Analysis of "The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up" by Hanif Abdurraqib

 Poem Found Here: "The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up" by Hanif Abdurraqib

 

 How much should a reader know about a reference?  I didn't know what summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up.  I also didn't know what songs they were famous for.  So I looked them up.  Can I Kick It? Yes, you can!  I remember that song.  A quick wiki read showed that they broke up in 1998.  And I'm there.

 At least my memory is there: outdoors in the neighborhood during the summer: chilling out with some friends or people from the neighborhood.  The music fills the backdrop as it would be on some 104.9 or 99.7 around where I lived.

 But we don't start out with music we start out in color, "all them black / boys in the 'hood."  I find the color interesting and then the mention of the boys in the 'hood because it feels like we're opening up to a movie or a visual memory.  The structures of adjusted lines brings a feel that the reader is also following this movie / visual memory along with the speakers with each short line feeling like a camera cut. 

 And as we follow this path there's some interesting references to earth, "wallets / unearthed in cities ", "all empty / 'cept for maybe the bones / "blessed the /earth with" and this is the point I looked back to the title "A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up."  The musical implications are there with references to places early in the poem -- but these type of terms along with the idea of Tribe brings a sort of history about communities about the speakers observations.

 So when the speaker brings up how the boys have wallets from cities "they ain't never seen before" there's also a sense of a community stuck in a certain area. "on my block crawled back / into they cases."

 I find this line the core of this poem, "new mouths & fathers "  The ambiguity of ownership.  Is "new" for both "mouths" and "fathers", or is "fathers" part of a new statement.  For me I think it's both.  I think it's a line that confirms this cycle of new mouths and fathers that never leave unlike how brandon's mother leaves.  This would also be the first introduction of a name here -- a more personal sense -- the tribe getting smaller.

 Near the end of the poem, the speaker poses an interesting question and answers to that question.

 Question: "what difference is there / in those things when we lose / & those things which decide / to gift us with a kind / of feral silence?"

In context of community, what does loss mean if the cycle continues?  Can loss be a gift?

 Answer: the change that leapt / from our pockets into the cracked / basketball courts" "& the older brothers / who never found their way back home"

I feel there's a certain kind of venom with these lines.  The loose change falling through the basketball courts.  A little low stakes and meaningless, but to also put that statement along with losing older brothers there's a mixture of the loss not mattering and mattering a whole lot at the same time.  Like the cycle continues -- brothers leaving, mothers leaving, and the ones staying behind remembering that is what their community is -- one of constant losses to be perceived as small to move on.