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The Déjà Vu: Black Dreams & Black Time
Gabrielle Civil mines black dreams and black time to reveal a vibrant archive of black feminist creative expressions.
Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life. With intimacy, humor, and verve, the déjà vu blurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future.
Emerging from the intersection of pandemic and uprising, the déjà vu activates forms both new and ancestral, drawing movement, speech, and lyric essay into performance memoir. As Civil considers Haitian tourist paintings, dance rituals, race at the movies, black feminist legacies, and more, she reflects on her personal losses and desires, speculates on black time, and dreams into expansive black life. With intimacy, humor, and verve, the déjà vu blurs boundaries between memory, grief, and love; then, now, and the future.
308 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 22, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 6, 2022
”I was trying to be re-membered,” Civil writes in a tale merging a medical crisis with the artistic wonder of a trip to Paris, juxtaposing loneliness and love.
This book is captivating. The theme of black feminist time pulled me into a journey where I could rarely guess the destination and thus was forced to be present within Civil’s words. Her multigenre strategy brought me to first time I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, with a side of Roxanne Gay. But you have to take Civil on her own terms.
Grounded in place and spiral time Civil considers art, creativity, dreaming. (”If we are out of touch with our own capacity to dream, we are limited in our capacity to act.” Amen!) She pulls from work as a performance artist, poet, and professor, threading images and poems throughout and experimenting with modes of prose. It’s a non-linear journey full of refrains.
Civil is unapologetically herself, not polished for the reader’s comfort. A paragraph is presented and then re-written, annotated, breaking the fourth wall. A raw conversational stream of consciousness turns out to address a tarot reader, to my delight. We experience Civil’s art but also its context: messy, sacred, and mundane. “What can it mean to open into something different, the possibility of being something different somewhere else, in something else, especially if it’s hard?”
I struggle to read about art, but less here. I was struck by Civil’s story of writing, then withdrawing an introduction to an “unapologetically black, female, and working class” poetry book with an f-slur in the title. Civil grapples meaningfully here with language / identity / culture / risk / art. I deeply felt the self-consciousness of the reviewer her story of the experience and the love in her direct words to Wanda Coleman. If our culture held nuance, could we celebrate this Black poet’s genius AND hold queer pain? Writing this review, I grappled with whether to type That Word as a nonbinary person who finds it affirming in specific contexts. What do we write down? What do we edit out? It’s messy. It’s supposed to be.
(ARC provided by NetGalley.)
This book is captivating. The theme of black feminist time pulled me into a journey where I could rarely guess the destination and thus was forced to be present within Civil’s words. Her multigenre strategy brought me to first time I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, with a side of Roxanne Gay. But you have to take Civil on her own terms.
Grounded in place and spiral time Civil considers art, creativity, dreaming. (”If we are out of touch with our own capacity to dream, we are limited in our capacity to act.” Amen!) She pulls from work as a performance artist, poet, and professor, threading images and poems throughout and experimenting with modes of prose. It’s a non-linear journey full of refrains.
Civil is unapologetically herself, not polished for the reader’s comfort. A paragraph is presented and then re-written, annotated, breaking the fourth wall. A raw conversational stream of consciousness turns out to address a tarot reader, to my delight. We experience Civil’s art but also its context: messy, sacred, and mundane. “What can it mean to open into something different, the possibility of being something different somewhere else, in something else, especially if it’s hard?”
I struggle to read about art, but less here. I was struck by Civil’s story of writing, then withdrawing an introduction to an “unapologetically black, female, and working class” poetry book with an f-slur in the title. Civil grapples meaningfully here with language / identity / culture / risk / art. I deeply felt the self-consciousness of the reviewer her story of the experience and the love in her direct words to Wanda Coleman. If our culture held nuance, could we celebrate this Black poet’s genius AND hold queer pain? Writing this review, I grappled with whether to type That Word as a nonbinary person who finds it affirming in specific contexts. What do we write down? What do we edit out? It’s messy. It’s supposed to be.
(ARC provided by NetGalley.)
December 23, 2023
I am a chronemics scholar and that is what drew me to this book because I LOVE reading about time and temporality and this book was BEAUTIFUL. it needs to be talked about more.
Civil is gem.
Civil is gem.
March 30, 2022
I don’t really know how to rate this or explain what it is. Im not a fan of Performance art but I’ve seen pieces I thought had elements of profundity and depth. This book could act as a primer, an introduction, to what performance art can be, and what it wants to be. I don’t know anyone who I would offer this book to, but I wish I did.
April 4, 2025
A wisdom text to be read s l o w l y
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews