Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity - Alexis Pauline Gumbs (finished 12.12.19)

 ...the other thing I love is that other people are using it as an oracle. A few weeks ago a healer was doing tarot readings paired with pages from Spill on Facebook. I was like, “Wow! Draw one for me!” And it was right on point! (Gumbs 2018)

A note: I finished this back on the 12th of December but haven't posted it til now, since that night my life kinda upended. It's ok. I'm depressed on it and will remain but healing takes a long time. Some other sort of reassurance would be a kindness to do to myself because I believe I just lied to myself.

You know me, I'm snarky with everything. Well I haven't cried today - like real cried, although hunched over in the bathtub for what was supposed to be a quick rinse and felt like was going to become a typical "j chokes on their mouth for ten minutes and throws up bile" brought me as close as I was during the last few lonely hours of work. I'm sick. I'm feeling disjointed. I'm feeling vindictive and apologetic in the same light. I'm feeling sickened and nervous. I'm feeling vulnerable and beat down. It's exhausting.

So I decided to read a work of poetry about intersectionality and black feminist theory within the context of reacting to black feminist scholar's writing with a poem and a line it was represented by. Alexis Pauline Gumbs' second iteration of this work, M-Archive, was highly regarded by a current roommate I respect while they did their co op interview. I can remember stupidly saying "I struggle to find genre things that I can get kids to read" in mis-attribution that this work could be enjoyed by kids because Jimmy had called it "sci fi" and they just kinda awkwardly tried to move past it. It's fine and not on you - I am a walking embarrassing mistake making mistake. I then saw it pop up in the wildly unacclaimed "Ask for PDFs from people with institutional access" group that has totally self-sabotaged its usefulness to steal things from academia like any one would know to already do when you could. I tried to get it at the library and ordered it as an ILL and oddly enough picked up Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity from my own private Catholic university hellhole library because for some reason we got something like this. I don't know what the fuck is going on here either, but will have to show you my crazy shit folder in my work inbox where I put...crazy shit said at a private Catholic university hellhole.

I don't know how to do a "me version" of a review of sorts to this Spill. I can list things I like (and will) and things I don't (probably less), but that feels mostly pointless. Spill is based off Gumbs' reactions to Hortense Spillers' work (who I don't believe I have read - beyond maybe "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe"???). It's a little unfair of me to say it's inconsequential to have read Spillers' work to understand Gumbs' but it's also true because the theme-ing is good and probably the best part of both. I don't buy a lot of the marketing that has been done to the work by Gumbs and her University publisher but understand why she has to do it like that. I don't really need to be so negative and brazen and didn't mean to be. What I mean to say is that it is almost as if they are separate works (as they are) but that Gumbs has obviously been affected and inspired and her poems are more a dedication informed by Spillers' essays than having an exact and direct transfer of its inspiration's original intention. Do you get me? No? It's hard to say beyond, the marketing and messaging of the book I think betrays its deeper idea - that there are lineages of work, theory and otherwise, that create our own. And Gumbs is definitely aware of that and may academically see her work as doing that with more decisiveness than others. Not in a hoity-toity ness as academics tend to do, but in that her mission with the work was to do such. Tributary, you know?

Something more concrete beyond that I have small umbrage with is the slammingness of certain poems but that's a personal qualm of late (slamming has been a bad poem form for a while to me and is not a slam's fault beyond the hope we all address that poetry cannot be slamm'd no longer) alongside some really bonkers rhyme scheme in poems that didn't match a flow or pattern. I couldn't tell the purpose of that part of the work beyond finding some similarity to when I make lyrics that I know won't work but I want to put certain words next to each other. Then there would be others who would disregard those boring critic complaints and throw me to the floor. The work is overall well made and honest and deserving of acclaim even if at points it can be poetry. Forgot I like poetry. It inspired me to write some fiction again, we'll see where that goes.

The book also almost reads like a narrative, as another suggestion to check it out. It also is followed in M-Archive by being inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander, and DUB: Finding Ceremony to come out in 2020 which is, I'm not shitting you, inspired by Sylvia Wynter. In that same interview at the top, Gumbs talks about how she can't read anything without Wynter after having read her and fuck, you have to agree with that. Wynter is the hardest shit to get through (I mean for me now it's CLR James but I'm trying) but I too cannot imagine the world without even the slightest indication of what I learn from glancing through any of Wynter's work - most of which I haven't even finished! In any sense, there's no doubt Gumbs is good and inspired by some fuckin' cool people. Let me know if you want that .pdf for the Alexander article as it's the only one of hers I've finished. Feeling under-read but inspired.

Here's my favorite parts from Spill (abstracted lines in bullets, full poems in paragraphs):

was she dipped in paint. split open like achilles. where was she weak? she looked at her body and saw only pores, only we spaces, vessel, opening. she was whole. was she. born or made. was she possible? she looked at her fingertips for a seam. pinched her skin in case it was all a dream. was she real? the new female being, first of her kind, couldn’t believe herself. (15)

• the person who holds the tool can say i am not an animal. (20)
• without spoiling, and much hesitation, the poem on page 41 also is very good.
• with memories of muscles taught to tear themselves and grow. with sunspot fairy leaf branch glow. with edges turning back at noon as sisters speak with clouds. or jumping in the creek with giggled ripples twice as loud. with knowing that her blood could heat the rest of the blackened days. with heat-drunk porch-sunk lemonade haze. the recklessness of resting after basking in his gaze. the sun. he calls her out. (58)

she puts her hand on her heart, fingers spread past allegiance. and whose hand dance does she reprise with her ungraspable fear. the will to live is more than holding on to bones that betray us. her will to live bequeathed by dead women she holds her heart she cannot hold her hot to the touch heart oh uncontainable heart where are my mothers how how how could you leave me here (64)

lord don’t make this bathtub overflow with afterglow. my downstairs neighbors may have prayed for rain or something else to stop my pacing but at this point my racing heart don’t know how not to scream about this. a grown woman baptized in her own hands is supermarket reading material extraterrestrial waterbirth evidence that stranger though I get, I am known inside myself. a deep space black of waiting stars floats beneath a galaxy of soap. if someone asks i’ll say I slipped and hit my head on heaven. my hand phoned home. not between lovers in this in-between space but between the celestial folds the abundant grace of the base of my own heavenly body. oh. one small step for the first kind. nobody better come in here but me but if somebody asks I will softly explain that years are not measured by light they are measured by water. and I am wet as I want to be and was eve made the flood and how great. praise the mother of opposable thumbs. (97)

it was the girls and the way they needed silver. needed broken. needed crushed bright confetti from their foreheads to their toes. it was the shattered glass in them, the unstreetlit night. it was the fallen disco ball. it was the way they invited futures with different angles, prismatic possibilities. it was the way they funhoused mirrors. teenaged. showing up so different from the children we had raised. (101)

• you had me at hell no. (105)

as if no one lives here. as if the world your shaking creates has no populated underside. as if the lies you tell yourself don’t run and hide right in our faces. as if we just emerged this moment when you got in eyeshot. i ought to. shoot you. so you know. that this part hurts. (133)

• it was the strange blue light of irrelevant police. as if aliens had landed and retail had run to meet them. (148)