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Build Yourself a Boat

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About this listen

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.

Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

©2019 Camonghne Felix (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing African American Poetry
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I listened to this twice. I found that the first time I was taking in the theme of trauma and its manifestations in the body. Trauma as affect. Trauma as amnesia. The act (enforced more so than enacted) of the mind forgetting, trickling into the physicality of the body forgetting. Healing as remembering, (re)learning that which was already known. The Black body as a component of the affect.

The second time I wanted to listen to the narrative Felix weaves through the book. It’s a journey which bodes well with the trope of swimming/not swimming and building yourself a boat. Bits like ‘Cutting with JB’, interspersed, come together in the whole to tell individual stories that contribute to the main plotline. Repetition, “How is it that I’m sane?”, becomes punchier every time, taking on a different meaning.

The body emerges as autonomous: “it’s the body that decides”.

A poetic jumble of her insides

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