Alexis Pauline Gumbs - M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World, Duke University Press Books, 2018.

Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

"M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness. And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again." - Sasha Panaram

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a literary treasure. M Archive, the second book in an innovative trilogy that began with Spill, is evidence of her brilliance." - Bitch Magazine 2018-03-01

"Groundbreaking.... This is an impressive archive 'written in collaboration with the survivors' and the mythology that Gumbs develops from the artifacts of future black life and memory works to reveal an existence 'on the verge of regenerating the cells that would let us dream deep enough to remember.'”

Publishers Weekly (Starred

"Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a brilliant, highly original theorization of the impact of a dystopic reality on black consciousness and black bodies, asking: how will they act as archives of the end of the world as we know it? By articulating black bodies as critical sites of archival knowledge, Gumbs reads them beyond historical notions of catastrophic suffering as racialized subjects." - Alexis De Veaux

“Reading this gift of writing I keep gasping! Is Alexis writing from the bottom of the ocean, or the far-off future, or from inside the mind of God-is-change? How does she see everything so clearly? How does she make such incredible connections for us? This writing is generous and genius. It feels like fiction that taps into the deepest vein of sentience, that is also instantly sacred text. Thank you, Alexis, and bless you.” - adrienne maree brown

M Archive: After the End of the World synthesizes black feminist theory as creative urgency. In her opening note, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes: “this speculative documentary work is written from and with the perspective of a researcher, a post-scientist sorting artifacts after the end of the world.” M Archive exposes how we destroyed ourselves, our earth, air, water, and sky, and how black feminist metaphysics emerge as our only alternative for survival. Gumbs writes:

the problematic core construct was that in order to be sane . . . you could and must deny black femininity. and somehow breathe. the fundamental fallacy being . . . that there is no   separation from the black simultaneity of the universe also known as everything also known as the black feminist intergenerational sphere.

This “black feminist intergenerational sphere” constitutes the texture of the text, what Gumbs might call its spirit weaving. The M of M Archive encompasses memory and matrilineage, “miracle and mayhem and mass incarceration” and more. The M also calls on M. Jacqui Alexander whose visionary 2005 work Pedagogies of Crossing serves as a specific ancestor. Each meditation in M Archive ends with an endnote referencing Alexander’s text. The archive becomes palimpsest, a black feminist crosscurrent of “feminism, sexual politics, memory, and the sacred.” M Archive proceeds “after and with” Alexander, “after and with” black feminist legacy.  This is a major contribution.

This is you beyond you. After and with the consequences of fracking past peak oil. After and with the defunding of the humanities. After and with the removal of people of color from the cities they build.

Gumbs then incants a gorgeous register of black feminists, claiming M Archive “after and with” Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Barbara Christian, Nellie McKay, June Jordan, Cheryll Y. Greene, Gloria Naylor, Jayne Cortez, Lucille Clifton, Kitchen Table Women of Color Press and the Combahee River Collective. (My heart sings just typing this list.)
This opening note pairs with a closing “Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements,” a rich bibliography (again shouting out Kitchen Table Press) that brings together diverse sources “organized by atomic number.” Along with black feminist texts, this list also includes works by Grace Lee Boggs, Gloría Anzaldúa, J. Dilla, Prince, Benjamin Banneker, Alice Coltrane, Boyz II Men, and Jorge Luis Borges. M Archive proceeds “after and with” these texts too; the text frames its own visionary context and marks itself as a crossroads. These opening and closing notes situate the seven sections of the book, which exist as elemental invocations.
“From the Lab Notebooks of the Last Experiments” invokes blackness as existence and endurance through time. (Gumbs notes: “Last is a verb.”)
“Archive of Dirt” invokes earth, burial grounds, storage spaces and new digging.
“Archive of Sky” invokes wind and lungs, screaming and singing.
“Archive of Fire” invokes global warming and fossil fuels as reclaimed bodies and breath.
“Archive of Ocean” invokes the middle passage and the necessity of tears.
In order, they describe: “What We Did,” “What We Became,” “Rate of Change,” and “Origin.” In these sections and the last two, “Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to Be Woven)” and “Memory Drive,” we find critical meditations on flowers and food, walls, whales, love, fat black women, queerness, birthing, basements, science, basket weaving, capitalism, activism, prison and school abolition, social media, millennial speech, our “complicated networks of evasion” (drugs, trips, “yoga pilates hot yoga zumba jogging and other fitness-watch trackable activities”) and more (148). Gumbs also intersperses altered images of the periodic table of elements throughout the text. These become visual reminders of the transformed elemental quality of the end of the world.
The end of the world is no joke! This text is clearly ambitious. More compendium than chronicle, the writing is poetic, dense, and often solemn with glimmers of dark wit. M Archive unscrolls as sacred text, refusing a simple before and after. Instead, time blurs. Before burrows into another before. Memory muses a moving spiral. Future origin stories appear including “the critical black marine biologists” who connect “bioluminescence in the ocean and the bones of the millions of transatlantic dead;” “the descendant of stagecoach mary [who] started making a tangible and dirty archive of the clean digital world,” and “the dj named narcissus” who made a mixtape and “tried to replicate the tired rhythms of their feet across the dust.” Gumbs also slips in mentions of Audre Lorde, Saartje Baartman (the so-called Hottentot Venus), and a particularly powerful contemplation of eighteenth century poet Phillis Wheatley.
M Archive spends much of its time, though, on how we all went wrong, how we “suffocated meaning under diction” and willfully ignored the lineage of our own stories.

you can’t blame the storytellers. because they did tell the story and they even put it on the internet in a number of different forms. and actually the truth didn’t just live in the story. any one of us could have sat on the ground and listened and known without being told. the thing was we couldn’t afford to know . . . because we really believed we couldn’t live without money.”

While the text can at times feel like the warranted chiding of a stern mother, M Archive speaks truth about our catastrophic moment, how we sold out our humanity and had to recover ourselves. Gumbs also pinpoints the moment, hopefully now, when people decided to change their behavior /change back into something better / something forgotten.

what did we each do then? . . . when we lost exactly who we needed to save. when we   knew there would be no tomorrow. what did we each do then? how did we keep breathing past it (because we are the ones that did). they dug for those memories and stacked them in a row.
that’s how. that’s how we learned to get through this.

Notice here how “we” and “they” are split but must operate as the same and how breathing and excavation of memory become new knowledge. While this knowledge is new to us, Gumbs reminds us that our foremothers always knew, already had the solutions. We simply had to / have to choose to remember, to know, to recognize them as ourselves.

eventually they all remembered that they were their own great-great-great-great-grandmothers . . . they began to acknowledge their foremothers as the daughters they had always wanted to have. they started being, just being, the mothers they had always wanted to be. . . it was the act of choosing, of choosing each other. again.

Choosing in M Archive becomes a practice of the body. As a black feminist performance artist, I loved the embodied rituals throughout the text, the moving, dancing, singing and screaming. Post- historical trauma, post-and-within-current apocalypse, survival here must be recovered from and through the body, re-incorporated in solidarity with others.

we took off our leaden clothes and we skipped out of our concrete shoes and we went barefoot enough to bear the rubble we had created just before . . . we touched each other’s hands and found them warm and ridged with remembering. we traced the lines and found home again and again. home was like a pulse. home was where the hurt was. we lunged and pressed toward each other’s chests. we let longing lead past our labored lack. we held each other’s hands. they did not break.

M Archive advocates for taking time and space to remember, to touch, play, hold, practice divination, practice freedom, and practice embodiment. By the end, the black feminist researcher “was aware of her function as a technology for remembering. specifically, she activated her body as a connection site for all intergenerational knowing and reveled in the edges of herself.” This revelry becomes writing for the future.
Emitting Afrofuturism and centering black female imagination, M Archive embodies critical future writing now. It illustrates not how we are trained to write in graduate school, but how we should be — from the body, from the heart, from our nightmares and dreams. Along with the text’s muse M. Jacqui Alexander and the aforementioned black feminist geniuses, M Archive should be read with Hortense Spillers (who inspired Gumbs’ previous work Spill) and Sylvia Wynter, two other visionary black feminist scholars who reconfigured notions of humanity. M Archive also takes its place among recent extraordinary volumes on black life: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Saidiya Hartman’s Know Your Mother, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s underground blockbuster The Undercommons. All of these works challenge traditional modes of scholarly writing and allow for the personal, the ancestral, the communal, the political, and the creative.
Like these works, M Archive also tackles epistemology, how we can make or recover knowledge within oppressive systems, and how this knowledge can fortify us and our communities. Gumbs writes: “Consider this text an experiment, an index, an oracle, an archive. Let this text be as alive as you are alive. Might be enough.” This last phrase speaks to the power and contingency of black feminist speculation. M Archive: After the End of the World should be read / aloud / mightily / in black light / in trouble/ after and with / your mothers / and sisters / now / and for the future. - Gabrielle Civil
http://www.full-stop.net/2018/07/12/reviews/gabrielle-civil/m-archive-at-the-end-of-the-world-alexis-pauline-gumbs/







Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill : Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, Duke University Press, 2016.
excerpt




In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

I first encountered Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity mid-air just recently departed from North Carolina but not yet fully in New York. Spillage mediated my reception of this book as I watched from my aisle seat people spill onto the plane and into each other, baggage slip in and out of overhead bins, and drinks tumble in the wake of turbulence.

Although I hardly like reading on planes, the setting – the suspension – seemed suitable, even desirable, as I made my way through a text that reconfigured what it meant to move and move freely as a woman and person of color in this day and age. For once, separation from land was not just welcomed but wildly liberating and momentarily, even a little bit rebellious.

Written by a self-avowed queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist, Spill reads like a love letter or an ode to Black women and girls – past, present, and future – seeking relief or more aptly, freedom from oppressive structures that perpetuate racism and sexism. Indebted to the inimitable Hortense Spillers and her work in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Gumbs demonstrates what happens when you stop writing about a theorist but instead write with them, through them, for them and the visionary worlds they create. According to her, “[t]he difference between about and with has to do with intimacy, conspiracy; maybe we can call that love.”

Arranged as a collection of scenes or witness accounts that offer brief but biting glimpses into black women’s daily lived and imagined realities, Spill invites readers to reckon with themselves as flesh and bone, as mind and spirit, as always already present and eternally elsewhere and otherwise.

Gumbs creates vignettes where both the women depicted in her poetry and the readers of her text must simultaneously ask, “what is she doing here?” (14) and “how did you get here?” (71). Each section, framed by a different definition of spill, points to how black women exceed and explode the parameters in which they are said to operate showing again and again how they make and remake themselves in an ever-changing world. The question “was she possible?” not only resounds throughout Spill to facilitate a marveling at the triumphs and resilience particular to #blackgirlmagic, but also gestures to what Gumbs describes as black women’s “prismatic possibilities” (101).

Yet this poetic collection deals as heavily with the past as it does with the future. With sections dedicated to Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley, Gumbs pays homage to ancestral mothers who embraced fugitivity in their movement and in their writing not just as mechanisms of escape but as ways of life; ways of staying alive. Functioning as that which is “like an ancestor kiss” or a deep embrace, Spill memorializes these figures in such a way as to suggest their enduring legacies in those who come after them (34).

But equally important Gumbs shows us how to do the same be it through pouring libations, performing a “mantra in the name of the mothers,” writing and rewriting the ancestors into history, invoking their time-honored lessons, and more (103).

Hers is a text that teaches us how to live with and live out Black feminist literary criticism; to view the field as a series of conceptions and a calling.

In this way, Spill is not just a poetic collection where art meets criticism or where art is criticism. Instead, it is an intricately woven, poly-vocal, ever-expansive map that details and gives rise to new and old black feminisms instructing us how to live and move with(in) these proliferating epistemologies.

For this reason Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s 2014 drawing, Now There Are Three Ways to Get This Done: Your Way, Their Way or My Way, which depicts a map being spewed from the mouth of a figure with two heads, three faces, and multiple breasts, is an apt cover for a book inspired by spillages. Said differently, this drawing originally created for the Tituba Black Witch of Salem Drawing Series not only conjures the magic that the series and Spill allude to, but it also gestures to the ways that maps, like the one spewed from the figure’s mouth, cannot contain or accommodate black women. And the ways that black women rewrite and remake maps themselves.

In its representation of multiple realities and skepticism of land (“she no longer needs the ground”), Spill acts as an extension to Hinkle’s drawing calling for new ways of imagining the world and black women’s place in it (102). There is no right way to be according to Gumbs and therein lies the challenge and the limitless possibilities.

By the end of Spill it is clear that Gumbs is not interested in having a seat at the table to recall Solange’s latest album unless she can first understand how she and that table came to be or as she says learn “how a table got to be stronger than her… how much love does wood absorb” (24).

The table was not made for her and neither was the world. But this is less of a challenge or detriment for Gumbs. Spill takes this as a cause for celebration – an occasion for rejoicing – because it necessitates doing the work necessary to live with, learn from, and love one another. It means spilling endlessly and forwardly in a world already spinning and not stopping to pick up the pieces, but instead marveling at the traces left behind. - Sasha Panaram

http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=3735

TO TURN THE PAGES of Spill is to watch the invisible become flesh from the language of humming, longing, living, and dying. Drawing from the deep aquifers of the work of Hortense Spillers, American literary critic and Black feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s poetry is an overflow and offering of Black voice. It is a voice mostly for Black women that illuminates a world critically and lovingly restored with dimension and structure by the work of Hortense Spillers. Characterized by intermittent rhyming, a perspective that is at once fluid yet rooted in the language of the body and the usage of space and citations, Gumbs weaves narratives of hope, desperation, and knowing into one sharp longing. It is a “poetilitical praxis,” an unflinching look at what pain has wrought and what fruit might yet be born.
A queer Black troublemaker, a Black feminist love evangelist, and a prayer poet priestess, Alexis Pauline Gumbs holds a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Her scholarship spans the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University. Alexis is a public intellectual and essayist on topics from the abolition of marriage to the power of dreams to the genius of enslaved African ancestors.
more here: We Stay in Love with Our Freedom: A Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs