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now even with a percussed tongue I can put the world back together with the twisted timbres of a ship.
-Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraphxst
The multiple "I" in Canisia Lubrins The Dyzgraphxst distorts the environment that I, as a reader and visitor, am brought into. Often I am not certain where the speakers are taking me, if what is real is truly real, or if what is real is a dream. Yet the three lines above sum up for me the kind of environment that Lubrin attempts to build and reimagine in this stunning book: it is neither place nor country, but space that exists in liminality.
In a current project,1 I define the liminal environment as one in which individuals exist among overlapping movements that require, or invite, a renegotiation of their cultural identities and expressions.2 The liminal environment can be a space to make sense of a new world, or a moment of transition into a process of building a new world. The world that Lubrin reconstructs in The Dyzgraphxst is not only imaginative but also ambitious in scale: it pauses, breathes, listens without compromising the movements of the poem's personas. It is obviously not the world we are currently living in. Instead it is an active counter-narration of the world we inhabit, where ghosts of deep space-time come to haunt and are welcomed with open arms. What I find most compelling about The Dyzgraphxst is the portion in Act III ("Ain't I Épistéme?") that juxtaposes "dream and return" (49), as if in a chiastic conversation about the image and the reality that is right in front of the speaker. These juxtapositions somewhat correspond to a pause in the chaos of the multiple personas, with each rendition of a "dream and return" constituting a new space:
but what for & for whose sake do I feel
only anger, sweet jolts, disappointment
gone from me and hope ran cold-say
nothing of art, nothing of the variable logs
again, here: I have this problem with dream (Lubrin 63)
The phrase "I have this problem with dream" repeats and resonates throughout this part of Act III. Through a language that resists the colonial and imperial tongue, the speaker processes all that negates the self and the...