Canisia Lubrin: 53 Acts of Living
Canisia Lubrin’s first book of poetry Voodoo Hypothesis (2017) was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial award, the Raymond Souster award, and the Pat Lowther award. Her second, The Dyzgrahxst, was released in the spring. For our series Black Lives Matter, the brilliant poet has written a stunning extended prose-poem, 53 Acts of Living, an elegant, intimate, deeply personal manifesto on language and being alive in the age of COVID and Floyd.
Take a breath: It’ll be a while before you’re able to exhale.
53 Acts of Living
0.
Hello.
1.
Are you cut?
2.
Does your blood collect into cotton now set for the dump?
3.
Welcome. We have waited for you.
4.
The ground has long entertained your mighty boots, our long and occasionally careful stepping. Why else would you taunt the earth to quake? How else to make plain that we are lambent on the ground?
5.
As island off the edge of a continent. As island off the edge of islands. An island is always sinking somewhere. All of the sunken islands fold in a long braid in any direction. Where north ends, where south opens, where east breaks from a peninsula, where west punctures the view with sunset, a poet gathers all the living things plus their shadows and how they fail. The poet fills boats upon boats with what remains and offers them the sea. Perfection is no prerequisite for revolution, or inscription for that matter. Inscribed things need language, need the hard tuning of what living arches into dust. Even in history, what else is there but wonder.
6.
The impossible thing about being in crisis is how one is thrust into maneuvers of survival and, at this axis, at first, the body must give up living before one knows the price of relief.
7.
One must give up on living.
8.
You—in your body—must stop the haptic responses a body makes to the commands of living. With any luck, you must.
9.
One must stop the act of living and conspire with being alive.
10.
You must find the brute strength of an impossible language, find a tone with which to communicate to yourself that all you must do, the only thing you must do now is make it past this or that critical second.
11.
You slip through thin ice, for example, and your body must disobey gravity, push your full weight against the tragedy of a descent, back into the air.
12.
Above the ice you crush your thumb with a pestle, for example, and your lungs enlarge, invite more oxygen into the blood and you curse the very idea of unflawed government.
13.
You give your hand to cold water.
14.
The reprieve distresses. Excites the stock exchange. With any luck you have died and you know it.
15.
You are locked indoors as COVID19—a microorganism—ravages the world beyond your doors.
16.
You know you can bring this devastation into your own house if you have a house or else you walk with it everywhere, wherever home is available to you. It is gradual unlike endpoints, unlike motion sickness. Even when your repose exists only as psychic location or euphoric meditation, and you house your wisdoms in a tent in a city park, our troglodytic leaders make laws against any measure you use to reach for rest. In any case, everyone you know is exposed. Some more than others. That is the impossible measure we know.
17.
Everyone you love is not loved any less but all exposed and dying differently and alone, maybe; something startles us into recognition that everyone is dying from the day life begins. And so dying is no useful interdiction but it is the reason most easily prized as rejection overrules.
18.
My history, your place in it is every occasion to feel a desert leap from hour to hour in (y)our head.
19.
Worry is this heavy. This hot. This frigid.
20.
Worry is this master narrative. Worry damns us to treading this unliving, which began centuries before our birth.
21.
Christina Sharpe says the weather, the climate, the wake
Rinaldo Walcott says The Long Emancipation
Idil Abdillahi says BlackLife
Audre Lorde says Poetry is not a Luxury
Saidiya Hartman says Lose Your Mother
Keguro Macharia says how will you imagine freedom today/follow the eros
Frantz Fanon says The Wretched of the Earth
Dionne Brand says A Map to the Door of No Return
C.L.R James says Beyond a Boundary
Octavia Butler says Parable of the Sower
Samuel Selvon says A Brighter Sun
Toni Morrison says Beloved
Austin Clarke says More
Derek Walcott says What the Twilight Says
M. NourbeSe Philip says defend the dead
W.E.B Du Bois says The Souls of Black Folks
Linton Kwesi Johnson says Inglan is a Bitch
All the others say what all the other say…
22.
You are looking out from here and maybe wondering what is next, how can you begin again? All I know is if my pen hovers over the page long enough because I am listening to the world, hearing what is revealed, what is felt and held because I am still here—because I am travelling the hard-edged roads and meanings of this place, things will eventually announce themselves. In all that living there is war, there is madness, there is music. In that music I find poetry. Whether or not I write it down is, of course, a matter of choice. If I write it down be sure that I make something of silence.
23.
The masses say in the streets abolish abolish abolish. They say Black Lives Matter against the panicked seams of a globelong eventide coming apart. Everywhere, everywhere around, something blossoms.
24.
Against this: capitalism, all the carceral cannons holding it up. More discontents toward anew.
25.
All command is fury.
26.
The willing good redeem little when the uncaring others offer nothing but the vast collapse of any usefulness toward the good.
27.
[…] Of things like power? Violent supplements. Anxious connexions. Imagination is ‘nuff ruckshun.
28.
The point is you lose. You lose an understandable aliveness.
29.
What you notice is not understood nor is it living. What you gain is awe and maybe you curse the frozen streams and lakes and sunlight that play between two deadly worlds.
30.
The world you love and the world you know.
31.
The body or whatever that has had to give up—however momentarily—the fact of living in order to enact the will to survive is hardly aware that things arrive by departure.
32.
Give yourself a chance to abide the indescribable.
33.
Resist the ease that counts all of this as flaw.
34.
This is how I was: above the azure veins of the land and the sea realizing everything could change, even the aircraft seat beneath me. Above, still, I saw the entanglements of frozen streams and lakes and sunlight in the urgent world translating my maddened breathing 75,000 feet above those fed up on the ground.
35.
I say nothing, of course, but my mind is full of words assembling against ruin.
36.
This was early March and, now, it is July as I write this.
37.
Often you will miss the needed shock and talent of that immediate refusal to continue or to find a way beyond the exhaust of work. As I do. And I do.
38.
I exist, too, in the friction of (mis)understanding.
39.
I can do little else than take to the book I have not yet written. The revered networks to which ink infrequently adheres. Like a fly buzzing away its tether to warm rice. Not that you think you’re a fly. A fly is hardly committed the ways we’re used to. You’re just sitting in the sun asking a fly why calm is so impossible in its presence. The fly is unconcerned with what annoys me or with testing the limits of my patience with needle and thread, or with ink—nor, for the sake of bread.
40.
After the event of waking up one day this spring and weeping for no single reason, I tally my being in the morning.
41.
But I promise ice cream to a friend so we can think of when we can go outside again.
42.
We are not the same. We are not in the same manner as we left each other before this pandemic shut our doors, shut us into the corridors of our lives, the ruination we would rather not see, the cell phone apps where we cuss loudly at each other’s arrogance. Where one of us sees the long hall of a world sick without the vaccine it needs. Where the other sees the hysteria adhering the real threat. We are both wrong, of course. We were both not wrong where we began, only now—we are. We both own the fact of hurt in that exchange.
43.
After months the flickering bulb of my screen over the date stamp of our last messages gathers dust.
44.
After funerals attended on screen.
45.
After graduations attended on video.
46.
After birthdays attended on screen.
47.
After mourning even mourning on screen.
48.
As my mother thins and thins and laughs still and asks for pizza for the first time in 50 moons. Do I make it by hand? I make it flour by water by cheeseàoh, vegetablesà welcome the sightless work of heat and stone. Well done.
49.
After gardens planted have bloomed and we eat (I will write something funny. I promise. But not) today.
50.
Through revolutions and uprisings and remembering the radio of my childhood as oddly intimate, I realize it was one way to lodge the voice. Against everything undone. Even the chaotic images crowding my palm as you speak into the telephone and my teeth make more noise than I intend.
51.
Deathbeds are no silence. No place for talk of death.
52.
Listen, I do not think language must ceaselessly serve us but I look for reprieve everywhere around. Every book on my shelves a zeitgeist alone, a zeitgeist together. And as I think this you send me a note, just as I jump and you gather me up.
53.
The real phenomenon of loss is both the inventory of what no longer exists and the impossible measure of what survives.
Canisia Lubrin
Somewhere in the pandemic, the reckoning, the rebellion | July 28, 2020
