Ga(S)p.

Philip, M. Nourbese

Precarity of breath as well as premature and unlawful cessation of breath remain distressing markers of many Black and African-descended communities. Using the biological processes of pregnancy as an example of radical hospitality in which the mother breathes for the yet-to-be-born child as a point of departure, "ga(s)p" explores the possibility of this act being a model for community through epigenetic memory. Against the backdrop of the poetics of the fragment—fragments of history, fragments of memory, and of breath even, "ga(s)p" centers the often unobserved work of women, beginning with that initial period of breathing for the Other in utero; it also and reveals the poem cycle Zong! to be an activated space in which a breathing-for occurs, where fragments of word, silence and breath, allow the reader—the one who breathes now for then and for them—to reenact reparative possibilities for the formerly enslaved, the formerly excluded and the formerly extinguished.

HUMAN fertility; POETICS; RESPIRATION; PRECARITY; MEMORY

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2024, Vol 45, Issue 2, p1

0160-9009

Academic Journal

10.1353/fro.2024.a935654