(Laughs). It actually feels like you are in conversation. The popping, start-stopping poetry of Dub is a tour through a history of colonialism, semi-autobiographical storytelling and suggested futures. All Rights Reserved. Like, whew, best, I remember reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, and I got somewhere in the middle of that book and realized I was crying and I had to stop and pause. Spill transformed me from a reluctant bystander of theory and poetry into a willing and enthused participant. Its so strange to be alive, what if we acknowledged that for minute? BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. MBS The subtitle of M Archive is After the End of the World, and this vantage point allows you to look back at our world to offer incisive critiques of the violence of capitalism, technology, and electoral politics, what you call the combination of digital knowability and pretend participation. You write, they started by stealing the meaning, and Im wondering if M Archive is about taking the meaning back. Gumbs book reflects on marine mammal behavior's ideological and cultural significance, encouraging readers to reevaluate how society undervalues black women and humans' connection to nature. Welcome back. Im disloyal to form. . I really love the way you situate and imagine research as this like wandering and being with and then the way ritual enters into it. I mean, I don't know what I've even learned about myself that hasn't been assisted by the example, and the work of Audre Lorde. It's not like, oh, it has to be like, a diamond or ruby, like literally any rock you pick up can shine. And what are the most surprising things I've learned about myself? This is the trifecta right here. And, and I trust that so it's like, you know, its like, well, marine mammals like you know, girl, you aint no marine biologists like what? Bio. The poet is known for weaving the past, present, and future togetherfrom environmental issues to the transatlantic slave tradeand offering up possibilities for caring for one another in the face of widespread harm. Be the first one to, Undrowned : Black feminist lessons from marine mammals, Advanced embedding details, examples, and help, urn:lcp:undrowned__black_feminist_lessons_from_mar_-_alexis_pauline_gumbs:epub:6b047228-f974-47ab-bb74-450c539c9879, urn:lcp:undrowned__black_feminist_lessons_from_mar_-_alexis_pauline_gumbs:lcpdf:8955975f-b6d0-4f6d-a75f-a13ad9dcc922, Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). So right now my daily practice is writing with Alma Thomas's artwork, and some like things from her archive. Search for other works by this author on: This content is made freely available by the publisher. So this is the Oracle one. Alexis, would you do us the honor of reading us a poem? Manage Settings That was terrifying to me, like, will I actually drown? I love I love your framing of that. She is currently co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines.Gumbs is also the Founder and Director of Eternal . 10 out of 10 and like that idea that if you've spent too long somewhere that you're either wasting time or that you should have been finished, you should have had it all figured out. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. At the same time though, you do know. Because Sophia, a long time ago was the first person to tell me in a workshop that the issue with a lot of us is that we are making art on accident and more than making art on accident that we don't know what to do with all the energy in our body when we come to perform, when we come to work. $$('.authorBlogPost .body img').each(function(img) { Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. And I'm wondering, I'm wondering if you have like hopes for the ways that people will engage with your scholarship as like time goes forward. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a writer who politicizes the archivenot the rarefied commodity within gated institutions, but the daily practice of documenting, inspiring, and engaging with Black feminist resistance. } adrienne maree brown is author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism and co-editor of Octavis's Brood. And this is something we ask everybody who comes onto our show. I think that that's I think that's my hope, because otherwise, yeah, I don't otherwise I don't necessarily need to return to it. Like that, that's the that's how I know that's a lie. And her words held space for me in that way. and love is how. Listener, it is in fact a striking picture. BOMB's Oral History Project is dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. What does it mean that I feel this way? . at the beginning of the book, Gumbs ends her note with this quote: "When you think it's time to come up for air, go deeper. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. //]]>. Academia is one access point for what I call the Black Feminist Pragmatic Intergenerational Sphereeven though academia has also killed Black feminists and refused to acknowledge their labor over and over again. So returning to it is, in a way, returning to myself. And so, she gave me my first concept of the idea that I should approach writing creating performance with some form of a ritual. Of all the things that you've learned, what surprised you the most? SubjectsGender and Sexuality > Feminism and Womens Studies, Literature and Literary Studies > Poetry, African American Studies and Black Diaspora. Adrien Julious, Authentically Adrien blog, "I am so grateful that Alexis Pauline Gumbs listens to Black women writers and scholars the way that she does. And, its poetry that is critical of academia. In M Archive (Duke University Press), the second book in an experimental triptych, Gumbs looks back on our current . If I'm just like, researching, didn't wrap around my collaging, then it's rap. The information they store is not sent to Pixel & Tonic or any 3rd parties. And I feel like the entrance you gave me was that I could see myself, and I could see myself in that place. When I would put those epigraphs, it was like she kicked in the door for me to be able to actually write in the context that I was educated in which were all predominantly white, elite, educational spaces that we're not, you know, not necessarily expecting me to be me. In doing so she imagines new forms of poetry and critical essay writing and opens up an alternative to conventional literary practices." And some of my protective mechanisms are so instinctive at this point, that I don't even recognize them as what they are. I think that there will always be a question and an assignment for me in Audre Lordes poetry. I mean, it's fine. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics. I don't understand many of the references, definitely none of the ones to Sylvia Wynter's work, with which I'm completely unfamiliar. I tried to pull myself together real quick. I think Beyonc has given me everything that I need to engage, because I wanted to go with a writer. So there are layers there. Offering a sweeping, thoughtful, and exquisite meditation on Sylvia Wynter's work, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's poetic engagement represents a new and unique way of encountering and paying homage to Black feminist theory and Black feminist theorists. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Abstract "We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black . I mean, I can just read any poem in The Black Unicorn, and it'll it will be like a question for my life on that day, an urgent question for my emotional, spiritual, physical life that is in there. I think the thing that I admire most about elders is getting to the space where you say exactly what you're thinking. And one of the major essays that I draw from in that book is about an uprising of students, faculty, and staff at the New School, against the ideological self-definition of the New Schoolparticularly the way the New School defined Black feminist work, and Jacquis work specifically as marginal, to the mission of the institution. Both wrenching and playful, it offers instructions (two sets of them), warnings, and its central bid to listen to the undrowned. Susan McCabe, Los Angeles Review of Books. And I think that makes me, it's just very reminiscent of your work for me to be able to see myself where I previously could not. The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's. And I want to read all of them to be clear. Alexis was honored with a Whiting Award, a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a National Humanities Center Fellowship. But I don't enjoy so much that I have to like, stop what I'm doing and sing along with them. I tried to pull myself together real quick. . A beautiful and graceful text, Dub will inspire readers to return to and to rethink Wynter's work and her place within African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Black feminist studies. Lisa B. Thompson, author of Single Black Female, "Breath is an important theme in Dub. Mattilda Bernstein SycamoreThe m of M Archive refers to M. Jacqui Alexander, Black feminist theorist and author of Pedagogies of Crossing, a text you are writing after and with. At the bottom of each page of the book is a footnote, but it isnt a conventional footnote, because you use Alexanders writing more as a launching pad than a reference point. . Thank you so much for joining us. And so what draws me to Audre Lorde's work is that I need to be reborn. . What's the way that I can be with these beings, and a lot, I mean, I wrote parts of Undrowned like very close to the ocean and on the shoreline, I wrote parts of Undrowned nowhere near an ocean. The VS podcast is a bi-weekly series where poets confront the ideas that move them. You win our game! Nothing foundtry broadening your search. 1. I think this collection is much more meaningful should you take the time with it. Reading the volume is akin to being a member of a theatre audience. Oh, Audre Lorde, as every day. So if we had to engage with the work of three people of any genre, era, dead or alive, fictional or not, who would those three people be? You can't write about, you know, my fears, unless you face your fears. Pronunciation of Alexis Pauline Gumbs with and more for Alexis Pauline Gumbs. And there was like a different book of hers that I hadn't read yet, and I was like, okay, this is just, whew, it was giving me too many feels, so Ima have to pause this book and come back and read a different one of her books. Yeah, it's true, though. What was it like in the 2020s. Because nothing will get done. Read an interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Sierra Magazine. Oops! We can learn to mother ourselves: The queer survival of Black feminism 1968-1996. And Audrey Lord answers, I was talking about you.. . And me too. And that's my hope. The structure is poetry and narrative, swift and untethered to typical rules of writing. Oh, there's a train. How absurd is it for breathing to be a project at all? I listen to Tiny Desk, I love Tiny Desk, but I usually listen to ones that I enjoy the music to. I think the like emotional, I don't know, I definitely had a kind of reckoning when I started arriving to work. }); So it's like, how can I? As tends to be the case with the books that Gumbs summons, the timing of Dub is prescient. Okay, best music to listen to by the ocean. So to watch somebody so deeply in love and so deeply in research after so many years, you know what I mean, and still have like, curiosities and questions. Alexis Pauline Gumbs was the first person to dig through the archives of several radical black feminist mothers including June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and Toni Cade Bambara while writing her dissertation We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism, a 500-page work. But before we get into this interview, best, I'm wondering whose art you could engage with and never get tired of? The author discusses Black feminist breathing, academia as access point, and writing three books that came from the same decision. And that's if I share anything that I write, it's an order to continue that and to pour back into what I feel like is this infinite well that I draw from, which is, which is love. So then that makes me wonder best, what are the things that make up the ritual of writing or creating for you? Like every time you named a name I was like, yes! // Fiction 9 Binyavanga Wainaina, Introduced by Achal Prabhala DNA and Our Twenty-First-Century Ancestors // Essay 28 Duana Fullwiley Two Poems 39 Kyoko Uchida The Millions // Essay 44 Deborah Taffa Two Poems 57 Diamond Forde Meditations on Lines // poetry 59 And she was a color theorist. You have earned {{app.voicePoint}} points. I'm excited for the conversations we'll be able to have once, you know, folks have been able to read it. And she's really invested in her study of her own emotions, as something that was crucial. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an American writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. And I feel like Audre Lordes, Audre Lorde had this relationship to stones, but she, you know, she has this place where she says, Those stones in my heart are you. I don't know if it's been obvious we're a little tender as a group. Like, this is, this is the thing that's been left and it completely shifted my relationship to a lot of texts coming from like elders and ancestors. I can't listen to hymns when I'm writing, nothing will get done. What does it mean that what are what are these patterns in my relationships? I was just writing a biography, a new biography of Audre Lorde, and I was just reading to myself this particular chapter, that's about the dedication of the Audre Lorde Women's Poetry Center at Hunter College, which there's a recording of it. Hearing the way that you reference Audre Lorde I think is so beautiful to me. Some of our partners may process your data as a part of their legitimate business interest without asking for consent. I don't know. One of your three favorite things. I love it. And it's this place of wonder. I would hope that they would watch recordings of Fred Hampton speaking and I would hope that they would read everything by Dionne Brand, but especially At the Full and Change of the Moon. Speaking of, you know, eco-feminist theologies, she just would like anything for the beauty of Earth itself. [9][10] Her writing and activism is influenced by the work of her grandmother Lydia Gumbs who designed the flag of Anguilla during the countrys 1967 revolution. What was it like in the 1990s? This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alexis Pauline Gumbs on her new book Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016). Bees? . Publication date: 2018 Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive the second book in a planned experimental triptychis a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. And I honestly didn't know because all roads lead back to Audre Lorde, I didn't know that she was like that, you know, she was like, what? In this speculative documentary work, Gumbs borrows from many disciplines in order to investigate, evoke, and maybe even provoke the fall, the break, the breakdown, the break-up, the breakthrough. M Archive is many things at oncepoetry, philosophy, meditation, rumination, history lesson, cautionary tale, storytelling, myth, parable, and reliquary. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. But that would be maybe for the historians but for people in general, if it's not loving them, they could let it go. Congratulation! I'm really reflecting. It's yes, she definitely had a grand idea of herself, which I'm here for, and I feel like was absolutely appropriate. Hosted by poets, History as Imagination: Black Dreaming as Liberation | Project Myopia, Roll Call: Three Castles and the Music City, Roll Call: All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt.2), Roll Call: All The Apostles are Black, All the Saints Queer, and All of Them Are Brave (Pt. web pages Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities have held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Yours is much more intact. I remember Jacqui showing me her office once when she was a visiting professor at Spelman College, and she told me how she used big paper to chart her ideas to access a more expansive part of her process because there is a difference between where your mind goes when you are holding a pen and writing in a notebook or on a small pieces of paper. Like it has been such a treasure. [4], Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. My work as a writer so far has been instead to remind my communities how familiar they are with the unrecognizable. Its not a trilogy because its not a plot-based narrative that continues to develop through the books. I don't have to be available to be eligible for breath. Great. But again, like, I think she made me think so much more about what it means to go deeper and deeper into a subject to grow more and more intimate with it, and that the more intimacy you foster with a subject, the more curiosity you can have, like. I don't have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don't see it happening that I'll be like, okay, well, I did that. We use cookies to personalize content and ads, and to analyze our traffic and improve our service. An in-depth interview with one of Americas most indispensable and independent thinkers, bell hooks, by BOMB contributing editor Lawrence Chua. Lea Hlsen, KULT, "Inspired by the work of black feminist intellectual Hortense Spillers, Gumbs collection of poems appear as a series of powerful scenarios. And so what I need to know about marine mammals is very much shaped by the fact that I'm navigating unbreathable circumstances in a particular way as a queer, Black, feminist troublemaker. All these things. They are not chronological, though they have different timescapes. And I, in the navigation of my own ocean of grief, just felt so much awe about the fact that like, there is a whole set of mammals that they are just in the saltwater. Stay Black. The risk is that in a moment where we have so many ways to impact and manipulate perception and meaning, we arrive at meaninglessness, a version of infinite possibility, an emptiness that capitalism can conveniently fill, or seem to fill. And it's something that surprises me about myself, sometimes, you know, I'm like, Oh, but I love everyone. So sitting in my bathtub. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, and co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. It sounds really beautiful, but I'm just marketing that theres a train. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an American writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator based in Durham, North Carolina. And that idea that we were so loved before we even existed is exactly what I need in a world that's like, we'll never learn how to love you (laughs). Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is author of, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy, 2), Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. Rate the pronunciation difficulty of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Kenya (Robinson) reflects on the end of her MFA program and becoming a professional artist. And I was like, Oh, okay. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Ready? I know the pace of it. Thank you. If I want to be happy, if I want to be mad, if I want to be in my country bag, in my rock bag, in my disco bag. And I think that frees up the space in my brain for writing. It's not something that is to, you know, be distilled into a set of facts, or even a set of approaches. Being a Black feminist engaged in the university, like I was during my PhD program, is like looking at artifacts of an apocalypse while breathing sulfur. Or about myself because of Audre Lorde? 4.53 out of 5 stars-1,223 ratings. But she also really studied herself and studied her emotions and asked herself, you know, like, having read all of her journals, she's asking herself, why did I respond this way? I work I write really well when I have people with me, not necessarily talking not even necessarily a workshop. On this weeks episode, Brittany and Ajanae sit down with Alexis Pauline Gumbs; during this interview, they discuss the gift of literary inheritance, unlearning the colonial lens, and allowing curiosity and awe to guide ones research practice. Durham, NC 27701 USA. And it's a, it's an intimate wonder of, like, my research comes out of that, and it comes out of it's a practice. It's just a lifelong relationship because she was in relationship with something that is so core that has to do with what life is, and how life is beyond even the experience of one body that I don't think it's possible to outgrow it. So I want you all to choose a number, but I just forgot how many times how many days I've been writing about her. . It's just that I would love to be able to choose that. So I would say, if one day someone's like, I'm going to write a biography of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, I would hope that they would listen to Fannie Lou Hamer [The] Songs My Mother Taught Me. She is author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, an educational program based in Durham, North Carolina. [11] Gumbs teaches online seminars, writes blog posts, and runs webinars through her website Brilliance Remastered. Also, when I was in high school, I just identified with him so much, and the way that he believes in our people, the expansiveness of who he understood to be his people, our people is something that has been a guide for me. I definitely don't have control over that. But it does connect me to the legacy of those literary workers whose brave experiments have made my work and life possible. Tiffany Lethabo King, Antipode, "[G]round-breaking. 34. [5] Gumbs is the Founder and Director of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and founder of BrokenBeautiful Press. And it's phenomenal to me that I could be loved by people who did not overlap with me in life. Make a ritual of it, and try not to rush through. And I don't even like to use the word weaving, because it's like a layering more than it is a weaving. And so, you know, I think it's, it's important what you said about when you read the work not being able to do that distancing thing, because like, what, you know, why should you read it, and then it's distant, you know, what I mean? Friends Following [CDATA[ Like three pieces of art facing each other at different angles but framing something with the ways that they are positioned. And so I would want people in the future. Crafted through a practice of poetic prose and non-linear narratives, Alexis Pauline Gumbs articulates visually stimulating interwoven accountsarchives of the future. Same. I'm thinking about Gwendolyn Brooks, you know, Gwendolyn Brooks, that I have hopes for myself. And I definitely have hopes, the most important thing to me is that people feel loved by the work, that's the most important thing. And so instructive, and so important. Here, let me show you. But this long, long relationship with research on the life and work and Andre Lorde, which to be so immersed in and never get exhausted or tired but to only continue to have more wonder like even just listening to the amount of love in her voice and on her face and seeing the amount of love on her face as she talked about it, to her talking about this daily writing process of being like for I forget how many days she said but for I'm just going to wake up and sit with the work of one artist every day as a part of a ritual and then write. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer Caribbean poet, independent scholar, and activist. Alexis Pauline Gumbs vs. Chasing Awe April 25, 2023 00:00 00:00 On this week's episode, Brittany and Ajanae sit down with Alexis Pauline Gumbs; during this interview, they discuss the gift of literary inheritance, unlearning the colonial lens, and allowing curiosity and awe to guide one's research practice. And I think that it's not to say that then okay, well, I go to like a place in my brain where there has to be some research I can do about this, though, that has been a historical theme of mine. The research, research is just a way I know of getting next to who I need to be next to, and who I just want to be influenced by, and who I know will allow me to meet aspects of myself that I really need to be with, but I, I don't know how or I'm terrified to or, you know, whatever it is, and I never know really what it is that I'm supposed to learn from that experience.
