Straddling between the purely political and the poetically artistic, I am arguing, is a Global Hip-Hop Nation (GHHN), which is yet to be charted and its cartography is yet to be demarcated. Taking two examples, the first a Hip-Hop song from within the Arab Spring and the second from the "favelas" in Brazil, my intent is to show what Hip-Hop can do socially, racially, and politically, on the one hand, and how, despite the fact that this GHHN is clearly global, it grounds itself deeply in the local, on the other. Through these examples, I call for an ill-literacy, one where creativity is taken as serious as grammar and where literacy becomes ill: intimate, lived and liberatory.