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“IT’S SO HARD TO SAY,
Shawn’s
dead.
Shawn’s
dead.
Shawn’s
dead.
So strange to say.
So sad.
But I guess
not surprising,
which I guess is
even stranger,
and even sadder.”
This quote takes place in 6. It’s So Hard to Say. Will grapples with the difficulty of articulating his pain and the shock of his brother’s absence. Throughout the novel, Will often struggles to articulate what he’s feeling. He reaches for metaphors, anagrams, random thoughts, and natural phenomena like the moon all to understand his profound grief in the wake of his brother’s death. Here, though, he’s able to plainly state how difficult it is to name what has happened. This encapsulates the power of his grief, along with the deep shock he experiences at the fact of his brother’s death. What’s more, by acknowledging that the fact of his brother’s death isn’t surprising, he acknowledges how common it is for people in his community and even in his family to lose the people they love most to violence. This reflects the systemic oppression that Will’s family and community is grappling with day in and day out.
“IN CASE YOU AIN’T KNOW,
gunshots make everybody
deaf and blind especially
when they make somebody
dead.
Best to become invisible
in times like these.
Everybody knows that."
This quote occurs in 15. In Case You Ain’t Know, after Will describes how each of the witnesses to Shawn’s murder refrained from telling the cops anything about the crime. Though the gang violence that plagues Will’s community is a constant threat, the cops are not considered a trustworthy source of support or justice. No one in the community trusts the cops, which is reflected in Rule No. 2 No snitching. The police, like the gangs themselves, are agents of violence and chaos. However, whereas the gangs provide protection for those who are within them, the cops are a threat to everyone within Will and Shawn’s community. The fact that everyone knows to be blind and deaf in the wake of a murder suggests that everyone also knows there are dangers both in the gangs and in the police. Further, in the absence of systematic support, the community has formed a system of rules and tenets to live by, attempting to create a security denied to them by the world around them.
“ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE RULES
They weren't meant to be broken.
They were meant for the broken
to follow.”
This quote takes place in 31. Another Thing About the Rules, after Will has introduced The Rules that guide his family and larger community. At this point in the novel, Will is clinging to The Rules as a means of coping with his brother’s death, which has left him with a painful absence and no one to guide him through life. The Rules, taught to him by his brother, give structure and a sense of meaning within his brokenness. Will is suffering just as much as his mother. However, while she turns to alcohol and into feeling her grief, Will, according to The Rules, is denied the same ability to show his emotions. Instead, he must continue moving forward. As a result, he attempts to transmute his grief and pain into violence that is codified by The Rules of the street, and in doing, he is seemingly trying to correct the uncorrectable. He recognizes that The Rules are a ballast against brokenness but does not yet realize that The Rules themselves perpetuate the grief he is trying to escape.
“He would tell me stories about
how the best rappers ever were Biggie
and
Tupac, but I always wondered if that was
just because they were dead. People
always
love people more when they’re dead.”
This quote takes place in 39. It Used to Be Different, as Will reminisces about the way things were in the past with Shawn. Here, Will is remembering what it was like to spend time with Shawn before things started to get more violent in Shawn’s life. Will is struggling because he already loved his brother very much and is adapting to the way that his brother has already become eulogized by the people around him, in the same way that Biggie and Tupac were. It is both beautiful and painful that people love the dead more than the living. It suggests that people may hold back their love from the living and, only when it is too late, people experience the full extent of their love for the dead. Will is struggling with the fact that his brother is becoming part of the pantheon of the dead that surrounds Will all the time. He would rather have his brother be alive than be sainted because of his death.
“How do you small-talk your father
when "dad" is a language so foreign
that whenever you try to say it,
it feels like you got a third lip
and a second tongue?”
his quote takes place in 186. How You Been? As Will and his father are trying to connect, though, they have never truly known each other. This poignant moment reveals the pain that Will carries because of the absence of a father in his life. His father was taken away by the same wave of violence that took his brother. Here, Will encapsulates how strange and foreign it is for him to try to communicate with his father at all. It isn’t just that he doesn’t know his father, it's that he doesn’t know what to do with the love and pain he has in the place where a father should be. This reflection also illustrates how the waves of violence that Will is grappling with have left many in the book without fathers and father figures. Will aches for the father he’s never known, and just like Shawn before him, who lost both his father and his father figure, Buck, Will is left alone to fend for himself in a violent world he didn’t create, without the guidance and love of his dad.
