Alexis Pauline Gumbs
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Dub: Finding Ceremony
And then there are books that make demands. Daily demands. Seemingly impossible demands. And those are the books that find me...wherever I am sitting before sunrise. The ones that snatch me out of bed while I am still too dazed to ask for anything like sense. These four poems open my book Dub: Finding Ceremony and like every page of that book they are linked to specific acts of phrasing and emphasis in the theoretical work of Sylvia Wynter, whose body of work asks our species to unlearn the colonial scientific and economic stories that make us make sense to ourselves. All endnotes refer to essays by Sylvia Wynter. —Alexis Pauline Gumbs
View playlistIn Praise of Black Weariness
I think of Black weariness as a specific condition born from the Middle Passage and ongoing genocide, a continual state of being that is distinct from resolvable feelings like "sleepiness." Black weariness is both intentional and environmental, a technology of survival in a world which has never left us any other choice. It is found in the procedural, grief-laden repetition of M. NourbeSe Philip's "Zong! #14" ("the truth was/the ship sailed/the rains came/the loss arose") and the directness of jay dodd’s "In the Age of Audacity" ("i don’t want a Solution/i want People to know/Everything hurts"). It's the flippant, sacred feeling writer Morgan Parker gestures towards in "Magical Negro #217: Diana Ross Finishing a Rib in Alabama, 1990s" (“Since I thought I'd be dead/by now everything/I do is fucking perfect"). Black weariness is the creation of luxury and time under impossible conditions. It's a balm, a speculative tradition, a freedom practice
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