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language: English
country: USA
year: 2018
form: novel, short fiction, poetry
genre(s): science fiction, fantasy
dates read: 12.6.25-16.6.25
when would the earthwalkers be ready for depth?
I read Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and was really impressed. not long after, I think — or possibly before? — I acquired a copy of M Archive: After the End of the World, the second book of the triptych that Spill began. it’s structured not unlike Spill in some ways, in that it’s a series of loosely linked prose fragments or prose poems, this time each inspired by a sentence or phrase from M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing. unlike Spill — or at least not precisely like Spill — it is also a work of science(?) fiction(?). M Archive is the fragments assembled by a far-future, possibly alien and certainly not-(quite-)human researcher — or possibly a group of future researchers — attempting to reconstruct the end of the world as we know it and the myriad forms of survival that followed it.
it’s an extraordinary book. it begins with a kind of introduction, a selection of “Lab Notebooks of the Last Experiments”, which sets the scene for climate disaster and a range of more speculative disasters following the depradations of capitalism. this is followed by four Archives, one for each of the western classical elements, each of which meditates on a particular kind of survival: in the Archive of Dirt, for example, some humans build new homes deep underground, only emerging into the poisoned air for brief periods, scrupulously avoiding detection by the surface-dwellers. in the Archive of Ocean some people have adapted to a life underwater. following the Archives are two concluding sections, one reflecting mainly but not exclusively on mass incarceration and the other on memory and embodiment.
to say that the final section reflects on memory and embodiment, though, is to suggest that the others don’t, but really that’s the whole book: knowledge in various forms — including both memory and knowledge of the future — and embodiment. the ways histories come alive in our bodies (even when we don’t want them to) and the ways our bodies open us up to new and different ways of engaging with the world. if I were to offer one critique here, it would be that this is at times quite idealist; M Archive draws heavily on an eclectic array of spiritual or mystical reference points, from yoga to African diasporic religions. for me it was at its strongest when it did not lean too heavily on these — that is, when it pushed towards a material politics and a material critique rather than the the consolation of prayer. its idealism manifests in other ways, like the implication that the violence of capitalism comes from ignorance, that if the mining executives really, truly understood the consequences of the environmental destruction they oversee they would simply not do that. it’s a nice thought, but I just don’t think it’s true.
but this doesn’t detract from the overall force of the collection. its central contention-intervention is a (re)centering Black women’s lives, histories, bodies, and knowledges — to take Black women seriously as thinkers both inside and outside of the academy, and to reject a world that one of the poem-fragments I pulled from the Archive of Sky is — among other things — a searing call to attend to Black women’s suffering as the literal foundation of the world we live in:
there was a world made of her screaming. an ecosystem to support it. the solid place we stand on. the calcified weight of her screams.
another poem-fragment, from “Baskets (Possible Futures Yet to Be Woven)”, the penultimate section, is a paean to and injunction to recognize and appreciate “the love” — and labor — “of fat black women”:
love. if you think you would have survived without the love of fat black women you are wrong. if you say it, you are lying. if you have blocked them out of your memory, it is because you do not want to know the meaning of necessary. you have failed them at the same moment you have failed the planet. which is every moment. say it. say the name of the fat black woman who processed your paperwork or fed you or cleaned something on which you would have slipped. […]
Gumbs has an incredible way with language. the poem-fragments are, on the one hand, direct — but never simple or straightforward. the short sentences and frequent sentence fragments give the whole text a strong, clear sense of rhythm, and the imagery and concepts are incredible.
even their bones would resist and crag the jaws of bulldozers wanting to be found. if they didn’t want to be seen again, the diggers wondered, then why would they bury themselves like art. and indeed. why trace sankofa heart on the coffin with nails. why hold a shell in a skeletal hand. and those are the ones who chose land.
can you imagine what they are doing underwater. shackles braided now with coral. hearts the shape of scattered lungs.
what a gift to be able to pick up this book and read it. what a gift to have these words. these worlds. to think with.
and she was here. so this was what it looked like.
moods: dark, hopeful, polemic, reflective