M Archive: After the End of the World
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Reviewed by Dr. John Murillo III

From an undisclosed space and time after the end of the world, Alexis Pauline Gumbs issues lessons in breathing, being, and creating. Following Spill, the first missive in Gumbs’s planned triptych, M Archive: After the End of the World is the second installment of a “speculative documentary” project that loops and threads and loops and threads and pulls poetry, witness (prophetic and ancestral), and academic research (imagined and real) into an intricate literary vessel. In it, Gumbs marshals imperatives, warnings, admonitions, laments, and praises into a text/missive/gift that proclaims an essential truth—“there is a sacredness to every day. every time”—and beckons us to contemplate the possibilities and impossibilities for Black life “with [and after] our present apocalypse.” 

Gumbs presents M Archive as the project of an imagined, unnamed archivist. The archivist investigates the past and the near and distant futures in order to examine the causes and consequences of the societal, environmental, psychological, corporeal, and spiritual cataclysm that birthed the wasteland of a “brown planet” in her present day. M Archive acts as the collection of findings produced by the archivist’s investigation. The archivist arranges the project into several archival sections: four sections she names for the natural elements of the ancients—Dirt (earth), Sky (air), Fire, and Ocean (water); two more she devotes to investigating just how the narrative of the (post-)apocalypse is woven, and one both narrates and ruminates on the overall outcome of the researcher’s archival project. Across them all, Gumbs, through her archivist, attentively and intentionally pursues what she describes as a “Black feminist metaphysics” that speculates upon the ongoing disaster and marvel of Black life in this antiblack catastrophe called “the world.” 

In part, what Gumbs and her archivist offer is a descent, or fall, “into the archive of our failure,” a set of sobering, surgical musings on and diagnoses of the failings of a world that cataclysmically crumbled out of a dual, collective refusal/inability to really believe, embrace, or otherwise demonstrate any care for Black women (referred to here variously as “the reaching-hands-women,” the “physical metaphysicians,” the “doers,” and the “basket weaver[s]”). An entry in “baskets of no,” the sixth archival section of M Archive, for example, gestures forcefully and definitively toward a truth that burns like a thread of flame through history and the text: this species, and in particular those who yield disproportionate amounts of power over it—clamoring to destroy itself and its denizens while trying to take the Earth with it—very well may be doomed by the foolishness of those who refuse to acknowledge that our fate is, in a very real sense, completely dependent on the love of all Black women, and “fat black women specifically.” That the necessity to “listen to, trust, and care for/about Black women (of all ages)” is an imperative that screams through the recent cultural-gravitational events in Black speculative creation (Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time) is no accident and only reinforces the centrality of this message throughout M Archive’s content, means, and motivation. 

As her chosen method, Gumbs employs what she calls “speculative documentary,” a form of speculation that plays with the format of documentary research. As I understand it, “speculative documentary” is an inherently collaborative approach, but one that collaborates across all of spacetime. For her, this form of writing is necessarily “not not ancestrally cowritten, but . . . also written in collaboration with the survivors, the far-into-the-future witnesses to the realities we are making possible or impossible with our present apocalypse.” In this sense Gumbs’s approach adds another star to the constellation of radical, creative Black feminist methodologies developed in the service of the project Christina Sharpe describes as “keeping and putting breath back into the [Black] body.” 

M Archive most avowedly indebts itself to M. Jacqui Alexander, whose Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred profoundly influences Gumbs’s writing and thinking here. In particular, Gumbs draws from and builds upon Alexander’s theorization of the transatlantic slave trade, both as a violent geographical and metaphysical displacement of millions of Black lives and as a “movement of energies and elements into a relationship that persists, a material and conceptual relationship we navigate with the potential and compelled crossings we make in each moment” (emphasis mine). Beyond Alexander, there are resonances with several other forms of Black feminist breath-making and -giving: Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” and what I have tentatively described as the “destructive writing” of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! And beyond the contributions of those few one finds evidence in M Archive of the influence of countless other Black feminist metaphysicians. Gumbs’s “speculative documentary” is, truly, a wholly collaborative, “constellar,” nebular project.

Ultimately, the collective, collaborative capacity for practicing what Gumbs terms “candle calisthenics”—our creative breathing, burning, and being together—will be essential if we are to survive the “end of the world” and to continue to evolve through its aftermath. Acknowledging this is imperative. To speculatively document, or critically fabulate, or destructively write, the lessons that will guide Black being—through the ongoing and forthcoming disasters of late capital, environmental destruction, and antiblackness and into the creation and sustainable inhabitation of a whole other world—Gumbs marshals the community of ancestors with whom she collaborates across time and space, the community of contemporary Black feminist metaphysicians that collectively and often thanklessly do this work, the fractured, fraught, and fluorescent community called “us”—all the Black of us. Across history and geography, for we for whom both of those terms crumble, everything is at stake, and so Gumbs and her archivist bring everything to bear in these crucial lessons in breath, being, and becoming anew. 

At turns lush and awesome, in ways that make the eyes gleam and the mind crackle with electricity, in ways that devastate and leave the spirit raw with overlain feelings of complicity and responsibility, and loving, always loving, always loving in, between, and across every single word—the beautiful and daring writing of M Archive imperatively continues the constellar work of radical Black feminism’s ongoing project of “imagining the unimaginable.” Gumbs performs this difficult work in order to imagine the violent and uncertain creation of an “otherworld” that Black beings in general—beings “beyond the limitations and luxuries of what some call ‘the human,’” and Black women in particular—must evolve to survive. As emphatically as I can stress this, Gumbs’s work—here, in Spill, and surely in the final work of this triptych—is necessary to our project of Black survival, growth, and creation, up to and even after the end of the world.