I did not like, and I would go into them saying, well, I'm not a fan of this artist, but I still need to write a review that has substance and that has nuance and clarity. And you could still appreciate the intention. Yeah, I had to find a way to appreciate the intention. And I think that is what made me kind of formally a critic. So what inspired, who, who inspired you, who was influential in your writing?

My mother, though she was not alive when I found poetry. My mother worked two jobs. She worked for the state. And then she worked at a J.C. Penny call center, which, you know, back in the day, you used to get these thick J.C. Penny catalogs. And you had to call in the order, you know, which is a wild thing. about now. But my mother was a person who answered those phone calls. And when she was done working two jobs, she would come home and work on a novel on her typewriter, very old, very

loud typewriter. And we had a computer in the home, but I think she liked the rigor of the typewriter, the sound of it, the symphony of hitting a key and having it respond with kind of a loud ringing in a sense. And I was too young to think about it in this way at the time, but that was the first time I witnessed someone committing to something they loved, even though they did not have perhaps. I would imagine she didn't have the time and energy for the job, but she found the time and energy for the thing she loved to do. And the thing was writing.

The thing was right. It wasn't just anything. And writing for the sake of completing something she envisioned. Did she complete it? Yes. I have not read it. It's in a box in my father's closet still to this day. My mother died when I was 13.

But I think about that, that kind of rigor and commitment to craft. When I was getting into poems, I had this really strict routine. I worked at a breakfast diner, which was ideal for me because I would get up at 6 a.m. I would go to work and I would work until around one or two. I would get off work and I would take a nap and I would write. I would read poems and write poems in my bedroom. And then I would like go to a show, you know, and then stay up all night and then do it all over again. And I think my mother was at the core of that.

At a very early age, seeing someone who built a routine around the kind of writing that returns you to yourself. You know, because if you go out into the world and you're working for other people to jobs specifically in my mother's case, you are loaning a part of yourself out to necessity. And that creates a debt. There's a debt that's accruing there when you're repeatedly saying, I know I have to do this, but it is not who I am. and to live a life where I got to watch my mother return to herself through writing taught me a lot about how I could do it for my own purposes. I really heard the bits all over your writing where you confessed to being an isolationist. And in fact, you at one point say that you thought you were in love with loneliness.

Yes. What happened? I think it's one thing to create a self-made universe wherein loneliness is an option. that you have built and chosen for yourself, understanding that if you step outside of that, there are people who will catch you and hold you. People really love you. I spent a lot of my late teens and early 20s

insisting upon that kind of self-architected loneliness. But it was almost like a myth, because I knew that I had a depth of friendship and a real robust circle of people who would do things with me and would go to shows with me and would sit with me and all these things, right? And then I began to lose those people gradually. A lot of my friends died when I was in my late teens, early 20s.

And then you realize that you have perhaps, through this kind of myth of your own making, squandered the ability to deeply love and deeply care for people who needed your affection, who at least needed the confirmation of your desire to love them well. And once they are gone, of course, if you're lucky and if you did love them at all,

they return to you in these kind of small moments of memory or small moments of the artifact left behind or in the moment you see one of their parents smile in the way they smiled. And then you realize, of course, that their life belonged to you, but it also belonged to everyone who loved them. And so their death also belongs to everyone who loved them.

And that, at least for me, what it meant was that even as the number of people I loved began to decrease in terms of the material, sense of them being in the world, the responsibility I felt for loving them well in their absence increased tenfold. It felt urgent for me to live a life where I was careful about how I spent my time in the understanding that it didn't belong to just me.

And I didn't want to have a life where I felt like I was cheating everyone who was still there out of our shared presence with each other. And so I think loss is the thing that defined my awakening around loneliness more than anything else. Though, to be clear, you know, I still do like a lot of alone time. As a writer, it's almost necessary. I mean, yeah. I do. I will say, though, I sometimes think many of us write alone in a basic sense.

sense. Like, I'm not writing with my friends often. But I also think, though, if you're lucky enough to believe yourself as creating within a lineage, which I think that all writers should, or all people who make things, should be in deep consideration of that. I think because you don't actually need a two-way permission to place yourself within a lineage. It's not like I need to write a letter to the Tony Morrison estate to say, hey, I think I want to be in lineage of Tony Morrison. You know, You can just admire someone's work and see the path their work took and see the craft and desire that for your own work. Maybe not an exact mimicry, but a desire to fulfill and carry on the process and say, I'm in lineage with these people. And what that does is that charges you with a real responsibility for care and for precision and for rigor.

And it also actually, I think, upsets the idea that we write alone. put another way. I mentioned my mother writing on a typewriter, right? I was a bad kid, so I was often in trouble. And I would often get grounded. And when I got grounded, I'd have to go to my room, often on a weekend, because that is when fun things would happen. And my family would often go and do other things. And at that point, my mother would be like, oh, I'll stay home. I'll stay home with him because it means they get to write. You know what I mean? And because the typewriter was so loud, I could almost like open my window in here when she was working. And there were times where I would sneak very quietly out of my room and cross. all up the carpeted stairs so that she wouldn't hear me, even though they were old and creaked, so she probably did hear me. And I would just sit at the edge of the stairs and peek into her room, open door while she was riding with her back to me. It felt like I was sitting over her shoulder, watching her do something she loved in a way that was just unbridled and only for her. I like to think ancestry and lineage and all these things matter deeply because when I am now sitting in my office and writing alone with my back to the door, I would like to feel like

like my mother is in the room sitting over my shoulder as I once sat over her shoulder. And that is as much of a guiding force as anything. So yes, I would like to think that I don't write alone because I would like to think that my mother in the pursuit of her artistic work never got to fulfill the dream of having her name on a book. But we get to be intertwined in the long tale of making things. We are not only in real familial things, lineage, but we're in also an artistic lineage. And so I am producing a product alone, so to speak, but I'm not writing alone. Because you paint such a vivid picture of the influence your mom had on your writing, I do have to ask you why you haven't read her book yet. I don't know. I mean,

you know, I think, I sometimes think that I don't know if she would have wanted me to or anyone to. I really believe in the sanctity of the writer's ability to determine what becomes of their work. It has never felt to me that just because I am the writing son of a mother who wrote that I should have unfettered access to what she wrote. Fair. You know, my mother died very suddenly. So it's not as though there was a wish left behind to do something with the work. My mother's novel may be beautiful, but I also don't know how she felt about it. I don't know if she believed it was ready to be read by others, and I want to honor that.

I do want to ask one more question sort of related to all this. just writ large how your writing has been shaped by the various losses that you have endured throughout your life starting with your mother. Yeah. It's more of a question of how my brain and heart have been shaped by those losses. And then by virtue of that shaping, my writing has responded or my writing is mirrored that I'm so concerned with the passage of time, but not in a way that's harrowing or frightening to me. My mother had a whole life before me or any of my siblings were born, and then her life was altered by the desire to have in love and raise children,

and then she died. My friends who I lost were whole people before we encountered each other, and then we encountered each other, and by the miracle of that, we got to have a, few years of a life that we maybe could not have imagined without each other, and then they died. I have become distinctly aware of the fact that it is impossible for any of us to encounter all of the people in the world who may love us well. There are so many people in the world and that the vast majority of them don't know us or don't care that we exist, right? That is miraculous

and joyful in a way, but also overwhelming in my brain to say there are a great many people people who could love me deeply and love me well, and we will never once encounter each other. Now, on one hand, it devastates me, but on another hand, I feel deep gratitude for the fact that by just a miracle of time in place and stumbling towards others, whether we know it or not, I have encountered people in my lifetime who I am lucky enough to love deeply. And that I think informs my writing, the sense of I have lost and I have lost and I have lost and yet I am not completely empty. I was unhoused for a stretch in Columbus and I was unhoused. I would often not sleep at night. I would just kind of like walk the streets of the city, which is interesting to do in a city

you love and know very well because there's a stretch around say 4 a.m. where, you know, the folks who are working night shift are heading home, but it's still a little too early for everyone else. And the city really feels still and quiet and like you can hold it in the palm of your hand. And in that moment, you reclaim a sense of power because to be unhoused in many cities is to be either invisible or a nuisance or a burden. But I loved wandering the streets at that early hour before the sun began to kind of crack over the skyline and even the cars were mostly gone. And there was a church in downtown Columbus

and every morning there was a maintenance worker who would come and unlock the church at 6 a.m. And he would see me and without speaking, he would understand my plate and he would just open the door and let me sleep in the fuse for a few hours, right? I think what I would like my writing to do is to say that

the amount that you have lost pales in comparison to the possibility that could exist if you can find some mercy for a few hours and then attack the world again. And so I think I'm trying to generate a real sense of gratitude for the time that I have had and a real sense of grace for myself for not always living up to the responsibility of loving people well when I could. I require grace, you know, but I'm really concerned about what I see is people's lack of ability to offer grace to themselves, which then becomes a crisis of their inability to offer grace to anyone else. And I think in my writing, I have an opportunity to say, I can build a monument out of the parts of this person that I love so much and a monument so large that I cannot see behind it or through it. or around it. And that is a form of grace-making because I'm saying, I can't see all the ways

that we might have failed each other when you were here because I am so in love with the single moment that I remember. Before we finish off, I just want to take you back a whole decade to 2016. Okay. You were writing a lot about what a terrible year was, exhausting, depressing. And it was for a lot of people. I remember this headline in Slate magazine saying it was the year that democracy died. But it was a terrible year, especially for black people, for a number of reasons.

The lethal violence against black Americans, the death of icons like Prince, and the rise of Maga and the American nativism movement. Just looking back, what do you think 2016 unleashed? I think American history has inflection points, but those inflection points are responses to a pre-existing sense. sickness. It's almost like having an illness that lives in the body that flares up every now and then, and then those flare-ups become so consistent that it is one's new reality. I think 2016 was an inflection point and a flare-up that felt to me very familiar. Now, the means by which those

inflection points began to exist, and I'm thinking particularly of the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, like Philando Castile, was murdered on Facebook Live, you know, and that seemed like a very of the time kind of thing. So the technology by which we understood Black Death, for example, had evolved. But the actual root issue was no different than, you know. And as we're seeing now, which I think is a moment where the flare-up has become so commonplace that it is just the new normal. The disease is the new normal.

And I do think that in 2016, having any kind of political power that appeals to and confirms any biases or any modes of hatred or discrimination, these kind of things, will fuel people to have unfettered access to that part of them that most wants white supremacy, for example, to flourish. You know, I think 2016 was one inflection point of that, and I don't think America has responded very well to envisioning any other option for how people can live. And I specifically think that as people grow increasingly dissatisfied with the reality of their material conditions in the states, and as people begin to abandon the hope that any political party will save them, you know, in the states right now, you have farmers, for example, who are, You know, they're like, you know, I voted for Trump and I can't believe this happened and whatever, whatever, whatever. And I think the impulse is to look at those people and say, ha, ha, you voted for this and now look at what you have, which I get that impulse. That's not my approach. I don't know how much sympathy I may have for these people, but what I do have is an understanding that they, like many other people, have been fooled by the promises of a political party that they believed would materially improve their lives. And now in the aftermath of that being fooled, they have to ask themselves questions around the utility. of power because that's really what we're talking about.

Power serves power. It doesn't serve individuals. It doesn't serve the working class. It doesn't serve the poor. It doesn't serve anyone at any margin. This is maybe too optimistic given what I know about America and its political relationship. But I do hope that people are going to begin to ask themselves, how can I individually improve not only my chances to survive, but improve the chances.

of those around me I am in community with. How can we build coalitions and how can we build power that's centered around? We had like a tornado in Columbus about a month ago. You know, again, climate disaster, right? Like every storm,

this is the least severe storm that I'll probably see the rest of my life kind of thing, you know? But trees were down in my neighborhood. Trees were falling through the roofs of my neighbor's houses. And there was a moment in the aftermath of the storm where me and all my neighbors

were just out in the street wandering around, looking at the damage. And then some, someone just went to go help pick a, lift a tree out of someone's yard. And we all kind of went and did it. It was this unspoken thing. It was this thing of looking around and saying that person needs more hands than they have than we have them. I really think that might be a better way forward than relying on and placing your faith in a party that cares about the maintaining of power more than they care about the actual movements of the working class

individual. I think that's going to be a hard sell for a lot of Americans, and so I'm not confident. But, you know, I do think, you know, 2016 was for a lot of people, a point where they were like, oh, wow, the party in power is the party that is going to allow me to tap into this kind of thing within me that wants a world that more mirrors my desires. You wrote in 2016, quote, I'm not as invested in things getting better than I am in things getting honest. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not, you know, people are always like, what makes you hopeful? And I'm not really propelled by hope, I don't think, which doesn't mean that I'm a pessimist, but I really think one's optimism must lie in honesty of their circumstances. And without that,

I'd be setting myself up for failure and I'd be setting my readers up for failure. Optimism cannot be this vague, fluffy thing that descends from the sky and we all feel good about it. It really, at its core, has to be rooted in an understanding of the circumstances you exist in. Because if not, what are you actually building towards? I do think honesty about one's circumstances is the bridge that gets us to a clearer sense of what there is to be optimistic about and why. And I work with a group of young writers every year, high school writers, and we workshop each other's poems and once a month we sit for hours and read and write. And I'm ecstatic over the moon when I think about the way they look at the world and how they're looking has

sharpened my own looking. These are all writers from the neighborhood I grew up in too. And so they see the east side of Columbus. They afforded so much dignity and they afforded so much grace. And through their eyes, it is a kingdom worth saving, you know, worth looking to the way it looks now for the next 30, 40, 50 years. They believe in the history that is embedded in it and they want to protect it at all costs through their archival, which is their poems. They're archiving a place that they want to stay, they want to remain forever. I place my optimism in that, yeah. Given everything we've talked about with all of that in mind, what is your primary role or responsibility as a poet and as a cultural writer and a critic?

in this moment right now. Oh, I think it's what it always has been for me, which is to point people towards something and say, this has a beginning. This did not just emerge. It came from somewhere. It has an origin point, and that origin point likely has another origin point.

I'm trying to connect people to a series of threads that defines the question of how we got to the thing I'm pointing at, you know? Oftentimes, the thing I'm pointing at is rooted in pop culture or cultural history, but sometimes the thing I'm pointing at is everything that is put in place that is attempting to atrophy our hearts and brains, which too has an origin point and a purpose. And my job isn't really to convince people to rebel against these mechanisms. But it is to say, look at this and ask yourself if the cost is not having the brain that you once had, which means the cost is not having the capacity for feeling that you once had, is this still a road you want to go down?

Do you still want to surrender yourself fully to a technology that thinks and feels for you? Do you still want to surrender yourself fully to a path in a country that doesn't exist anymore? Do you still want to live in pursuit of an American dream that is outdated? And if you do, that's fine. My job is, I think, not to even steer someone in a direction that, because I think my work of cultural criticism or analysis is not prescriptive. It is largely to point and say, here's what I'm seeing, and here's a potential outcome for what I'm seeing. and I'm concerned about the outcome, and maybe you would be concerned about the outcome too.

But even if you're not, here's what I worry the cost is. And for me, the cost of a heart that is fraying at the edges is too high. The cost of outsourcing my feeling, my depth of feeling, is too high. So many of my friends have kids now, and this has been a real delight for me, because the sense of wonder that can be so commonly be the engine of propulsion for a five-year-old, and to get to be an audience to that, and in being an audience to that, ask yourself how you can sharpen your own capacity for wonder. That has changed me more than almost anything, formally as a writer, as a thinker, as a feeler.

and it would be a betrayal to these people I love, these young people I love who are telling me grand stories about the ants and the ant hills that they saw at recess or the worm that they held in their hand during the day. It would be a grand betrayal to them if I sat at the altar of their wonder and then went home and outsource that feeling and that excitement that I felt to some technology

that is in place to make me feel less. Right? And so I think that my role right now is more commonly to say, what's the cost that you're comfortable with? It's a question I'm asking myself all the time too. For me, the cost will always be too high if the cost comes at the defraying of my own heart. Hanif Abdul-Rakib, so grateful to speak with you. And congratulations again. Thank you. Thank you. It was wonderful to be here. Hanif Abdul-Rakib is the 2026 winner of the Weston International Award for Nonfiction. Special thanks to Megan Leahy, David Lennard, and the Writers' Trust of Canada. This episode was produced by Chris Wadskow. Our website is cbc.cai.c.com. Where you can subscribe to our podcast.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nicola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.ca slash podcasts.