Swallow the Fish by Gabrielle Civil
Swallow the Fish: a memoir in performance art
CCM, 2017.
In December, I co-curated a reading at Belladonna* with Anna Gurton-Wachter, and Gabrielle Civil was on the bill. That’s part of the fun of curatorial collaboration: you get introduced to writers and artists that you weren’t previously very familiar with. And holy cow! Civil blew me away. Her piece was poetry, but also performance art, with elements of movement and sonic play that enlivened the zoom room. After her performance, I ordered her books Experiments in Joy and Swallow the Fish, deciding to proceed chronologically, starting with 2017’s Swallow the Fish—named for the performer’s gambit of wholeheartedly embracing real embodied risk.
Civil really delivers on what she promises in the subtitle. Swallow the Fish really is a memoir of becoming a performance artist. It starts, and often returns, to biographical elements like Civil’s childhood in Detroit, elaborating on the aspects of her personal history (a voracious early reader, a Black girl in a mostly white Catholic school) that combined to lead her into a career of performance art. Childhood has its performances, often command performances, but I love the way Civil describes the shift from the kind of performances that are called forth by the structures of childhood and young adulthood into the purposive performance of an artist in the making:
I had long been investigating the question of poetry in the world; 25 Targets activated my body in space.
Here, my body became actual, physical, if largely invisible. This spoke to my sense of myself in the world but was also pushing me into new territory. I was no longer just performing myself (in a child’s schoolroom desk or even for a crowd of poetry lovers on a stage.) Without deliberate audience, I was moving deliberately, practicing, moving through space.
It was the start of my re-embodiment.
The overarching structure of the Swallow the Fish involves Civil moving from performance to performance, describing each one. Civil doesn’t straightforwardly describe, but engages in thick description, a la Clifford Geertz. Thick and multi-faceted: a kind of “13 Ways of Looking at a Performance,” which takes us through the cultural, social, and personal circumstances from which the piece emerged, its critical reception, its materials, notes on the embodied experience of performing, photographs and film stills, poetry. I’ve honestly never felt closer to performances at which I wasn’t present. Description like ice on a lake: thick enough to walk across.
And it helped tremendously that Civil is conscious of her writing not just as a means to preserve her performances but as itself a performance. Civil’s writing is virtuosic and welcoming, in conversation with a range of writers, thinkers, and artists (Adrian Piper is coming to mind, as are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, but Civil’s bibliography is long and rich). Civil’s performances are rooted in Black feminism, interventions in the all-too-many mostly white rooms of the art world, as well as refutations that anti-racist art, or political art writ large (Civil’s coming of age as an artist begins alongside 9/11 and the Bush era, so she is also responding to anti-Arab racism and jingoistic militarism), has to look a certain way.
On a personal note, I’m hugely grateful for this book for multiple reasons. I may not be in my early twenties anymore, hungry for models of art and how to live the artist’s life, but there is a part of me that will always be a beginner, striving to maintain and cultivate that beginner’s mind. Additionally, I am conducting a program of mail order poetry school that focuses on apprenticeship, and this feels very much like a look back at Civil’s apprenticeship. I was only a few pages in when I realized that I would be quoting and recommending this book to my correspondents. Finally, I’ve been trying to write my own memoir of artistic coming of age for a few years now, and in Swallow the Fish, Civil provides a captivating formal model for narrating this journey and showing how it can be of use to others.
A quick for instance. The section, “On Aftermath” provides a very useful take on a familiar phenomenon that I haven’t really seen writers and artists talk about that much (in print): what happens when the performance ends?
will you be shaking? able to talk? will you feel euphoria, emptiness? will you be quizzical yourself about what just happened? chatty? wanting to go out and drink with your friends? wanting to crawl into a corner? wanting to lie down in the back of a flatbed truck and look at the stars? will you be on the moon? will you need first aid? will you have to pay the sound man, give out chocolates and a bottle of tequila? will you be embarrassed? victorious? misunderstood? will your friends hate you or feel sorry for you? will you suddenly have fans? will you be lied to or shunned? will someone finally see you, love you, whisk you away? will you still be you? or will you still be something else?
Civil continues:
In aftermath, the performance work is not actually over. In line with the torqued physics of performance time, the art ends for different people at different moments. For some, the first two seconds are enough and it’s already done. For others, it lingers for years. For the artist, the experience of the work in the body often lasts longer than the actual actions of the work. This feeling can overflow into audience reception, it can collide or contrast with immediate outside response or delay an artist’s capacity to deal with this response or with anything else. The performance may be over for everyone else but in aftermath, the catastrophe, the intimacy, the possibility remains in the artist’s body; it is still cresting and subsiding.
The audience is part of the work, as Civil recognizes elsewhere when she talks about how the same performance can land differently in different rooms. The audience—in this case the reader (me)—has their own relationship with aftermath. In the aftermath of reading Swallow the Fish, I am in an generative afterglow, reconnected to my own artistic coming of age and the project of preserving it and make it useful for others. I am resolved to make more ambitious and vulnerable art that is simultaneously intellectual and embodied. For other poets, performance artists, or really any creative workers seeking to be similarly inspired and emboldened, I urge you to read Swallow the Fish.