Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker | JFK Randhawa
December 13, 2022
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s Derelection (The Song Cave, 2022)
“I want to engage this text as labor. It is not a nod, gesture, signal, or inspiration. It is poetic infrastructure – black women’s work – that radically repoliticizes black life.”
– Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes,” on citational practice and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
When a work of poetry creates a hairline fracture in perception, numinous material suddenly leaking in, one could say it succeeds in becoming what Aimé Césaire has described as an “insurrection against society because it is a devotion to abandoned or exiled or obliterated myth.” It is a rare gift to surrender to initiation before you fully sense what alchemy is at work, the analytic seeping away and clearing space. Welcome to Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s Dereliction.
Rucker’s debut collection Dereliction (The Song Cave, 2022) bears witness to and is subject of a process of rebirth out of the structural legacies of misogyny, institutional racism, plantation-colony hypersurveillance, isolation narratives, and state-sanctioned care-via-negligence. Composed of two movements, “Murmurs” and “Dereliction,” Dereliction churns mythic material and banal daily activities – sitting, staring, writing – into an apocryphal fugue that unmakes and remakes the world. This collection could be the sound a black hole makes. Through the voices of a dilated speaker, the text becomes a manifesto towards entanglement – ecological, mythopoetic, geopolitical, necrosocial – amid the prophetic events of abandonment, abjection, channeling, and surrender that overwhelm the reflective mask of a dislocated self. Complicit in erasure, or self-constructed in opposition to its own desires, a referendum on the “self” presents a way into transmission, such that internalized white supremacy is excised. A path is cut to radical fugitivity where an I is never alone, an I is always in dialogue, ricocheting off constraints into a multilateral chorus. In Rucker’s poetics, the I is in a state of reaching and ever changing, ever arriving: “(Note: I’m projecting. This is not a thesis.)”
The first section “Murmurs” is a forty-seven page narrative without discrete sections and spoken by a lyric I – god, spirit, daemon, memory, vibration – with plural mouths. The speaker teeters between dormancy and animacy, drifting through lofted or subterranean tropospheres marked by equinoxes. In Rucker’s assemblage of astrally-shifting dream-times, any element can be a doorway to hidden circumstances that re-situate the reader proximate to a shadow-world of unchartable emergent relation:
Black hole hidden beneath black car,
blue flame lit on every burner, a jealous hand fingering the smoked salt.
Throughout “Murmurs” Rucker invokes the echo of cosmic “singing,” like the whine of a comet or a missile or Gabriel’s apocalyptic horn, which punctuates the miasma of the speakers' crossed-over worlds. The singing comes down like a strike or a filtrating aura, with no beginning or end, with a force that permeates, creates, casts off, and which seems to adjudicate the universe:
Occupational, the air of everything around me.
Out the sky a voice starts singing, closing in on the life-force below.
Meanwhile, readers are guided by an asemic unfixed speaker who rejects the closing-in, the suffocation, claiming, “All this singing set above me commands nothing.” Rucker offers “us” the conditions of successful evasion, of the work of the speaker and the composition to come: “stick to the swamp.” We join the speaker along a journey to recovery, where malignancy goads an otherwise:
Toxicity taut on the epoch’s edge,
its septic taunting, its prophecy –
What and how an otherwise might unleash in a body is just one theme of the collection’s second section, “Dereliction.” “Dereliction” holds twenty-eight discrete poems with titles vacillating between acerbic, idyllic, and prophetic (“Practice for My Birthday,” “Of the Lucky You Are Chosen,” “Whoops, We Spent All the Jenny,” “It Is in My Silk You Go Sobbing”). Here, Rucker’s poetics gather material around snags in the field of awareness, in the fabric of central figures’ corporal experience, playing cinematically with what is transmitted or unseen through nonlinear indexing. One example of this appears in the poem “Of The Lucky You Are Chosen,” where linear time is disjointed, embryonic, and recursive:
Embryonically, her consciousness
remains seafaring. Unforgivably young. She
re-visions herself a ten-million-year-old reptile
creeping the shoreline, a bog-buried sacrifice
excavated, her skull full of mud & bile, three
petrified baby teeth fused to the jaw –
It was a quick death, she remembers.
Morphing is the only certainty of Rucker’s work as it transmits memories of never-ending future-past worlds. Transmission is less dependent upon humans than it is upon an ensemble of reclaimed signs. Theory-living, bread-making, computing and phone-calling, house-tending, kissing and laughing, visitor-welcoming: Such are the labors of life bidden by a community of teachers around which the speaker’s plurality accretes. Derica Shields, Sylvia Wynter, bell hooks, S*an D. Henry-Smith, Aimé Cesaire, Susan Sontag, Walker Evans, as well as a hybrid pantheon of other-than-human consorts and the daemonic are explicitly named in the text. Present also, implicitly, are Augusta Savage, Katherine McKittrick, the writer’s own sister and parents. Together, they become architects of the unfinished. Indeed, the collection’s intertextuality is less citational than it is rigorously communal. The relational field of learning that Rucker creates is not built on the extraction of knowledge but in assembling proximity and potential accomplices.
Together these accomplices will orchestrate a new world. But first, steadied by Rucker’s hand, they invite readers to deeply consider how it is we go about citing the gods, how it is we go about citing Black women, and how it is we go about unknowing together. With an intention “to slip right through,” “clean from rock / into tall shadow,” the speaker asserts her own biomythography and shakes off a fate that has naturalized the social erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other-than-white human lives. In divinatory insurrection, the text performs the gods of one's body.
Writing this essay, the year closes in on the one-year anniversary of my own cherished teacher’s passing. Loss is visited upon each of us, in some way, this season. I’m moved to consider what reconstitutes through departures and am summoned closer to that kind of undoing by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s work. I experience Dereliction as a narrative guide. It is the phenomenology of coming to know an afterlife projected into the present and a divine and daily renunciation of the conditions of social death. This labor becomes one step in a nonlinear process of alchemizing a fealty to one’s own path to source, shifted from a daily low-grade mourning. This is the transformative power of Rucker’s text. It forges a direct line to untenable loss, trusting that the potency of unchartable dreams might be channeled to reveal otherwise formations of liberation. Read Dereliction and be summoned:
I find solace alone, in this maze of trapdoors. These disorganized
thoughts and coyly placed words do their job and through them I take
shape without need of holistic incorporation. Wholeness, you see, is
not my goal. This monologue has no end. If it seems whole it is only
because of the fact that is never-ending.
JFK Randhawa is the author of Time Regime (Gaudy Boy, 2022) and is co-founding editor of rivulet. Jhani has studied at Upaya Zen Center (Santa Fe, New Mexico) and Green Gulch Farm Zen Center (Muir Woods, California), and has participated in artist residencies at Blue Mountain Center (Blue Lake, New York), Writers House (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Millay Arts (Austerlitz, New York), and the Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, Wisconsin). Their multidisciplinary work has appeared or is forthcoming in the de-Canon/Fonograf Editions Hybrid Literature Anthology, ASAP/J, Footnotes (The Poetry Project), Soap Ear, the Heimbold Visual Arts Center (Bronxville, New York), and the Woolen Mill Gallery (Reedsburg, Wisconsin), among others. Jhani is a 2023–2024 Postcolonial Studies Masters student at the University of London, SOAS. Online: @qjhanip / jfkrandhawa.com
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a self-taught writer and poetic practicioner from the Great Lakes currently living in the Gulf Coast. She is a 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Her work has appeared in various media and publications, including the Sundance Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Annulet, Montez Press Radio and more. Dereliction (The Sound Cave, 2022) is her debut poetry collection.
Works referenced / “naked and screaming at the back of the book with all her friends” (Rucker 64)
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Dereliction (The Song Cave, 2022)
Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes,” Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021)
Vinson Cunningham, “The Argument of Afropessimism,” The New Yorker (July 13, 2020)
Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020)
Lotte Arndt and Yesomi Umolu (eds.), Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, 2019)
“Dialogue: Candice Lin & C. Riley Snorton,” Candice Lin: A Hard White Body
Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular (Liverpool University Press, 2017)
Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012)
Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists (Oxford University Press, 2005)
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Weslyan University Press, 2008)
Derica Shields, “A Heavy Nonpresence,” Triple Canopy (2021)
M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Duke University Press, 2006)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016)
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (Dial Press N.Y., 1956)
Edgar Garcia, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (The University of Chicago Press, 2019)
“Kazim Ali on Kimberly Alidio’s poem “: rock // neverended :,” Poetry Society of America
Roshi Eve Myonen Marko & Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up in the Land of Attachments (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2020)
S*an D. Henry-Smith, Ladipo Famodu, Alec Mateo, and Monique Todd, Collaborative work premiering at Metro54/Tempel Amsterdam (2022), in which the artists ask, “What happens when the tools of our study talk back, our fleeting results lead us again to the start? Absorbing us whole, the microscope becomes the microphone, amplifying us into multilateral scale.” (Instagram, @metro54 & @lil_sunchoke, 11/8/22)
SK Kakraba, Yonye (Drag City Records, 2015)
Sheila Chandra, ABoneCroneDrone (Real World Records, 1996)
