Annotation: Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Dub: Finding ceremony
In Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony, one is invited to join in on a conversation about language and discourse, its functions, misrepresentations, and natural associate to loss; however, what is incredibly intriguing is our inability to grasp how language has a relationship with many more than just humanity. Gumbs uses a blurb from an interview with Sylvia Wynter where they says “there is also a poesis of thought; a new poesis of being human. These concepts don’t come in a linear fashion, they build up (page x). For humanity to take up the idea that language is innate and nurtured only by humans and really only discuss the relationship that language has with humans is to create a linear story of language. When we do this, our language loses creativity, sometimes meaning, and ever more critically– importance. Gumbs highlights that investigating these thoughts can be “dangerous” as it calls for a “betrayal of our founding mythologies,” but the reality is that it takes up our other values of furthering human kind. When it comes to being critical of ourselves in order to further human thought, research, and life, we must be critical of the language that we use. We can come at it from a top down thought, similar to the view that we always have, or we can break it down with figurative language and suspect out the phonemes, morphemes, semantics, and syntax that make up the pragmatics of language. From here, we can realize that language is a function of every living thing on the planet. However, with this action, it seems that language only functions for an individual. For instance, a poem written by me could only ever be for me. When it comes to research, we are raised on the ideas that it is to present to others afterwards so if this is the case, can altering language and typical representations of research to creative writing and poetry allow for more understanding or limit people in how much they can learn?