by Mary Sutton
March 8, 2022
Mary Sutton is senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets and poetry editor at West Trade Review. She was formerly the NEH Scholar in Public Humanities at Library of America where she worked with Kevin Young on African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song and the book’s companion website www.africanamericanpoetry.org
©2022 West Trade Review
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Back to Life, Back to Reality: Gabrielle Civil’s the déjà vu Does the Historical Work of Creating Space
NONFICTION REVIEW
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Image by Anaya Katlego on Unsplash
the déjà vu: black dreams & black time by Gabrielle Civil; Coffee House Press; 240 pages; $17.95
Gabrielle Civil defines the déjà vu, her fourth work in performance writing, as “an accounting of black feminist consciousness.” This publication, which combines poetry, memoir, criticism, historiography, visual art, script dialogue, text message threads, and interviews feels both nostalgic and bristling in its contemporaneity. Civil, whose knowledge of culture is as voracious and heteroglossic as that of the postmodern writers and artists whom she cites, draws a panoply of media into her orbit, making no distinction between “high” and “low.” Like the French OULIPO writer Georges Perec, she gives notes, texts, and other ephemera as much legitimacy as her poems and essays. Like Ntozake Shange, she embraces idiosyncrasy while never losing contact with her reader. She seems most interested in what we choose to remember; on how Black people position themselves in both public and artistic spaces; on how public spaces can become artistic spaces; and on what authenticity means in a Western world that has allowed people of African descent so little space for self-actualization.
Civil begins by sharing her notes about the importance of monuments in Western culture and adopts a position in favor of counter-monuments, a view professed by fellow poets Fred Moten and Robin Coste Lewis, and most succinctly by the monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who rejected our reverence for these objects over that which we ought to have for humanity. Civil uses the example of graffiti and observes the layering of tags on a mural in Montréal dedicated to murdered sex workers, many of them Indigenous. The graffiti forms both a crude palimpsest and what Civil would call an “exploding text” in which “memory, monuments and memorials” are superimposed by the spectators’ language and signs, some of which might be too esoteric to recognize. Civil wonders if murals and other monuments are sufficient ways to honor those we’ve lost, particularly those who are rendered invisible due to social hypocrisies. Is this mural a sincere means of paying respect, or is it a way to exonerate our collective conscience? She wonders, too, about the profane language and signs that people sometimes use in decorative art, including both graffiti and tattoos. When is such language offensive? Who has the right to determine what is offensive? Civil offers no answers, probably because there are none. Instead, she invokes the palimpsest—a motif that has been employed by painter Julie Mehretu and novelist Italo Calvino, both of whom Civil cites. The palimpsest is present, too, in Lorna Simpson’s double-exposure portrait photography. The device, which is applicable in both visual and written narratives, evokes the ways in which our experiences mirror and overlap, reinforcing both the necessity and peril of excavating memory. The peril, as Civil suggests, is that someone else’s memory can devour and eclipse yours.
Part of the double-consciousness of being Black is living within both your memories and someone else’s, an inner schism that robs Black people of allowing themselves the permission to be whole, complex, and self-determined. Civil is a Haitian-American Detroit native who attended predominately white Catholic schools before graduating from the University of Michigan and becoming a professor. She is, like most Black people who live and work within predominately white spaces, deeply attuned to the aspects of her lived experience that are about performance. As an instructor, she becomes aware of the ways in which she imposes her own expectations and ideas about excellence onto her students. For an artist who declares that her work is about opening up space, it is a starkly illuminating anecdote about the insidiousness of internalized racism; the ways in which it deprives Black youth, particularly, of their full humanity; the ways in which it teaches Black people that they are not allowed to fail; that they are “lucky” to become artists; and that the Sisyphean weight of work ethic matters more than the right to dream. Civil decidedly touts the necessity of dreaming, in the Whitmanesque sense of loafing and inviting one’s soul. This is echoed in her own insouciant approach to life outside of the classroom and her account of her peregrinations in Paris while seeking out the city’s memories of Joséphine Baker.
The spirit of Baker seems present in the chapter entitled “After the End,” a chronicle of a 2017 performance art rehearsal in which Civil wonders what performance art, particularly dance, will look like in some distant future. She remarks on the sight of a diverse group of performers rehearsing during the Trump years. She juxtaposes this vision of an assortment of bodies working cooperatively with the deep social stratification that existed outside the walls of the theater. She wonders, too, what it means for Black and brown bodies to take up public space, and if there will even be public space in this distant future.
As Civil knows, there is nothing new about the sight of a Black body on public display. The stage has taken the forms of auction blocks, human zoos, and the vaudeville shows in which Baker initiated the career that led her to the Théâtre de Champs-Elysées. How similar, though, is the white gaze that fixated on Baker in the banana skirt to the one that stalked Trayvon, Ahmaud, and George Floyd, to whom Civil dedicates this book? In a quatrain within this chapter, Civil wonders, again, what it would mean for everyone and anyone to move through public space without being interpellated as “alien” or “criminal”:
In the future, how often
do you see a body moving,
liberated in public space?
How often do you get to be that body?
Civil characterizes her own body as “chubby” and writes that “[dancing] in public as a chubby black woman […] is a reclamation.” With this act of performance, she writes, “I reverse marginalization. I am insisting on my presence.”
In the chapter “Don’t You Feel It Too?,” Civil recalls a performance art protest organized by the visual and performance artist Marcus Young at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. In this context, dance becomes both a form of civil disobedience, as well as a healing, meditative practice that can and must include those with disabilities. In the transcribed dialogue, “refractions,” which occurs between the queer trans writer and performance artist Aegor Ray and his colleague, Bobbi Vaughn, Civil encourages the reader to think about corporeality, about reorienting oneself to one’s own body and to bodies that are only now becoming socially legible.
Civil’s qualms about her own social legibility as a “chubby” Black woman are illuminated when she describes being at a Paris café and finding a nearby man attractive. Civil’s vulnerability is palpable to anyone who knows what it is to exist in a body that is not slender, a body that is non-white, a body that has been historically commodified and, therefore, burdened with the stigma of being depersonalized and, maybe, unlovable.
In “Black Time,” a narrative poem and catalogue, Civil references things that can only be understood within Black culture—“how long it takes for the hot comb to heat […] how long it would take for lotion to fix my ash.” Civil is at her most playful and assertive when writing verse: “Black Time […] is i’m always on time / is early is on time / is on time is late / is right and write and rite on time.” There is a subtle invocation of Negritude here, as well as reminders of more haunting aspects of time—the time we have spent living in a seemingly interminable pandemic and the time it took to steal George Floyd’s life. In her explanations of both Black time and her choice to lowercase “black” and “blackness” throughout the book, Civil insists that Black people exist beyond Western constructs of time, style, and grammar and have the right to embrace differences while letting go of the markers that have been assigned to us. For a book that passes through so many forms of media and that explores a plethora of sociohistorical memories and physical settings, the déjà vu feels deeply personal and resonant. (Admittedly, this resonance may be unique to me, as Civil mentions the work of Kevin Quashie, a beloved former professor of mine, and her feeling of being excluded from a seminal poetry anthology on which I may have worked). The book is rigorously intellectual yet accessible. Like any good performance artist, Civil engages deeply with her audience and even seems to ask us to join her on a stage in some distant future, one on which all bodies will move freely and within their own sense of time.
