The jacket copy of Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest book, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension begins, addressed to the reader, “If you know, you know.” And, beholden to the unsubtle hype of the statement, it’s true. Anyone familiar with Abdurraqib’s past work knows that the book’s mix of prose and poetry will only sort of be about basketball, the same way Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest is only sort of about A Tribe Called Quest and Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance is only sort of about Black performance art. The same way, maybe, a dinner party with beloved friends is only sort of about the dinner, more so about the gathering, the making of something to be shared and enjoyed and remembered before the familiar melancholy of departure.
A reader craving a streamlined thesis (presumably about basketball) might be frustrated with the book’s expansive network of meditations, but this is a trademark of Abdurraqib’s work. In an interview with The Ringer, he explains that he’s always writing in opposition to “aboutness,” preferring instead to allow a multitude of subjects to wax in and out of focus without ever eclipsing each other. And so, with the humility, flair, and insight that’s landed him three nominations for the National Book Award and myriad other accolades, Abdurraqib writes about basketball, yes, and LeBron James, but also of music, film, love, his father and mother, Ohio, departures, returns, haircuts, America, race, war, violence, rage, grief, flight, and their intersections. But if there were to be an “about” to this book, it would be the subject of time. The book, after all, uses time’s passing as its primary structural tool. There’s Always This Year is not divided into chapters or sections, but quarters counting down from twelve minutes to zero. There are timeouts and intermissions, brief interspersed moments when we are suspended from time to reflect on “Legendary Ohio Aviators” and films about basketball, but we always rejoin the countdown, the clock a reminder that whatever euphoria or heartache Abdurraqib is leading us through, it’s only for the moment. “Impermanence was the altar I was leading us to this entire time,” he tells us toward the end of the “Pregame” section. And then, just before the clock hits zero and we’re launched into the game: “Not everyone will die. Nobody lives forever.”
The duality of that final Pregame line—a contradiction, a mandatory pause to consider what possibility denies both dying and living forever—foreshadows Abdurraqib’s back-and-forth relationship with time in There’s Always This Year. In moments, he’s grateful for the cushioning provided by time’s evanescence, embracing the safe retreat into memory just as much as the potential for what’s to come. “I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives,” he writes. “I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know. What can only hurt me as much as I allow it to.” In other moments, and perhaps more often, he grieves the pain time inevitably brings. “The joyous weight of trophies and medals is nothing when compared to what the heart must endure, how it shields us from what it can, for a little while, before falling to its knees,” he writes. Then, later, “Survive enough, and there is always a darker tunnel lurking in the periphery.”
If the book is primarily about time, the practice and tactics of survival are another powerful, inseparable thread running through There’s Always This Year, as are the practice and tactics of war. Abdurraqib spends ample time loving up on his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, and extends this love to any neighborhood dubbed a “war zone” by inhabitants not held by its homes. Of his older brother’s coveted army fatigue jacket, of the H2 Hummer LeBron James purchased before his final high school season, of the toy guns and super soakers Abdurraqib played with as a kid, he writes, “And then there is the fantasy, not only the way America can sell war but also how eagerly it can sell the aesthetics of war back to people who have been convinced they live in so-called war zones…The powerful call things ‘war’ because it’s hard to sell the plain horrors of terror, but it is not nearly as hard to sell the materials.”
Among the many moments of reckoning Abdurraqib offers in There’s Always This Year, these links between the language of war and cultural trends fueled by the intersections of American consumerism and militarism feel especially pressing. America, as it was in 2003 (LeBron’s draft class) and likely will be as long as the fruits of empire remain its main motivation, is once again publicly enacting and enabling devastating acts of violence on foreign soil, and support is fading for the mass movement for racial justice and police reform since the 2020 murders of George Floyd, Brianna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, even as police violence increases. Meanwhile, camo is making a documented comeback in fashion, and music festivals thrive by catering to early-2000s tastes, an era defined—at least in part—by eerily familiar justifications of war and islamophobia by a majority-white political party. These correlations of cultural nostalgia and our country’s constant recommitment to violence in the name of whiteness never quite take the main stage of There’s Always This Year, but they’re never absent, either: “What good is witness in a country obsessed with forgetting?” Abdurraqib asks. “But I’m talking about history now and history ain’t nothing but a whole bunch of shit a lot of witnesses don’t wanna speak on.”
These confrontations with cultural nostalgia and forgetting complement Abdurraqib’s own confessions and sins of longing. His conscience seems to waver between guilt and forgiveness when it comes to nostalgia, between rejecting its justifications and embracing its salve. Either way, he refuses to let it remain unexamined as an innocent act, writing instead, “When I say nostalgia is a hustle and we are the hustlers…I mean that we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory.” This, maybe, is Abdurraqib’s ultimate survival tactic, the only way he knows how to live simultaneously with the ache of what’s lost to the past and the pain of what the future will bring: to lie. Perhaps, depending on what’s being forgotten, and for what reason, and to what outcome, the lie of a painless memory can be forgiven, at least for a moment, if it means survival. Not everyone is guilty. Nobody is innocent. A funeral is still a gathering.
While this is to say nothing of There’s Always This Year’s tender love of Ohio, the game of basketball, LeBron James’ rise and legacy, or any of the other subjects Abdurraqib thoughtfully and honestly tends to, his outlook toward the future and his recollections of the past never quite reach optimism. This makes sense, given they also never separate themselves from urgent, pressing realities of surviving in the United States—or being an accomplice in it. “If I haven’t made it clear yet,” he tells us toward the end of the fourth quarter, after painful and rageful recountings of the murders of Henry Green and Tamir Rice, “this is all about the good fortune of who gets to make it out of somewhere and who doesn’t. Who survives and how.” Still, the book finds a way to be hopeful, even if the hope is fleeting. It’s a testament, maybe, to Abdurraqib’s commitment to surviving that he ends the book with one final, gorgeous lie. One where, even with all his prior convictions of impermanence, he imagines himself poised in a moment that never ends, a past self with past beloveds on an unchanged basketball court in Columbus, Ohio. A moment we all know, now, is a lie, but which Abdurraqib forgives himself for indulging. And for which we must forgive him, also, even as the clock ticks to zero.