Gabrielle Civil - The Déjà Vu: Black Dreams and Black Time

the dj vu is a rousing, eclectic black feminist project. It blends elements of spoken word, critical writing, poetry, letters, journal writing, book review, photography, artwork, and performance, defying at once the limitations imposed by more conventional approaches to genre. Here, Gabrielle Civil has crafted a pedagogical model for writing performance art.

Alexis De Veaux

What if we could offer our archives to each other like flowers? Hold them in glass, heavy but transparent? What if we could show each other the journey of unknowing and remembering ourselves now? Why would we wait? With this work, Gabrielle Civil continues to model generosity, bravery, and vulnerability as core principles of black feminist performance, creativity, and living. Read it for the beauty, the black feminist references. Read it for a particular herstory of this time. Look for what you might be unknowing right now and what you need urgently to remember.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Civil soldiers for the possibility of black life to dream beyond the confines of colonialist rhetoric laden within modern world systems. Here, she asks the reader to think and experiment playfully with her as she skillfully complicates our time-dream-space continuum with new poetic knowledge. the dj vu is a book project that performs as a conceptual artwork crafting its own genre of intertextual experience.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

This is the book I wish Id had as an artist as a young woman. And its the book Ill relish in sharing now. Performance studies has a new one for the mantel in this generous, funny, tender journey through the thicket and politic of Becoming.

Cauleen Smith

While the world insists that blackness exists only in the body, Gabrielle Civil shows us that black feminist consciousness extends well beyond any corporeal limitations. Affirming the power of black dreams and black time, the dj vu notes metaphysical links between the ancestors and the stars. It is an astounding book.

Wendy S. Walters

So often, in reading the dj vu, Im reminded of how breakable memory is, especially when that memory tries to hold trauma within it. The act of remembering itself haunts the dj vu as Gabrielle Civil catalogues her experience through impetuous lists, vigorous anaphora, repetition, and the interpretation of dreams, both waking and asleep. Civil meets the multiplicity of memory with formal multiplicity. There are several categories of memory, after all: childhood nostalgia has a peculiar quality to it; history is never yet fully formed; and visioning, also, is related to dreams. Moving in and out of enjambment, Civil works from poetry to prose to arts criticism, to inexplicable junctures of poetic bravery, to sheer amplitude, to breaks into the conversational, to epistolary, to performance. In all this plurality, Civil manages to deliver a kind of replete self-accounting, or autotheory, in the dj vu. She goes deeper than ekphrasis or arts criticism, toward an experience thats closer to that of intimately living with, and within, the text of our culture.

Anas Duplan

Gabrielle Civils luminous the dj vu emanates deeply within and around the speakers memory, in which the politics of joy are palpable intimacies of language and performance, a sphericity in which all the time / is seeping and oozing. Civil brilliantly envelops the reader in black time, hers, ours, a way into the present moment by excavating a self, one taking great risks and following big dreams, where humility and compassion ignite a vivid tableau and conceptual stratagem, ever human, where blood clots form a bright red arterial flash that leads a few steps to find a snow globe. This book is roundly wise and rich with surprise, where art-making and black feminist professing reveal the heart of this incredibly moving work: Gabrielle Civils own vibrating, undeniable power ~~~~~~~~~~~~~black future~~~~~~~~~. Civil inspires a life of love for the self, for others, for the human condition, as we follow hers, engaged in practice and play as human beings, out of which Civil urges and instructs: Imagine an iridescent bubble around your head / This is your dreams happening now.

Ronaldo V. Wilson

Copyright 2022 by Gabrielle Civil

Cover photograph Sayge Carroll

Cover design by Christina Vang

Author photograph courtesy of the author

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, .

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

The cataloging-in-publication data for the dj vu (ISBN: 978-1-56689-622-1) is available from the Library of Congress.

PERMISSIONS

Dreams by Langston Hughes, 1951 by the Langston Hughes Estate, is reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates.

refractions by aegor ray and bobbi vaughn is reprinted by permission.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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Blacktime is time for chimeful

poemhood

but they decree a

jagged chiming now.

If there are flowers flowers

must come out to the road. Rowdy!

across the Changes

( into the dj vu )

( take the art tour )

( bring me all your heart melodies )

( i could tell you how it started )

( what happens if we take our time? )