Swallow the Fish

by Gabrielle Civil

Gabrielle Civil’s Swallow the Fish is a memoir in performance art that explores the medium from within its beating heart. Adding its voice to black feminist conversations, it combines essays, anecdotes, and meditations with original performance texts to confront audience, motivation, and fears. Both joy and panic appear in Civil’s world of performance, where neither walls nor city limits set the scope of the stage. Civil bares vulnerabilities and enthralls readers, asking essential questions and embodying dreams.

“Enjoy. Enjoy? Enjoy!” Perhaps this is Gabrielle Civil’s calculus for performance art, though I suspect that accuses her praxis of being too pat. Instead, Swallow the Fish discloses that the “Enjoy?”—that doubt, her sense that she’s maybe said or done the wrong thing—is catalyst and outcome. Thus, this remarkable book is a monograph and manual, a catalog and travelogue rendered as a progress of generative failures. An intimate showcase for Civil’s fierce eros, mordant humor, and intellectual appetites, Swallow the Fish is also a vital record of how a black woman moves through spaces where desire and aversion make equally rough contact. So, enjoy! But enjoy(?), too.
—DOUGLAS KEARNEY, Mess and Mess and

This book paints a beautiful Black woman sky of possibilities. This book makes me want to perform/it makes me want to write-to holla-to hold it close. I love this book!
— SHARON BRIDGFORTH, Writer/Performing Artist

This book is so meticulous and so absorbing, I am in awe. It is declamation, reflection, proposal, documentation, blueprint. Gabrielle Civil is revealed as an artist perfectly poised to speak to how race, gender and sexuality enact embodied performativity. She writes and performs herself into history in ferociously intelligent and relentlessly personal ways. And I’ve never read such a perfect articulation of the turbulence of performing – the way that externalizing the possibility and conflicts of one’s body leaves you open and vulnerable to the quagmire of interpretation, misunderstanding and projection. How the specificity of identity mixes with desire to confound, comfort or disrupt public space. As with so many things that I love, I want everyone to read this book.
— MIGUEL GUTIERREZ, Music & Performing Artist

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Art

314 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2017

Reviews

[Kyle Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful exploration – and detailing – of a creative practice.

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

In December, I co-curated a reading at Belladonna* with Anna Gurton-Wachter, and Gabrielle Civil was on the bill. That’s part of the fun of curatorial collaboration: you get introduced to writers and artists that you weren’t previously very familiar with. And holy cow! Civil blew me away. Her piece was poetry, but also performance art, with elements of movement and sonic play that enlivened the zoom room. After her performance, I ordered her books Experiments in Joy and Swallow the Fish, deciding to proceed chronologically, starting with 2017’s Swallow the Fish—named for the performer’s gambit of wholeheartedly embracing real embodied risk. Read the rest on my reading blog.

[Bethany Whitehead · Rating 5 out of 5]

I happened upon this book as I was working my way through the Electric Lit list of 34 Books by Women of Color to Read this Year (2017) and didn't know anything about the artist or her practice. What I discovered inside was a delightful and insightful journey along an artist's path to being a practicing performance artist. I am an arts administrator and really geeked out at the intimate look at how works get created and brought to an audience. The format of the book and the honest reflection made for a engrossing read that I could not put down. Loved it.

[Bianca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I consider myself a very open person when it comes to defining art, and I loved how much this book challenged me, forced me to expand, made me uncomfortable, tugged at my inner biases/expectations in regards to what (performance) art can and should be. Civil is very vulnerable and very brave, and her honesty in addressing all parts of her artistic process was incredibly inspiring.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfection