Craft Essay on Hanif Abdurraqib’s “My First Police Stop” (New York Times, 2016)
Often I find one of the most pleasurable parts of reading nonfiction written by a poet is the great care they take with diction. Poetry’s natural compression births precise, staggering essays full of rich imagery, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s “My First Police Stop” exemplifies this perfectly. Let us begin at the beginning: title. It is the writer’s first police stop, which implies a second, third, fourth—we don’t know how many. We only know that it is the “first,” and thus as we begin reading we are aware of the stakes: whatever is about to happen, more will follow. Abdurraqib crafts a visual, concise, and emotional story that conveys the importance of one incident; his experience also slots into a larger narrative of Black life in America (and falls cleanly into historical patterns of anti-Black violence). Abdurraqib’s careful use of diction, his structural choices, strong characterization, shifts in narrative movement, and clear imagery yield a masterful essay.
Beyond its title, the writer has made a handful of choices in diction that subtly expand the scope of the essay, its implications, and the cultural context within which it is operating. For example, “on a September night,” in early fall of 2001, characterized by its “darkness and silence,” the palpable racial tension of post-9/11 America looms. Before the writer’s police encounter, he describes the “blaring horn” and the “flashing lights” set off when unlocking the driver’s side door of his Nissan; halfway down the page, we see “flashing lights” again as Abdurraqib is pulled over. The same phrase turns to signify a second type of danger—first the Nissan lights in drawing attention, then the police lights in having failed to circumvent it.
Even when it’s not flashing and honking, the Nissan’s appearance raises concern, though unwarranted, for the white people in the “towering and expensive homes” of Bexley, Ohio. Having arrived there a Black teenager in a “used” car, painted an “odd shade of brown, with a thin gold stripe,” and a “loud” engine, Abdurraqib had likely been in danger long before realizing it. Horns or not, the car was an alarm. (The immediacy with which the police apprehend him upon leaving the house party indicates they were already there, waiting.) Regardless of whether 17-year-old Abdurraqib realized it at the time, Abdurraqib the present narrative persona is conscious of the car’s conspicuousness. Why else would the Nissan be introduced with the kind of focus and care warranted by a main character?
Structure and characterization are very intertwined in the essay’s successful execution of stylistic strategies, namely its imagery. Told in a series of narrative micro-paragraphs ranging from one to four sentences, the essay’s structure creates a rhythm with beats and pauses. Each micro-paragraph serves as a compressed image like a stanza—a boy and his father in a used car lot, a lone Black body on an otherwise white soccer field, new and precious jeans soiled.
Looking at the page, one might think the gaps and white space indicate fragments or a lyrical construction. There is, however, a straightforward chronology of events—what writer and teacher Kim Barnes calls horizontal motion. (We will return to this idea.) The essay is not lyrical, though it is poetic.
In the first half, each of Abdurraqib’s micro-paragraphs focuses on one element of the narrative and builds upon the preceding micro-paragraphs to aggregate meaning. This shifts when the narrator encounters the police, after which point the beats and pauses serve to slow narrative time, thereby heightening tension. At the end of the essay, the structure affords a contemplative tone imbued with emotional reflection after a quick one thousand words that are mostly active (versus contemplative, reflective, etc.).
How does Abdurraqib amass such deep meaning in such small pieces? The first micro-paragraph introduces the Nissan through its origin story, and details the writer’s family—poor with a single, widower father; the second ascribes joy to prizing a possession, especially as a teenager; the third and fourth complicate the Nissan’s position as a prize by detailing its flaws; the fifth reasserts the writer’s joy and situates the Nissan within the “first car” trope—a beloved beater. (I myself had a 1995 Volvo 960 tanker, inherited from my grandpa, that I loved dearly and drove until it was twenty years old.)
With the Nissan established as a fully formed character in the writer’s life, the sixth and seventh micro-paragraphs turn towards Blackness and place, positioning the writer as a young and relatively naïve kid who leaves the safety of his community for the first time; the eighth returns to the Nissan and layers Blackness atop ownership. By the time Abdurraqib arrives at the “September night” around which his essay hinges, in the ninth and tenth micro-paragraphs, each component of the narrative tension has been laden with context, amplifying the effects exponentially. We know the racial implications, the class implications, and have been given small clues to the socio-historical implications of the moment (September 11).
Throughout these first ten micro-paragraphs, the writer moves us forward in time while relating scenes and action, all “horizontal movement,” to return to Kim Barnes. She defines two types of narrative movement that work together to elevate personal narrative from anecdote to the level of literary art. Along the horizontal plane of an essay, one finds the chronology of the story, events, characters’ decisions, dialogue, etc. Along the vertical plane, the writer interweaves other fields of study, political context, social criticism, reflection and analysis, and the like—whatever connects “individual experience to a larger current of thought and meaning,” (Barnes, 2020). Abdurraqib turns to vertical movement just three times in his essay.
At the tenth and eleventh micro-paragraphs:
“I spend a lot of time trying to pinpoint how fear is learned. Or, rather, how we decide that fear is a necessary animal that grows out of our expectation to survive at all costs, and how I have been afraid and feared at the same time.
When I reflect, I think the fact that I had gone 17 years without having developed a direct fear of the police meant that I was lucky.”
At the sixteenth:
“When you are asked to step out of a car that you own, your body no longer belongs to you, but instead to the lights drowning it. There are two sides of the night that you can end up on: one where you see the sunrise again and one where you do not. You may not consider this in the moment.”
And at the twentieth:
“I thought about how much the car had cost me. How much it had cost me to get here, to Bexley, just five miles away from a neighborhood that no one from nearby homes would venture to. But mostly I thought about how I perhaps owned nothing. Not even my hands, now pressed behind my back.”
By turning from literal action to emotional reflection, in an essay that is almost testimonial otherwise, the writer plunges his reader into the emotional center of the piece. Our glimpses of feeling are very brief—shaky hands, unguaranteed sunrise, a tragedy’s beginning—and therefore of great value. Had Abdurraqib taken a turn towards a more lyrical structure, it might’ve undercut the concreteness of his story. “John D’Agata, one of lyrical essays’ more prominent advocates… describes them as experiential more than narrative, argumentative, or even emotive; the lyrical essay gestures more than it connects,” (Mintz, 3). Abdurraqib does not want to gesture more than he connects. He is set on making an important connection, on communicating an urgent point:
“So much [within America] relies on convincing people that much of the violence that the country and its actors are complicit in happened a long time ago, a capital-L long time ago… so long ago that there is actually no one living or breathing impacted by those violences…” he says in an interview (Abdurraqib, 2021). His essay demonstrates that the violence is now.
As we progress down the page, the essay’s scope expands outwards from family to community to society, ending in an outward motion towards all victims of police brutality. The anti-Black undercurrent of “My First Police Stop” also situates it as a literary descendent of a violent predecessor, lynching.
The scholar Kimberly Banks argues lyrical literature serves to humanize lynching victims, specifically in stories by Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois; the social framework she proposes implicates “My First Police Stop,” and teenaged Abdurraqib, as part of a literary lineage. Banks understands lynching not only as a symbolic act created by white supremacy, but also a response by white society to efforts of Black advancement, such as education (451). Both Hughes and Du Bois penned narratives in which Black characters strive for upward mobility and “the local white community refuses to accept the protagonist’s change in social status,” (Banks, 452). The result of this rejection is lynching. Banks posits that “by making the lynching a lyrical moment, Hughes [and] Du Bois… contrast the protagonist’s humanity against the inhumanity of the mob,” (453). This too is what’s at stake for Abdurraqib. As the writer veers away from lyricism in his essay, he also refuses to dehumanize his aggressors, the police. His fate hangs in the balance—a Black college student powerless beneath white hands in a white neighborhood.
Because we know that Blackness itself is a character in the essay, we know the trope of Black anger is either present or it’s not (but both are a choice, like the writer’s posture towards the cops). In “My First Police Stop,” Abdurraqib chooses to permit only fear. In an interview with BELT Magazine, he’s asked about his personal history with the Columbus, Ohio punk scene, its complicated relationship to racial diversity, and who gets to publicly display their anger. So much of his work, he says, “is trying to crawl back to history, both my own and the history that my living is kind of encased in, by virtue of being a Black person in America. And not only by way of confirmation that yes, there has been violence and yes, there’s been anguish and yes, there’s been pain, but also in confirmation that there’s been a great deal more than that in my lineage, and in the lineage of many others, that is really iridescent and stunning…”
His essay is indeed iridescent and stunning. The frank yet image-rich story brings forward a commonplace violence against Black people that America often denies, while maintaining a degree of privacy for Abdurraqib, the person. “If you wish to preserve your secret,” writes Alexander Smith, “wrap it up in frankness,” (Lopate, xxvii). No secrets, but Black suffering is not put on display in “My First Police Stop,” yet another careful choice that highlights Hanif Abdurraqib’s literary deftness.
—October 2021