Episode Transcript
Tami Navarro 00:00:05 You listening to Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean, with Kaiama Glover and Tami Navarro.
Alexis Gumbs 00:00:18 After and before carnival, causing carnival, there was a craving, a salt craving for a particular smell. No one talked about it or explicitly associated the sweetness of salt fish with the memory of being packaged and preserved barely while crossing over. It was a memory too visceral for verbs, but it was there. And some people waited all year, like a release and an excuse to fully sweat. Some people had to fly home for it. Some people try to reproduce it in the cities of their escape. They had to have it. And if they didn't get it one way, they would find themselves still seeking it in blood or a fascination with the body fluids of the exact wrong people in bed with them wondering "why?" In fights with them wondering "why?" In basements seeking a sacrifice to quiet the craving. There aren't any words for it. No one can put it on their tongue to say, I need the memory of being brined meat for monsters to snack on.
I need a closeness made from the opposite of love. I need the anonymity of abject arrival. Give me the scent of jostled grief. No one would say that. No one ever said that, but they did sometimes pack themselves into rooms with unknown fire codes and stay and sweat until they forgot everything else. They did press up against walls and corners with a secret hope of splintering. They did take to the streets for carnival dehydrated and sweating proving an endurance. No one had any use for, they did fill the whole island with the crevice sweat of knowing evaporating into the odor, the taste of survival.
TN 00:02:10 We're excited to have with us today. Alexis Gumbs, author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, and now Dub: Finding Ceremony, all of which are published by Duke Press. She is also the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, published by PM Press. Hi, Alexis.
AG 00:02:31 I'm happy to be here.
Kaiama Glover 00:02:33 And we are so happy to have you. We had the truly magical experience of having you read and think aloud with us as part of the Barnard Critical Caribbean Feminism series. So that was live and in person and amazing, but there were just so many threads I wanted to pull with you and didn't get a chance to, because of all the brilliant swirling about the room. You know, that just wasn't the space. Anyway, I'm thrilled to have you captive here in the studio for a little while. We can have more conversation. So, yeah. Welcome.
AG 00:03:02 Thank you. Thank you.
KG 00:03:03 Um, so shall we just go for it? I had a question. I'm gonna start with a question for you that I wanted to ask last night specifically. Well, we're here T minus two days from the publication Dub: Finding Ceremony. So obviously I want to hear about that. Um, in a lot of different ways, I want to hear about it, how it fits with your broader work specifically with respect to the two parts of the trilogy. Trilogy, triptych?
AG 00:03:28 I say triptych.
KG 00:03:30 But okay, you're going to educate me because what is the difference between a trilogy and a triptych? That's not my question, but what is the difference between a trilogy and a triptych?
AG 00:03:38 For me? I call it a triptych because they, because they're not consecutively plot-based, you know? So like when I think of a trilogy, I think of like N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy where, you know, like things are happening and the plot makes them connect to each other in some kind of time order. I say triptych, which I don't think is actually a thing. People used to talk about books, but I think about like that formation in visual art where-
KG 00:04:05 there's panel
AG 00:04:07 yeah, because of their angles, you know? And, and I feel like they face each other in a particular way, when you're looking at each of them, you're looking at something different and you're not looking at, they're not continuations of each other, even though of course, I mean, in my process, they, they are chronological, but the content is not chronological in any way.
TN 00:04:24 Awesome. And I'm gonna use that for my team.
KG 00:04:26 I love that. That is super helpful. Um, yeah, but that, wasn't my question. My question was, how does this part of the triptych relate to the two prior parts? How does Dub relate to your work more broadly, including Revolutionary Mothering and including your activist work so Eternal Summer, if you can situate it.
AG 00:04:49 Yeah. Well, in relationship to Spill and M Archive, it is it's part of the same process. And so I made a decision and this was, this was years ago when I had finished my dissertation. I was really thinking about what do I want my intellectual writing practice to be? And I've had some resistance towards like, you know, just create a monograph that is your dissertation, but readable,
TN 00:05:19 Shoutout to all the grad students.
AG 00:05:22 This is, um, I think what, what would have been the default thing to do. And I realized I didn't feel attracted to that at all. And, and then I was also realizing, I was like, okay, the people that I cite over and over and over again, the theorists who I cited in my dissertation Hortense Spillers, M Jacqui Alexander, Sylvia Wynter also did not do that. I mean, Hortense Spillers has this incredible dissertation about the sermon, and yet she had this incredible impact on the field, through these essays that she has written for specific purposes at specific times. And that are, of course now collected, one of the most influential, theoretical volumes that exists. And Jacqui Alexander, also, right, Pedagogies of Crossing is not a monograph. It is these absolutely interconnected, but distinct essays that she created, and really a ceremony that she created, I feel. And Sylvia Wynter also whose essays are not even collected at this time, as of yet.
There was something about their intellectual practices and how I very much saw them making my own intellectual practice possible. That made me think about, well, what does that mean in terms of form? And so what I decided was that I, well, what I realized was I did not know, at all, what my relationship to form was going to be, but I knew that it was intimately in relationship with them. And so I just decided to create a daily practice where I would go back to their work and I would actually be prompted by their words and my relationship to what they were, what they were doing, which I couldn't, I mean, I still can't even describe what each of them did, but I just knew that I was drawn to it over and over again. And that it was generative beyond just being able to explain it beyond just being able to apply it to something. It was something that I will always be in relationship with and I needed to see what that relationship would generate if I actually gave it priority, like first thing in the day and actually gave it space. So I didn't, I didn't think like I'm publishing a triptych of books. I'm like someone will publish these.
I really was like, I'm in a personal writing practice and I'm deepening and honoring my relationship to these thinkers who are so important to me. And then what happened is that, what I would say is like the artifact of that process is what you end up seeing in each of the books. It's not everything I wrote during that process. None of them are in the order that I wrote them in, in terms of those days, but they took me to completely different places. I mean, those are three really different theorists and yeah. So, so Dub then being the part of that process that was specifically working with Sylvia Wynter's work
KG 00:08:24 On the same model. Right? I've never seen anything like that.
AG 00:08:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every single day and first thing every day, really, because her work is so profoundly accountable to the Caribbean. Because her work is at its core about really dismantling the stories that we have, the ways that sense has been made and, and revealing the violence of those stories. It took me, it, it had me have to be in relationship with the Caribbean differently. Like I couldn't have written this and not been thinking about my own family's histories in the Caribbean. And then all the stories about ancestry that are kind of the mythology that I don't examine that has me make sense of myself, but then having to really reckon with Sylvia Wynter, I had to look at everything in a different way. I had to listen in a different way, and it became, I didn't know what was going to happen, but it became this really intimate, ancestral listening process that was at the same time, there's something that, you know, that there's a blessing to that. And it was also very destabilizing for, for a sense of self, you know, a sense of self that I, that I had and that I was using. And I would say also it's important that Sylvia Wynter is a theorist who is so crucial to contemporary Black feminist theory, who does not identify as a Black feminist. And, and there's, and black feminist is like such an important part of my identity. I mean, when you were reading my bio last night, it was, and she founded the Black feminist this, the Black feminist that, and the other Black feminist thing that like, as many times as I can say, Black feminist, you know, like that, that's, I love, I love to say it.
And because I, I do feel like I'm honoring and have been made possible by a tradition of people who called themselves Black feminists. So we winters not someone who called herself a Black feminist. And that also was important because it's, it gets me also to another part of what's at stake and the accountability of my work. Right. I mean, my grandmother doesn't identify as a Black feminist, right. Am I, am I not going to be intimate with her story because she doesn't actually claim that title? No! The core of what it means for me to be a Black feminist is that I'm obsessed with my grandmothers. You know, like this is, this is what Black feminism is!
Um, so there's something about that too, that really clarified for me, my relationships to Caribbean theory and, and Caribbean politics and practice, you know, like the end, the audiences to whom Sylvia Wynter- cause many of these essays were first public speeches that she gave was so important. And I think that's why I ended up really being guided in terms of how I created, how I prioritized, what would prompt me. I was really guided by her argumentative style. I was guided by her inflections of emphasis, which look really different. Like, you know, they're published by different people, right? So sometimes there's like a double underline. Sometimes there's a bold, sometimes there's these italics, but there's these ways that she's making a particular inflection. Cause she's trying to have who she's listening to at this particular gathering, right at this particular conference on ethno-poetics or this particular conference on the idea of development in Africa, she wants the people there to understand the incredible complex multi-layered argument that she's making.
And she puts emphasis in particular places with just such brilliance. And I found myself like, oh, that also that, that moment of emphasis is also that moment of intimacy of leaning in, of being accountable of saying, I know you're listening to me. And that, um, was profoundly generative to me beyond even specifically what she was saying, but also like, okay, wow. What is it to even imagine being understandable to my ancestors, to even understand what that is, to understand where I am, because Sylvia Wynter is talking about this possibility of being in relationship with an environment beyond the mediation of enlightenment thought. It's like one short way to say it.
KG 00:13:09 Short and very eloquent. Thank you very much Alexis.
AG 00:13:11 Right. And so she's, but she's doing it too. Like she's talking about that. And she's also saying I'm actually practicing with a group of people who are right here, this possibility, even though I have to do it through these languages of colonialism of which she was expert in all of them.
TN 00:13:30 But it also what you're saying requires understanding, giving a lecture, giving a speech or writing a book as a relationship to your audience, a relationship to the people, to whom you want to be in conversation, which is not always the case. Right? So for those who are sort of pushed to do the single author monograph, it's not so much a dialogic relationship, but a sort of talking at, right, or informing rather than the things that you're talking about Wynter, the kind of practices that Wynter takes up require the kind of flexibility and willingness to, to change, to react, to think about what will get this across.
AG 00:14:06 Yeah. Because it matters, right. She's not saying it to prove she can say it. Right. You know, it's, it's actually like this relationship must happen. It's it's not about demonstrating intelligence. It's about the practice of intelligibility. Like how can we actually perceive each other, be with each other, and create from there. And of course she has continued to do that. Right. She does that. Writing plays and writing novels and really her practice as an educator is, is a model and example of that. And I also think to loop Revolutionary Mothering into it. I mean, so conceptually, certainly mothering is, um, is huge. I mean, there's, there's a section of Dub that's called the, The Birth Chorus. There's another section called The Blood Chorus and they're really investigating what does, what does mothering look like in captivity? What does, what are the costs of mothering?
There's yeah, there's a, there's a lot there, but there's also, I guess I'm, I'm also thinking that this same question of what, how does the intellectual writing happen? The reason that Revolutionary Mothering, which is the thing that is most close to what my dissertation, "We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves" was thinking about would not for me have worked to be a single-authored monograph. It's an anthology. I have two co-editors who are, who are revolutionary mothers, Mai'a Williams and China Martens. And it was a seven year process of them gathering a community of faces really in, in this place. Right. So, so bringing together Mai'a has gone all over the world and made relationship and been in activism with other people who are mothers in the Gaza Strip in Chiapas and in the middle of the revolution in Egypt, you know, and, and that whole time we've been cultivating our friendship. And I'm fairy godmother of her daughter who, who she was, I was pregnant with when we started this, these conversations and we didn't know where we were like thinking about a book, but I was telling her like, oh my gosh, I'm doing this research about how Audre Lorde that about mothering and about these conferences or lesbians of color. We're talking about mothering in this really radical way. And she was like, well, I'm thinking about this and this way, and this is what the moms and Chiapas, we were just talking about this. And then China, I mean, it was really Mai'a. And I were like, this is something like, we, we should be able to put this in conversation, you know, like this archival record. And then these conversations that are happening in contemporary political spaces, we should be able to be together. Like what if there was a, but that was about that. And that was a ceremony for that being together. And then China, um, China is the person who published the one of the first zines about parenting ever. And it's a zine about mothering. It's called "The Future Generation." It's a zine about mothering as a mom on welfare. And, um, China is like a generation or half-generation older than Mai'a and I and really in terms of independent publishing and creating community around words, just like someone who is just a really amazing person to collaborate with. And so that is totally different right. Than what it would be like to be like, okay, "as an expert, who's engaged this archive myself, how many smart things in a row can I say about what I from this archive?"
Because really what did I learn from it? What I learned from it was about mutuality. What I learned from it was about care and creating something together at about interdependence. And so therefore the form had to be that, right. We had to be on this journey, which we're still on. I mean, incredibly, especially when a book takes that long, right? So like these people are like, I just had this baby and I wrote about an essay about it. And now we're at the book lodge, and yet here they are running around, they're seven years old and now they're driving around, you know, like all of them, it's incredible to be family. Cheryl Boyce Taylor, who was at the event last night is in Revolutionary Mother. And, uh, she, she wrote that piece-
KG 00:18 she was the one that got exposed about her brassiere
AG Mmhm. She got very exposed about her undergarments and everything. But it was, I mean, speaking of ceremony, we had the book launch for Revolutionary Mothering at Bluestockings here in New York city. And Cheryl was there. My sister was there. She was pregnant with my first niece. And it was this space where people were like, like intergenerational wisdoms were being passed between people. I felt like my sister was like at this blessing and like in this beautiful supportive space. And then actually, and Cheryl shared this piece, which she wrote about, about her son Malik, who's actually Phife from Tribe called Quest. Yes! So, poet mother of poet. And the next day is, is when Phife passed away, totally unexpectedly and suddenly. And we had been there in this space of honoring for her to speak her journey of mothering as, as a queer mother and the power of their relationship and the journey of their relationship.
And, um, of course we couldn't, we could not have known that that was what was going to happen, but it was also to be able to be, to be family with her in that way to be profoundly affirming and honoring the, the political, revolutionary, theoretical pricelessness of her mothering at the moment. I mean, I guess it was a different moment for my sister at the moment that their relationships to mothering were completely changed. So, um, wow. I just don't, I mean, I don't know. I think I'm cool, but I don't think anything that I wrote by myself about that topic would have, would be able to hold that.
TN 00:20:13 That's amazing. And so much of what you, the names that you've invoked in the folks that you've talked about, enabling your practice, facilitating your practice, crafting, making your practice are these Black women, but particularly Caribbean and Caribbean-adjacent thinkers. You've talked about Audre Lorde, who I know you're really upfront and clear about your intellectual genealogy.
So there's an Audre Lorde. You've talked about Sylvia Wynter clearly Jacqui Alexander's work, right? So there's this sort of canon of folks that you're dealing with, but you have also opened with talking about the centrality of the importance of Black feminist thought for you. And I guess I just want to hear you talk about that because in some rooms, those things are oppositional in some rooms, those, right. So the Caribbean thinkers are sort of maybe marginalized or not included in this kind of canon of Black feminist thought-
KG 00:21:04 They're not included *as* Caribbean women. Right? They're there, but no one acknowledges-
TN 00:21:09 That's the thing, right. So thinking about Sylvia Wynter as a theorist, what do you engage with her as a Caribbean theorist? Is that part of their identity, that part of their writing practice, inform how you take them up?
AG 00:21:21 Yeah. I think that that's really interesting. I mean, so, so yes, there, there is this situation where it's like, okay, Audre Lorde and June Jordan who, um, that's like the core of my archival research, right? Huge priority. Both Caribbean women in diaspora grew up here in New York city, but it's not, it's not thought of as Caribbean, Caribbean intellectual work that they're doing, creating whole lives and, you know, 14 books, you know, like all, all of, all of what they're doing, it's not thought of as Caribbean feminism. And for me as a person of Caribbean heritage, who, who also has grown up in the United States, it's absolutely part of why I ever even identified with them. And they were these first Black feminist I ever knew about. Right. So, so my model and experience of what is a Black feminist that's, that's what it is. So, so it's, it's not, it's not separate in terms of how did I come to be a Black feminist? Well, I came to be a Black feminist because of identifying with Audre Lorde and June Jordan, not like, oh, and they're from the Caribbean! That was like, that was, that was a part of what they were navigating. How do they navigate their relationships with their mothers in particular? And I'm like, okay. So as a person here and my mother growing up in Jamaica, that is a primary, that is the primary intellectual problem and possibility that I'm working with in my life. These are the people who dedicated their lives to that. And I see that as so, as so core to a Black feminist practice, but even that within itself has this right? Like they, their mothers are not Black feminists and their mothers don't have to be Black feminists for that to be a primary motivator for what they're thinking about in their work. And so there's something about generation and there's something about recognition and lack of recognition that I think is, is really up in that conversation.
I would say also, I think about it in relationship to my own parents and my, and my own relationship to Anguilla and Jamaica, um, which are completely different because of my parents, different relationships to Anguilla and Jamaica, and my mother, like many of these stories. And I write about this in Revolutionary Mothering, but she, she was born in London to my grandparents who had migrated from Jamaica to London to work and then sent back as a young child to be raised by another relative in Jamaica. And that was actually an abusive context, a traumatic experience for her. And therefore when growing up, we went to Anguilla every single summer, like "can school end so we can be in Anguilla and we not coming back until school about to start!" You know? That was, um, formative and so much time. And so much of like how I understand my family and how I understand myself came from those experiences. We did not go back to Jamaica. We went back to Jamaica one time and we stayed at an all-inclusive resort. And we went like one day and visited, you know, family members in Kingston, you know, that goes totally, totally different experience. And that was because of trauma and abuse and, and obviously globalization and capital, you know, like what, what made it such that my mother's association, and she has done so much work around this.
And now even part of the reason that it was important for me to ground myself with Black feminist writers of the Caribbean, and definitely including NourbeSe Phillip and Dionne Brand and those people, I mean, Opal Palmer Adisa, like those people who've written about those mother daughter relationships and written about the costs of those transnational cleavages of capitalism and what actually has meant in families. I needed that. And that actually allowed me to do with make the art within my family. And, you know, my family teases me that like, I will come home from breaks on school and be like, I have created an audio piece. Okay. And it's like about our family drama, you know, but I'm trying to like heal it and I'm trying figure it out. And, um, I'm interviewing my Nana about my mom and I'm interviewing my mom about her. And I'm like, "can you hear each other now?" You know, like, there's that, um, what gave me what I needed to be able to play that role in my family was the work that Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Dionne brand, NourbeSe Phillip did about actually showing me there was a tradition of working that out creatively and working that out in writing and the many other mediums that all of those artists use. So yeah, those things, those things are not separate for me, but I do see that there, that there's a way that in the naming of terms, in the marketing of books, in the academic language of, you know, what epistemology is this little epistemology is that, there, there is a separation that to me is always related. It's related to the separation between my mother and my grandmother. It's related to those forced separations that are also what make it the priority of my life to focus on that meeting place and to say that that's, that remains possible, the ceremony can be found for it.
KG 00:27:04 I think, you know, it's, what's worrisome or what's the, the tricky or the sticky part of this is that, um, all right. How can I, like, how do we get out of the narrative wherein one, can't be political feminist self-actualize and realized in the actual space of the Caribbean and that work can only happen in diaspora and specifically, and deeply ironically, in the space of the United States. Right? And so part of that is this sort of disclaiming of the Caribbean when we bring these thinkers into post-colonial conversations as Black women, but not as Caribbean Black women in the ways that you've just articulated. Right. And, and it's, I mean, you've just done this work here, and I have yet to read Dub to see if it's there, it's there in the two prior panels. Um, but, but that kind of speak. And even those, those panels, they're transatlantic, they're intergalactic. The Caribbean is there, but so many other places, but that Caribbean specificity is a hard thing to hold onto. And again, in a way that, that risks feeding the narrative of you got to get out in order to find yourself elsewhere. And I'm asking you for the answer to that. Yeah. Let's fix it
All 00:28:15 [crosstalk]
AG 00:28:19 On this day. Yes, yes. And yes. And it's, I mean, I do want to say that obviously there are Black Caribbean feminists and Caribbean feminists in general doing work in the Caribbean right now. Um, incredible work around raising visibility around sexual violence. I think about Angelique Nixon. I think about Red Thread movement, Alyssa Trotz, you know, like, I, I just, I feel inspired around that all the time. Right. So it's, it's not to say that it's not possible. I mean, this is what, this is what we are doing. This is what you are doing. Right. And people based in the Caribbean are, are doing that work. And I think that the, I think that there is something to be, I mean, I, I hope that Dub is in, is in this energy. Cause, cause when you say it that way, I think about like, oh, how is Dub its own version of me being like "Nana and Mom, like hear each other!" you know, like, is it me being like "Black feminist and Caribbean feminists, we the same ones!"
Like we are united, you know, like I acknowledge this, I think that, you know, I don't know, um, you know, books in the mail and Sylvia Wynter will get it and maybe she'll read it and I will be so honored to know what she thinks, but like, what does it mean for such a self avowed Black feminist to be like this whole book, every single page sites, Sylvia, Windsor, you know? And I don't know how she feels about that personally. And I hope we get to talk about it, but I do know that there, that that would be, that would be such a beautiful, that's the space that I need. Right. And so that's me every day, creating that space in the practice that ended up creating that book. That is a space that we need that I think requires the type of intimacy and devotion that, that what you do, first thing, what you do over and over every day takes.
So yeah, I would say that I do not think that that kind of actually being able to live, otherwise collaborate the ways that we want to collaborate, be in the space of Caribbean, of the Caribbean and with all, with all, all of it, all the queer Black feminism that is running through me. I don't think that that will come from any of the institutions that continue to make us marketable or sell us. Right. And it's, this it's the same... it's the same thing that meant that my grandmother could not afford to raise her own children. She had to be in England and then here raising other people's children. And why? Because her labor to be mother to her children is not, was not valuable. And her labor to mother, these other children was valuable within capitalism. Right. And so that's, I'm always thinking about that.
Like, what does it mean? What does it mean when the forms of recognition that we understand will support our lives are not doing the work that we actually need to be able to turn in and see each other. And I think that's, what's so beautiful about what you all are actually practicing. I mean, in this moment, we get to sit here and face each other in what you've created with this entire series and how you've put people in conversation intergenerationally and who have different experiences of what it is to be Caribbean women writers. It's, it's what I love about association of Caribbean women, writers and scholars, you know, it's, um, I, I think that that's, that's where it will, that's where it will come from. And I'm excited about that because I see us prioritizing it. I mean, I see you both prioritizing it in this very act and yeah, it's necessary.
TN 00:32:35 I have one more question if I may, um, I can't let you go, Alexis, without asking you about time. So in my own thinking and writing and many Caribbean writers are obsessed with time because of the processes that have ravaged the region that are ravaging the region, the things that you talk about that kind of transnational separations, particularly in relation to mothering are happening today and will happen tomorrow, right? Because capitalism has not radically transformed itself despite our best efforts.
So I have to ask you about time, um, and non linearity. So I was so struck what I re-read most recently was M Archive and you're clearly in conversation with Jacqui Alexander on palimpsestic time, but there's also David Scott on time, there's, I've used Benitez-Rojo On the Repeating Island, there's Plantation Futures, Michaelene Crichlow and Creole timei. So we're all thinking of, it's like, okay, this isn't linear. We get that. Yeah. So I just want to hear you either, how you engage with those folks or how you think about time, because so much of your work is not about looking forward or even looking outward. It's about a remembering, but it's not, it's neither backward looking. It's a sort of space in between neither future nor past nor present cause the present has been emptied. So I just wonder how you think about all that.
AG 00:33:51 Oh yeah. I love that. I mean, everybody that you mentioned also is just really has really impacted how I think about time. Definitely Jacqui Alexander, the way that she invokes palimpsestic time as something that makes forms of labor visible as, as something that I think I experience it as a technology of presence, that accounts for the evacuation of the present that you, that you talk about. But it's a, but it's a practice. Um, and it's, uh, it's a being in relationship. And actually I'll say when I was for, this was really a trip, like when I was actually in the process of writing M Archive, in that daily practice, you know, I was going all over the place. There was somebody on planet of sulfur, you know, like there's like some stuff in there that I'm like, "where are we?" And yet, as I wrote that, I started to realize that every day I would see something from that scene that I had written first thing in the morning and nobody's awake. I would see it in the actual day that I lived like that scene with the, somebody is on a planet of sulfur. Basically their heart is becoming coal, which is becoming a diamond. Like this is like, this is not obviously going to be the rest of my day. Right. Because I'm not on a planet with sulfur, and hopefully my heart's not turned into coal right now.
But literally that day that I wrote that scene, I went to do, there's an art gallery that, um, we support in our community in Durham or it actually doesn't exist anymore, but we were raising money for the [inaudible] gallery. And I walked in there and literally on a string in the middle of the room, this ceramic black heart, it's just right there. And I was like, wow, it was one of those moments, like what is happening, you know? And I really had to ask myself what is happening in relationship to time because I'm thinking this is like super futuristic. This is, you know, this is, um, I wasn't really making sense of what I was writing each day. I was just like allowing myself to be transported and in terms of Jacqui's work a lot by her questions like her, she's asked so many amazing questions in Pedagogies of Crossing. And I had to reckon with the fact that like, okay, at the same time that this is taking me out of the moment and maybe making other things possible and accounting for the remembering the wisdom of those who have been through all of these different apocalypses, it is also specifically bringing me present to pay attention to this day that I am living right now. And so how to hold all of that, is that me understanding myself as future ancestor is that,
TN 00:36:45 And did you call that heart into being right? Did your writing of that lead you in a way to invoke that? And can we have a hand in our future in that way?
AG 00:36:54 Yeah. I was like, is M archive. I was like, is M for manifestation, like what, you know, like, and then in that case I should be really careful. [crosstalk] I mean, and, and David, Scott, I mean the, of course, and one of the cortex for Dub is his interview with Sylvia Wynter. Like that is one of the places where it was, it was interesting because there is a difference between speaking to an audience of people and like what you all have created with the series, like actually speaking to one person and what that means in terms of being in relationship.
And I, I did find there was actually a different temporality in terms of that intimacy and yeah, the type of, I mean, and what's happening in that interview? Well, she's reflecting on her whole life also, like she's talking about her childhood and her education and different projects that she did and what she thought when and how she's rethinking her ideas around ceremony and how she's rethinking this essay and what, you know, all of those things. And yeah, I think, I think there is, I think there is something about being in time. This is what, um, in Ottawa, there's there, these three women-wait, two dreads and a bald head? two bald heads and a dread, I don't know if they're describing their own heads. Um, and they talked, they talked about, they said "We as a people are not on time, but we are in time." And so in the way they were saying it, I think maybe they literally meant like in time, like, you know, the boat didn't leave yet. So you're in time for the boat.
But what about in time? You know, like what about an immersive in time? I think that that is, I think that's what I'm experiencing in my practice is like, okay, I'm in time, which has, which does have to do with showing up for my purpose or showing up to see, you know, how this is emerging in this day. But it also has to do with what it is that they're talking about in terms of us as a people not being on time. It also has to do with a rejection of a certain capitalist formation of the day and units of time. And you know, all of that is happening at the same time. How do I show up for what I'm supposed to do, who I'm supposed to be to be accountable for who I'm here for, but not by reproducing what we have all been forced to survive about this idea of time that comes out of exactly these structures, Sylvia Wynter is talking about.
This is what makes slavery and colonialism, not only imaginable, but inevitable. We can't continue to think that way cause those will continue to be the only possibilities. And yet here we are, we have been shaped by that. We have internalized it. We, this is what I think is one of the things that's so amazing about Sylvia Wynter's body of work. She wants us to see, we think it's natural, what we do. And there's actually whole epistemologies and ways that science is taught that, say, this is nature doing this. And it's not, it's the story that we're telling about what's natural. Right?
So, yeah. So I think that time is such a huge part of that because to totally disregard it, is met with violence, right? Even, even in the small scale of a parking ticket, if you don't acknowledge the time in which you supposed to pay that, and then everything else, rent, you, can't just not acknowledge time and capitalism. You will be met with violence. And yet here we are right here.
KG 00:40:52 In a lot of ways, that's what I was trying to get at the other day is your work operates to an extent in the future. Perfect. Right? In the space of what will have happened, what will have been and understanding what you are doing in this present as the past of that, right? This kind of accountability to a time that you recognize will be someone else's time to be in time.
TN 00:41:18 That's so hopeful.
KG 00:41:20 Oh, that's what I kinda wanted to get to hope. [crosstalk] And Alexis' despair and confrontation with violence or, you know, incapacitation by trauma, but always like this is the writing for, to be the past of this tomorrow that I know will be, and dare I say, I know will be better or will be better if I keep doing this and we keep doing this. So anyway, we may be out of time. [crosstalk] Capitalism claims our time for the rest of this day, many myriad ways. So maybe we have to let you be elsewhere in time.
AG 00:42:02 Well, I mean, I just, I love everything that you just said. And I, I think, I just want to want to also say that when you say that about the future perfect. I mean, of course I think about Tina Camp, but I also think about, I think about Barbara Smith, you know, I think about Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde saying we have to create Kitchen Table
Women of Color Press. Why? Because this is what will have had to happen for... Right. And so for me, continuing to go back to these texts, I feel completely hailed by that. Right. I feel like, oh, that happened. Right. And, and it's science fiction, you know, like the, the
KG 00:42:40 We didn't even get to that! Yeah. All the speculative, [crosstalk]
AG 00:42:45 It is. It is. I do think that I do think that it is those directions of accountability that people have been conscious of for a long time. And I think about the decisions, like I think about decisions that Barbara Smith made believing someone will need to have this, you know, I think about Alice Walker talking about right after she had, you know, found Zora Neale Hurston's final resting place and her saying like what to her, what it meant for black women's writing to be out of print because of a capitalist timeframe of relevance and marketability. She was like, "I refuse, I refuse for us to have to go be dug up again." So she made decisions that had to do with the fact that she hoped that somebody would be able to have something to hold onto that would make something else possible and not have to go back and find the same stuff that she had to go back and find, at least.
KG 00:43:49 Speculative forensics. Yeah.
TN 00:43:51 Speculative forensics. There's you fourth book! Black feminist, Black Feminist Archeology. Why a triptych? [crosstalk]
AG 00:44:01 It was a process. And it is interesting to be like kind of post that process because now I'm still, of course in a daily writing practice, but it is, it is different. And it is also interesting for me at this moment to be like, okay, and maybe this is how sometimes people feel after a first book, because even though there are three different books, because it was actually one decision and one commitment that I made, what, for a purpose, like what I needed to have happen and transform has, or what, and what I also didn't understand, I even needed to have happened in transform has happened and transformed and the work I'm making now, it has a different function that I, that I am discovering, you know, and then, and then I'm in the process of, but I do feel like those three texts, their relationship to each other is, is important.
And I do feel though I did not know that they would be published by Duke Press or any academic press or I, I, or even I did not even try to make that happen actually. And that's a whole nother story, but I think that there's, uh, some certain refusals I had to make and a certain, also commitment to demonstrate, and also performative aspect of like, what is it to, you know, in the age of where you need to have a hashtag like "Cite Black Women" to only cite one Black woman every page, the whole book, you know, like really to, um, make space for myself, to be able to write another way to be able to have, have space for what can my intellectual writing look like. And also not just not just me, you know, I, I understand that part of, one of the reasons that it's valuable for me for this work to be even published by Duke University Press, is that it's like, what ways will other people trust themselves around form that they might have thought they weren't allowed to?
And to be able to have an example, it's not the only example. I mean, I think about Cherríe Moraga and her codex, which she, she published. And she was like, I refuse to translate the words in Spanish. Like, y'all have a dictionary. I don't have to, I don't have to do that. Therefore it, we don't have to do that. Right. Like she showed us that. Yeah. So that that's, so what I'm reckoning within my own life now as continuing to be an intellectual writer is like, okay, so now what do I do with even the possibility I've made for my own, for my own writing, it's not the same thing. It's requiring something different and it's really exciting. And it's also like messy.
KG 00:46:50 She has to come back. You just have to come with new stuff because we didn't have time to get to this.
AG 00:46:54 I'll be back!
TN 00:46:58 Alexis, thank you for joining us. That was amazing.
KG 00:47:01 Thank you so much. This is more than we could have hoped for.
TN 00:47:08 Thank you so much for joining us.
TN 00:47:09 We hope you'll tune in again.
TN 00:47:13 Writing Home is produced by Kaiama Glover, Tami Navarro, Rachel James and Miriam Neptune. Support for this podcast comes from the Digital Humanities Center, the Center for Research on Women, the Media Center and the library at Barnard College. Our music is by Ayizan from their album Dilijans and the track is Tribilasyon.
