This essay explores how the poetics of hip-hop—spitting rhymes—gives form to spiritual lament. Hip-hop is criticized, and rightfully so, for promoting misogyny, greed, violence, and nihilism—but does it do something else? Using hip-hop artist Biggie Smalls’s song “Suicidal Thoughts,” the author argues that spitting rhymes is a way that African Americans salvage lost aspects of the self, that is, parts of the self that have been silenced and, at times, terminated—by the self—because of trauma. He engages in an interdisciplinary study of African American history to discuss the ways in which the Sambo figure was constructed and utilized to deny the reality of Black suffering; sociologist Émile Durkheim’s On Suicide to delineate the various forms of suicide, some of which are the direct result of social regulation; biblical scholarship, for example, the work of Walter Brueggemann, to demonstrate that spiritual lament functions to protect a community from overwhelming despair; and psychoanalysis to address how the loss of ways to creatively confront our sorrow is harmful to the self.

这篇文章探讨了嘻哈的诗意——随地吐痰的韵律——如何形成精神上的哀叹。嘻哈因宣扬厌女症、贪婪、暴力和虚无主义而受到批评，这是理所当然的——但它还有其他作用吗？作者使用嘻哈艺人 Biggie Smalls 的歌曲“Suicide Thoughts”认为，吐口水是非裔美国人挽救失去的自我方面的一种方式，也就是说，自我的一部分已经被沉默，有时甚至被终止——由自我——因为创伤。他从事非裔美国人历史的跨学科研究，以讨论三宝人物的构建和利用方式，以否认黑人受苦的现实；社会学家埃米尔·涂尔干的《论自杀》描述各种形式的自杀，其中一些是社会调节的直接结果；圣经学术研究，例如沃尔特·布鲁格曼 (Walter Brueggemann) 的著作，证明灵性哀叹的功能可以保护社区免于压倒性的绝望；和精神分析来解决失去创造性地面对悲伤的方式对自我有害的问题。