Becoming-Gods: Canisia Lubrin’s Army of Revolutionary Zombies

 

In “Zombies,” a song from Awaken, My Love! (2016), Childish Gambino sings about the struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape crawling with the undead. Though the horror trope itself is familiar, Gambino manages to defamiliarize the listener’s sense of fear by granting his zombies soft, seductive voices. The featured artist, Kari Faux, sings:

We’re coming out to get out We’re all so glad we met you We’re eating you for profit There is no way to stop it

In the outro, Gambino asks, “Do you feel alive? Do you feel alive?” As our crooner questions our own status of liveness and implicates us in the profit-hungry landscape of the walking dead, zombies of the song transform. The ultimate question being asked is, can we be certain of where we fit within the spectrum of monster and survivor? Zombies become the figure through which another recent artist, poet Canisia Lubrin, aims to awaken her own loved ones. In her debut collection, Voodoo Hypothesis, Lubrin weaves a tapestry of stories from the living and the dead in order to summon a revolution in the lore of this earthly terrain. The book reaches deep into the world’s oceans and as far out as Mars, in order to demand a reckoning of the violence waged against persons, animals, and environment. “It was never a complex thing, the beginning,” writes Lubrin, evoking the effortless quality of her paradoxically hard-working lines. The poem in which this line appears, “Let the Gods to Do Their Work,” attributes the ease of creation to heavenly beings, and in the ease of this line Lubrin’s poetic voice, by relation, becomes equally divine. After all, these poems appear to be the accumulation of a long and nearly-mystical lineage. We can imagine that the great lyricists Dionne Brand, Derek Walcott, and Gwendolyn Brooks—to whom these poems are dedicated or who provide their epigraphs—are the guardians of these lyric spaces. Lubrin investigates what it means to be immortal or mortal, alive or dead in allusions that span the gods of diasporic literature and NASA’s recent space excursions. For an example of the latter, see the titular poem, “Voodoo Hypothesis,” in which an expedition to Mars is a red-rock metaphor for interpersonal loss. Even when Lubrin’s poems court the otherworldly, as in the final poem, “Epistle to the Ghost Gathering,” the journey to Mars returns as a metonym for the difficult journey of humankind across past, present, and future. These formally-diverse experiments in verse also play with matters über-contemporary. Alongside Brand, Walcott, and Brooks, Lubrin names Jesse Williams. Williams is a Grey’s Anatomy star and social justice advocate whose fame increased with his powerful and political speech at the 2017 BET Awards, which Lubrin quotes in “Village Crescendos”: “Just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.” This ultimate woke bae’s words are no less powerful than those of the poets and intellectuals (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mike Mariani, C.L.R. James) who, through Lubrin’s dedications and epigraphs, partake in the painful and tangled racial memory of this book. Like Williams, Lubrin demands that the public reckon with the violence being perpetrated against black bodies. Her trilogy of poems, “And If Today I Die,” “Sons of Orion,” and “At the End of the World,” names those who have been taken from their families, friends, and loved ones: Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Charleena Lyles, Darnesha Harris, and others. These poems participate in the Black Lives Matter and #SayHerName movements by embodying the deceased victims of police violence. In these haunting lyrics, Lubrin’s diasporic imagery weaves connections between these present-day tragedies and history’s sprawling web of racialized violence.

Lubrin’s diasporic imagery weaves connections between these present-day tragedies and history’s sprawling web of racialized violence.

Given this gathering of celebrated lyricists, award-winning intellectuals, and recently-departed individuals, one could say that Lubrin has set herself a frightful task. The book risks failure on the level of style, cunning, and empathy. She excels, however, where other poets might falter. Her book is as rich in assemblages of influence as it is in uniquely spun imagery, turns of language, and depth of feeling. The title poem, placed first in the collection, summons the blindness with which poetry so often begins:

Before sight, we imagine that while they go out in search of God we stay in and become god

The poem’s pronouns are curiously ungrounded, switching rapidly from “we” to “they” to “she,” and finally settling into the lyric pose of “I.” The first two lines set up an opposition between “we” and “they,” but this opposition is quickly disarmed by the poem’s refusal to identify these subjects. Reader, writer, and other interlocutors float as unique but undifferentiated persons in “the kindness of antigravity.” Aligning herself with classical poets struck blind before seeing their muse (Homer, Milton, etc.), Lubrin’s poetic speaker invokes darkness as a primal moment of becoming. This state resonates with the book’s project of disturbing the hierarchy of white/black imposed onto race relations. Creation, in the opening lines of these canonical texts, begins before light, when everything is still richly dark. As Lubrin’s speaker becomes a god, she implicates all forms of life in the process. The poem catalogues “Martian rock,” “organic molecules,” “flooded planes,” “spheres of minerals,” and “cold-slain dust” in order to demonstrate the book’s expanse, reaching beyond mere anthropocentric concerns. It is no surprise, then, to find that the follow-up poem, “The Mongrel,” introduces Lubrin’s individual brand of “mongrel poetics.” This term has a complicated history in poetry. It was used in the 1990s by literary critic Marjorie Perloff to describe the work of Modernist poet Mina Loy, but it has since been used by The Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo to describe a form of poetic critique, repositioning Perloff herself as the subject of scrutiny. The Mongrel Coalition’s brand of “mongrel poetics” encompasses a radical anti-racist contemporary criticism that seeks to uproot the old guard as personified by Perloff and the (mostly-white and often-racist) poets she champions. Moreover, the term “mongrel” itself has been weaponized as a racial epithet for non-white or mixed persons. Lubrin’s six-part poem “The Mongrel” aims to disrupt these violent race relations. The poem relies on a language outside poetic discourse and invites mathematics into its section-naming techniques: √, ≅, ≠, ≥, ≤, and ∞. Lubrin’s multi-lingual strategy reaches far into the expanses of both the humanities and the sciences to fully explore the diversity of life forms present on earthly and heavenly terrains. Invoking a posthumanist materialist feminism akin to that of Donna Haraway (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women) and Rosi Braidotti (The Posthuman), Lubrin further infuses “The Mongrel” with an examination of the molecular and the technological: “she moves us, light-formed, cue, / of Mongrel, also a corpse, but of steel.” The first part of this poem, under the sign √ (square root), roots out “a fur city, no more / archival than ancient than still warm” in order to thread a unique analogy between this Cyber Mongrel and the diasporic tradition of the Caribbean. The poem’s punctuation revels in the unease of this comparison. Under ≅ (the sign for congruence), Lubrin introduces the dash as a stoppage, an arrest that comes at the speaker’s every attempt to define the Mongrel: “she—feral / with remembrance” and “wanderlust / and relative need for lightspeed, systems and fall-off—” In the section of this poem headed by ≠ (the sign for inequality), the history of the diaspora unspools:

There is blood, seldom ache, where the avail- able light reaches down past levels of dog, cow’s grass, tribe, pitch and burn, the wild brutality loves us this side of the name

Lubrin’s extreme line breaks invite a strange sort of excess. The possibility of reading the whole of “the wild” into the lyric speaker’s becoming recalls the modernist stylings of Djuna Barnes in the final pages of her novel Nightwood (1936), wherein the profane heroine meets her lover down on all fours, barking and mad as a canine. Like Barnes, Lubrin creates a wide world—an entire universe, in fact—welcoming and dependent upon a variety of so-called others: racialized, sexualized, and historically-oppressed persons for whom the jubilance of these lines offers a new form of revolutionary action.

Lubrin’s extreme line breaks invite a strange sort of excess.

Under the sign of ≥ (greater than or equal to), Lubrin writes: “The Mongrel was still breaking, offing, / in a pale blue nutshell of monk’s milk and tar / when life exposed the carapace of her skull.” The poet here, as elsewhere, expertly mixes violence and beauty; the skull is smashed, the inner-workings of the Mongrel’s brain exposed, but the bone is “pale blue” and the texture is “milk and tar.” The result of this imagery is an uneasy aesthetic appreciation for the gore: “knotted blood,” “broke hours / of bone branding flesh.” Under the sign of ≤ (less than or equal to), this violent history is brought to bear on specific geography: “that Nova Scotia beach aglow with Mongrel flame—” The specificity of the Nova Scotia beach leads Lubrin to the universal, such that under ∞ (the sign of infinity) the beach reveals an entire “species / of amnesiacs, cut off from the trembling that tore— / our continents apart.” The final line of the poem signals “that our knowledge of the Mongrel is only fragmentary—” By ending with the collection’s characteristic dash, Lubrin underlines this point. With this paralyzing stoppage, the poem harnesses the infinite possibility on either side of silence, in order to envision life differently. Lubrin transitions smoothly from the mathematic to the lyrical in the next poem, “Aftershocks,” which is dedicated to Dionne Brand. Brand’s vast corpus of poetry, novels, and non-fiction excavates the affective and political aftershocks of, among other things, blackness, borderlines, and the Caribbean diaspora. Lubrin’s poem begins as “The Mongrel” ended, in a paralytic state, which is immediately diffused by urgent action: “No rescue. Escape was / the farthest she could come, / away from that island—that chance.” Those first two words, framed in the negative and followed by an end-stop, form a hard caesura in the first line of the poem. In response, the latter half of the line presents a difficult and unresolved possibility: escape. The hardness of these lines continues, emphasizing the effort required for this escape through the hinge of a comma and the arresting dash that follows. The poem ends on a note of incompletion: “There rots a rescue— / rescue is too much to ask / of anywhere—” That final dash implies that the escape of the first line is ongoing and must expand beyond physical dimensions. The new country to which even a free woman flees also bares the chains to which her bloodlines have been tethered. In the spirit of Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, Lubrin takes up the project of “re-membering” in “Children of the Archipelago.” The poem not only recalls the genealogy of slavery and violence inherent in its subjects, but impresses these histories into physical form. Lubrin re-members the dead in such a way that their physical forms are brought back to life in the younger generation. She fashions a family portrait in which parents

pray our bad chance away in the coalpot buttressed by the father who hugs his son and cries the Atlantic into his nape the mother who holds her daughter and drinks the Atlantic from her nape

In these familial relations, forgetting is assured against by the oceanic memory held in the bodies of the young. But even as these guardians aspire to a free future for their children, they admonish them:

Remember hanging, remember the centrifuge of hammock and the whole life held up by one nail. Remember the haunt-bound hoards of cane, the sun-strip banana fields that set us out for tenements that could not love us broken or whole. Remember our bruises hid in looping dwòl English.

The anaphora “remember” attaches itself to concrete images of place. The insistence concludes by latching onto the body and its language. Lubrin’s use of Creole presents a clear allusion to Walcott’s searing poetry, infused as it is with Creole, in which the Eurocentric tradition is uprooted by the insertion of Caribbean languages. Memory, as it stretches between family members and continents, is examined in fond and minute detail throughout Voodoo Hypothesis. For the book’s poetic speaker(s), the material of memory is richly-historical, indisputably-emotional, and rife with gaps. In “Fire of Roseau,” for Gwendolyn Brooks, Lubrin presents an “empty room of black / mahogany” in which “the jangling mothers have forgotten the brew.” These images cleverly recall Brooks’ domestic scenes of African-American hardship and community. From this space of conflicted blackness, Lubrin’s lyric speaker issues a litany of “unanswerable demands.” The poem laps at the edges of a baptism or birth; struggling is enmeshed in oceanic visions and seeks escape. Any possible pattern, familial or formal, is broken in the assertive final lines: “I rebel, I like any nigger with a demand: tell me my thoughts are jagged / but never why they bruise—” Lubrin employs this explosive language, with its racial epithets and violent verbs, to subvert the direction of “gazing centuries” and to level the gaze back at the aggressor, coming out victorious. The altar at which the speaker of “Fire Roseau” kneels is flooded with the ghosts of ancestors. In “Village Crescendos,” these ghosts transform the present into an excessive temporal zone, such that the present tribute seemingly takes place in multiple pasts and multiple futures. Lubrin writes in the affirmative, as if this “unsettling of time” is an act of resistance: “Repeat after me: give them a bad time.” The poem ends without an ending, its final mark in this mixed-up time a comma: “by the heave of that same Massav branch,” This gesture cleaves this poem to the following one, provoking a reading of each poem as an interconnected branch of the same haunted family tree. It also tempts the reader to circle back, to read these excessive lines out of time, and to return to the first hinge of the comma when Lubrin writes: “The long reach of this Massav Tree into the square is yours,” These commas bookend the poem and enact a never-ending embrace of ghostly ancestors.

Each poem is an interconnected branch of the same haunted family tree.

The subject of ghosts becomes most urgent in the poems that are explicitly attached to the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, Lubrin transitions from “ghost” to “zombie,” signalling this change with a quotation from Mike Mariani’s article for The Atlantic, “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Zombies”: “Undead slaves at once denied their own bodies and yet trapped inside them—a soulless zombie.” In his article, Mariani explains that the zombie is not simply a Hollywood pop culture trope, but a figure that first appeared in Haiti with the arrival of African slaves. The archetype evolved from the figure of the undead slave, a soulless zombie condemned to indentured servitude for eternity, to the reanimation of the deceased for the purposes of fulfilling nefarious tasks. These voodoo zombies were yet another manifestation of Haiti’s colonialist history. In Lubrin’s poem, an undead chorus cries, in a lyric voice, “I wanna live, son,” and even addresses the poet directly: “Sing for me, alright?” But in the book’s characteristic swing between optimism and pessimism—and the resulting sense that neither mood alone can constitute progress—a chorus of murdered women arrive to ask, “Who cares.” Lubrin reanimates these deceased victims of police violence in order to interrogate the connection of these individual crimes to vast histories of racialized violence. In response to this book’s search for a way out, these “exhausted” zombies present the reader with a momentous task:

If you are not ready to string your haunting touch against the breast of some burning bush, lift no ash to the dirt-black smoke across the field for whose sake this scorned race, ancient too, merges with the night

As in the parable of the burning bush, nothing short of a miracle is required for these meaningless deaths to transform into social upheaval and political change. In honour of those lost, Lubrin resurfaces the concept of the walking-dead, re-appropriating the term “zombie” from its Hollywood connotations. In an earlier poem, “Lacking the Wind’s Higher Reasoning,” Lubrin’s speaker dismisses the zombies who “slay each other on TV” in favour of the “walking dead” who court a “theory-in-slow-motion.” Equipped with Mariani’s deft excavation of the zombie trope, she returns it to its root with African slaves and fashions a useful analogy for today’s endangered black bodies confronting historical subjugation in their waking and undead lives:

mend towards the sake of bones, their blueprint for cutlery, and with bed-backs frozen, lift that shrivelled soul glutting the road, instead proposing: zombies abstract that to slay is to scavenge the long-departed hand of god.

The miracle that must precede this war on death is not divinely out of reach, but rooted in the earthly terrain of memory, molecules, and mongrels. The miracle will not be the rising of the dead; the miracle will be the waking of those already living. In a mongrel language of lyric, scientific, and metaphysical credos, Lubrin fashions a text of such power that it threatens to veer up and walk over the unsteadied body of its reader. The book’s experiments in syntax and powerful disruptions of linear temporality present a poetics that spans eons and geographies beyond traditional appraisals of space and time; its promise is of an infinitely-expanding universe wherein we may consult the ancient ocean-spanning tapestries of ancestral memory and, by weaving stories out of darkness, awaken back to life those lost to racialized violence.