My brother dies several times a month.

It’s always my mother who phones to inform me of his passing.

“Your brother’s not answering my calls,” she says in a whisper.

To her, the telephone bears witness to our permanence on Earth, so if there’s no answer, the only possible explanation is the cessation of all vital functions.

When she calls to tell me my brother is gone, she’s not looking for reassurance. Instead she wants me to share in her grief. Suffering together is her form of happiness; misery shared is misery relished.

Sometimes the cause of death is banal: a gas leak, a head-on collision, a broken neck from a bad fall.

After ascertaining that her son is still alive, my mother always feels mortified. She pouts like a 12-year-old girl. Her voice even turns into a 12-year-old girl’s. How can you get angry at a little girl?

“You think I should bring the carabinieri some pastries?” she asks in that little voice.

Come to think of it, who knows why she called the carabinieri and not the regular police? I don’t dare pose the question, since it risks doubling the number of calls she’ll make next time. The fire department, for example, or civil protection. She’s never thought of them before.

I am born in one place, spend half of grade school in another, attend the other half in a third country. I go to high school in a fourth city. I am forever the superminority. As much as I hate the cliché, it’s true — I am too “this” for “that” and too “that” for “this.” But in Wizkid’s music, I’m given the choice to not make a choice. “My music travel no visa” he declares confidently on Superstar. His world is one not of binaries but of bonds between Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Caribbean. And though he was not raised in the diaspora, it feels like he makes music exclusively for us: the lost and confused trying to find ourselves in clunky hyphens and numerical ordering, struggling to determine if our culture is first generation, second, or even third. He is not the first to tell me who I am, but he is the first I believe.

Even when the songs are emulating an American pop formula, they still feel stubbornly African, which is to say they buck against the niceties of said formula, opting for vim over veneer, playfulness over perfection. The production is gritty, percussion chaotic, auto-tune abused, lyrics disregarded, and melodies embarrassingly saccharine. And it is all held together by the faith that it will accomplish its only goal: to make people dance.

In this mélange, more than anything else, I find my rhythm. Wizkid’s music is elastic enough to leave room for the movement I inherit from my early youth while also accommodating everything else. It’s hard to explain how intuitive it all feels, but when his music comes on, I just know what to do and I know I am doing it right.

The encounters I have with creepy men and shitty lovers are tragic for their normalcy, shattering the image of sexual freedom and power that I imagine with the help of Wizkid’s music. My experiences, in which my inflated expectations are met with, at best, indifference toward my pleasure and, at worst, the denial of it, confirm that the real world has not caught up to the worlds we can create in music. I consider two options. One is to throw away the music, believe nothing, trust no one. Another is to see the contradiction as instructive, for if I can’t imagine pleasure, how will I know when it’s real?

In time I look beyond myself, searching for critics who have more precise language on the subject; who have elaborated on the gap between the imaginative agency that popular music offers to women and the physical realities that take it away. I find helpful language in the work of Ann Powers, who, writing on rock, cites the “always partial and precarious” erotic freedom that many women, and young people in general, have experienced through rock and roll. “As great as it feels for a girl to let the noise and rhythm surge through her body,” she says, “that body still moves within a world where others wield all kinds of weapons to contain you.” Itching for parallel analyses in genres I feel closer to, I look to the work of Joan Morgan and the journalist Akoto Ofori-Atta, the latter of whom writes of the “gray area” that abounds in the hearts of Black women who love hip-hop, of the “contradictions of loving an art that is reluctant to include you; loving men who, at times, refuse to portray you in your totality; and rejecting sexual objectification while actively and proudly embracing your sexuality.”

But every now and then, if my father finagled his way out of his Saturday morning shift delivering packages for FedEx, he’d stroll into our apartment on a Friday night, toss his keys on the table, lean his head past the doorframe to whichever room my mother was posted in and say, “We’re going out tonight.”

You’d think she’d find this sweet, the spontaneity of it. Like in those old-timey movies where the husband comes home to tell his wife to throw on her best clothes, they’re hitting the town, and the wife drops whatever she’s doing to turn on the stereo and put on her face in the bathroom, all while her husband admires her from behind, sways side to side, shadowing her tempo — both of them smiling at each other in the mirror.

But this was real life, and in my real-life home, my mother didn’t like surprises.

“You just telling me this now?” she said one night.

In no time Ace had me on my back, pinned to the floor. His legs straddled around my waist, hands gripped around my shirt collar.

We were wrestling for real.

And that’s when I felt him. His belt buckle was still undone, and he was still somewhat firm, pressing against me, as if his anger sustained it.

And when I think about it now, maybe that’s when I knew. Knew for sure about myself. Because as much as it scared me, it didn’t feel wrong.

“You think you big now?” Ace said, shaking me.

I couldn’t put up a fight. Not that it mattered, and not that I wanted to. I had gotten almost everything I wanted. A reaction. Something to let me know that Ace still saw me.

Government officials come to the narrator’s workplace to warn his students of various sects operating contrary to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the most dangerous of which is the mysterious Picketists, whose secret sign is an extended hand with an insect in its palm. Through Caty, one of his fellow teachers and a Picketist convert, he learns of their nighttime meetings, where they dress in black and march on local hospitals, cemeteries, and morgues, carrying signs reading Down with Aging!, Down with Cancer, No to Eternal Disappearance! It is an ongoing, recurrent, futile protest against the realization that:

you are living in a slaughterhouse, that generations are butchered and swallowed by the earth, that billions are pushed down the throat of hell, that no one, absolutely no one escapes. That not one person you see coming out of the factory gates in a Méliès film is still alive. That absolutely everyone in an eighty-year-old sepia photograph is dead.

If D loves H, then where does this prickliness — this obstinacy verging on imperviousness — come from? Watching her swing between secluding herself from H — physically, verbally — and clinging to him, I think of the painter Celia Paul, who became Lucien Freud’s lover in 1978 after meeting him at the Slade School of Art, when he was 55 and her teacher and she an 18-year-old student, and who has described young women in such circumstances as facing a “dilemma.” These women have “their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired. The two ambitions are usually incompatible.” This incompatibility has many causes, among them the duty that arises out of love, which, Paul testifies, makes it difficult to remain “dedicated to my art in an undivided way. I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish. And you do need to be selfish.” I think of Alice Munro, who admitted to interviewers dispatched by the Paris Review that, while all young artists needed to be somewhat “hard hearted,” “it’s worse if you’re a woman. . . . When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other.”

[...] Watching her alternate between naked woundedness and vehemence, I was reminded of Louise Glück’s description of the aspiring poet’s debased yearning — her “adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure.” The harshness of that failure is as little veiled by Julie’s face as a flush.