Dub

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.

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.

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