Reviewed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

In the beginning there was the word.  And before that there was the darkness.  Gospel, Samiya Bashir’s new collection of poems, published by independent black gay and lesbian publisher Redbone Press, is an extended meditation on the relationship between that darkness and the word.  

Set in the mouths of crows, on the edges of couches and dirty tables, and in the hands of the dispossessed, Bashir’s poems awaken a desire to caress the mundane, hoping your fingers will find divine crumbs of revelation.   Bashir’s project, inhabiting the tradition of black gospel music’s straddling contradiction, standing in the sacred and the profane, is timely.   In a moment when the question of the relationship between faith and sexuality has been put in the media limelight through the discourse of marriage amendments, this project takes a step back, redefining both sexuality and salvation with a close look at the infinite places and moments when the human body meets despair, pleasure and transcendence. 

Starting at the crossroads, flying through the living room, the sick bed, the bedroom and the sanctuary and ending in the locker room, Hugin and Munin, two crows drawn from Norse mythology, but steeped in black vernacular frame the collection and provide the reader access to the intimacy of the poetic subjects.  And with this crow’s eye view, blackened and shadowed by death, Bashir asks us to question our own bodies, because the question of how and whether can find a way to love our bodies and each other is the question of our salvation.

“Jesus gon’ hear my song sho’ nuff” the most explicitly “gospel” poem of the collection explores the erotic value of worship, describing the body of a church- woman in the ecstasy of divine song.

It begins with a flutter at the pit of my stomach

Rises to a warm sweet spot in my chest 

As I dress it begins to reach my throat

Leak out in bits of cry—

Placed after three beautifully erotic lesbian love poems, this reminder of the embodiment of praise in the black church emphasizes the resonances between religious fervor and sexual expression, disputing a media narrative that presents the two as if they were mutually exclusive.   If, as this poem suggests, the body is a sacred manifestation of spirit in it’s full expression of the vibration of song and the sensation of life, what do the legal, medical and social limits we place on our bodies cost us?

“Topographic Shifts” which gracefully and painfully describes the amputation or “correction” of a baby girl born with twelve fingers and twelve toes, raises key questions as it forces us to imagine the pain of dismemberment without consent.  

How is it done-

Remolding body into

Image of body?

Reminding us of Lucille Clifton’s extra digits, which haunt her writing hands like phantom antennae, this poem asks the reader to confront the ethical dilemma of the difference between how the body actually manifests, and the “image of body” what we want it to be.   The poem ends with an ironic cliché that uses shallow words of comfort to disturb the reader.  After detailing the process of using ether and string and scissors to “…rip. Root. Cauterize.” the “offending” or “wasteful” extra limbs of the newborn, the narrator comments that 

This condition

is more common 

than you’d think.

If the “condition” is “common” then what is the purpose of the violent imposition of conformity on the body of a baby? What does it mean for your body to be “wrong” from the moment you enter the world? What does it mean when we redefine our own bodies, in their natural diversity, as “offending” and “wasteful”?  Whose bodies are usually marked as offending and wasteful? Is this not a question of race and class? Whose genitals are modified by doctors hoping to cure ambiguity in the birthing room? Is this not a question of gender and sexuality?  

Bashir moves from the deviant infant body to the sick adult body in “Breakadawn.”  Written from the perspective of someone who lives at the brink of death in a body riddled by pain and lacking normal functions, this poem offers a meditation on what it means to wake-up bedridden.  Organized by a repeated invocation for the suffering person to “remember” the condition, the poem will not let us forget the dismembering of the infant’s fingers and toes in the preceding poem, while at the same time taunting the poem’s subject with the impossibility of putting a body back together.   Once again the body is not only a problem in its own being and its own feeling, but also in its social meaning.

remember instead

doctor after doctor

calling you dirty

just dirty shame

What definition of healing causes us to criminalize each other’s bodies? What is gained by blaming a sick person for their own pain?  What does it mean for someone who is sick in a culture that values health as if it is a choice to choose to wake up each day anyway?

In “Reckoning Song” the most formally experimental poem in the collection, and the poem that happens to follow the two previously mentioned poems, Bashir extends this question of the body, moving away from the intimate second person that she used in the previous to poems and fully inhabiting the first person.   The poem, broken by internal bullet points depicts the beauty and contradiction of the body at the point of breaking, mediated by will.  The question to be reckoned with is the question of what the body can do, and whether what we can do with our ecstatic, desiring , dancing bodies will save us or destroy us.  Asking

what if I can shake it   *  and not break it 

the poem uses repetition and space between the words on the page to dance out the space between queer theory, race politics and disability activism.  Like each of the poems in this collection, this should be read carefully, and more than once. What do our bodies mean, in their limits and their possibilities?
Bashir has continued the trajectory of this question in the performances and events that promote the work recruiting queer and trans fellow artists to collaborate with her on stage performing as crows and witnesses.  The live incarnation of Gospel reminds us that the crow is not always a symbol of death.  On the page and in person Gospel works out the good news contouring embodied life in its complex and painful glory.