Dub: Finding Ceremony

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

"In DUB Alexis Pauline Gumbs continues with the third book in her poetry series, the first two books being Spill, inspired by Hortense Spillers, and M Archive, inspired by Jacqui Alexander. Whereas Spill deals with the contemporary afterlives of slavery and M Archive describes the post-dated evidence of our imminent apocalypse, DUB destroys Gumbs' own origin story, as she questions the assumptions and histories she has held onto most of her life. This text, through engagement with Sylvia Wynter's rigor, reinvents language outside of personal histories. DUB is organized into topical sections, where spacious prose poems animate the voice of an underwater chorus in ceremonies that flow into one another. Beginning a daily writing practice, Gumbs wrote DUB based on moments of emphasis in Sylvia Wynter's essays (and one interview over several decades). This book is influenced by the promiscuity and prolificity of dub music, the confrontational home-grown intimacy of dub poetry, and the descendants of this work. Dub uses the impact of repetition and the incantatory power of the spoken broken word. Gumbs uses dub to emphasize that Sylvia Wynter learned every colonial language and came to the conclusion that the ways of thinking that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time and heretical to the ways of thinking that came before them; and so it must be possible to construct ways to understand life and place differently now as well. Gumbs goes back to the origin stories that precede her and turns the blood into paint, emphasizing that "then" is also "now" through the broken and intense voices of ancestors. Inspired by Wynter's heretical poetic action against our deepest beliefs, DUB is an artifact and tool for breath retraining and interspecies ancestral listening. Throughout the text, listening includes speakers who have never been considered whales and algae. Gumbs is attentive to kindred beyond taxonomy, questioning kinship loyalty, and suggests that our perceived survival needs are responses to a story we made up and told ourselves was written by our genes, a story that can be changed. This book will be of interest to scholars of African-American studies, diaspora studies, feminism, queer theory, English, creative writing and poetry"--

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Speculative Fiction, Spirituality, LGBT

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 14, 2020

About the author

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. 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.

Reviews

[mumtaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

this collection of poetry was revelatory... the structure of this book works both as a narrative and a sociopoetic oracle, allowing it to act as a vehicle for dialogue with the reader. reading these poems felt very timely for me as someone trying to understand their place in the cosmos and woven in lonely between the threads of love. the collective use of "we" and intimate depictions of nonhuman relatives (whether it be whales wailing or hibiscus blossoms flowering) spoke to me in a way that helped me feel less alone in how i love and am loved. 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. When you think your heart will break, stay there, stay with it. But at the same time, when you think you gotta hold onto something (like who you think you are), let go." in sharing wisdom from Sylvia Wynter and from her own ancestors, Gumbs leads us on a meditative journey through grief, loss, pain, beauty, and always love. So grateful for this text.

some of my favorite poems were: "whale chorus," "commitment," "nunánuk," "Anguilla," "it's your father," "blood chorus," "birth chorus," "staying," and "letting go"

[tsedi · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovedddd this book— i read it before creating anything, to start journal entries, as a form of prayer.
the poetry here reads the way my dreams feel, like time travel, an oceanic portal. meditating on ancestry and Blackness, i’m inspired by this piece’s ability to balance finding your past & future in natural/spiritual/non-human worlds while still learning from this life & remaining deeply human.

big rec if u appreciate experimental poetry (style has roots in jamaican dub poetry! can u hear the music as u read?) + as a resource to reimagine ourselves. it’ll be a favorite for a longggg time, if u read it we gotta chat 🫶🏾

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://theopinionatedbookworm.blogsp...

[Meghan Molnar · Rating 5 out of 5]

would vote best rhymes ive read in a while. narrative and expansive and beautiful poetry about ancestry, ecology, blackness, change, deep listening… i <3 u alexis pauline gumbs

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a beautiful way of allowing words to wash together, rhythmically like the ocean, or rapidly like a river. The popping, start-stopping poetry of Dub is a tour through a history of colonialism, semi-autobiographical storytelling and suggested futures. The structure is poetry and narrative, swift and untethered to typical rules of writing. There is a message in that lack denial of (western) structure, I think, just as with Sylvia Winter's writing, who Gumbs references. The poems move through a slave's history to a philosophical positioning on unlearning and interconnectedness as postcolonial practice. This isn't a book for one sitting, but one to dip in and out of, to appreciate, mull over, and enjoy, and it is immaculately written and presented.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this collection is much more meaningful should you take the time with it. Read it aloud, feel it as you stumble your way through an apartment's tender floors. Make a ritual of it, and try not to rush through.

I think reading Dub page-by-page is not giving it proper time for its lessons and support to root within your mind.

[Karin Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to quote a reviewer from the back cover "Part prayer, oration, exhortation, commentary and story, Dub amplifies ancestral stories to become mythopoesis in the making" M. NourbeSe Philip.
I read this book slowly over the past month because it takes time to take it all in fully. Magnificent!

[Lynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just pure time-crossing oceanic revolutionary planetary ancestral current-present brilliance.

[Audi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional

[Paige]

Lyrical messages from the ocean !!

[Asali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ancestrally co-written genius.

[lou garciadolnik · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh my god!!!!!!!!!

[Taiyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

apg is really 1 of the most important voices of our time. Top 5 easily.

[BiblioBickie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a masterpiece. I read this in fits and spurts because it's so deep. I take time to think about the poems (many of them are paragraphs with no capital letters; many are best read out loud because of the rhythm, rhyme, and rap-like repetition of sounds), often journalling afterward. 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 highly recommend this book; it's incredible. I think I'll be reading this again and again.

From the publisher:
In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.