Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Everything that Made Us Still Belongs to Us

Dub: Finding Ceremony is the third and concluding book in a poetic trilogy by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The first book, Spill, is a collection of experimental works exploring Black feminism through imagined embodied scenes of fugitivity—Black women seeking freedom from gendered and racist violence. M-Archive, the second book in the experimental triptych, tells a researcher’s story after the end of the end of the world, reconstructing the truth through  artifacts of survival and possibility in a post climate-crisis state. Dub continues in the trilogic legacy of genre-breaking with prose poetry that channels the voices of ancestors and offers wisdom stories of the diaspora that break western constructs of time and space.

With the voices coming through porous walls of ocean and land, Gumbs identifies and shares marine life as portals of Black feminist genius and living, breathing history. Each book deepens, builds, and interrogates scholarship, storytelling, and poetry in an ongoing dialogue with the works of leading Black thinkers and scholars Hortense Spillers, M. Jacqui Alexander, and Sylvia Wynter.

— Lisa Factora-Borchers for Guernica

Guernica: How did you create a book of this breadth and imagination by listening to your ancestors?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: It was an intense embrace of “what looks like crazy.” 

There are women ancestors in my lineage who I know for a fact were institutionalized in mental hospitals; my great grandmother died in a mental hospital. Part of my commitment to listening