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The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. 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.
List of contents
A Note ix
Request 1
Commitment 3
Instructions 5
Opening 7
Whale Chorus 15
Remembering 21
Nunánuk 34
Boda 40
Anguilla 47
Another Set of Instructions 66
Red August 74
Relation 92
Prophet 94
And 110
Skin 114
Losing it All 120
It's Your Father 126
Edict 145
Edgegrove 153
Unlearning Herself 163
Birth Chorus 177
Conditions 194
Jamaica 199
Blood Chorus 202
Shop 214
Orchard 220
Cycle 227
Saving the Planet 231
Staying 239
Letting Go 246
Acknowledgments 253
Notes 261
Crate Dig 273
About the author
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of
Spill and
M Archive, both also published by Duke University Press.
Summary
The concluding volume in a poetic triptych, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise.
