Lumens [9781771316859]

Overview

Lumens liberates the racist symbolic order rooted in whiteness-as-goodness in history's nomenclature of light, situating dark(ness) as the genesis of meaning.

Both poetry collection and shadow-historiography, Lumens embarks on an Enlightenment quest in reverse. These poems question the violent racial metaphysics that enabled Europe's rendering of Africa as ontological nothingness—in order to keep the fantasy of white supremacy alive. Echolocating voices buried and liminally illumined through time, Lumens reveals the colonial violence embedded in the quest "to know," aided and abetted by the act of keeping Black and Indigenous futurities in the dark.

Inspired by writers like Claudia Rankine, Toni Morrison, and M. NourbeSe Philip who take risks with form, white space, and sound, Lumens is attuned to the musicality of language that lean into the polyphony of a multilingual and interracial upbringing. DeRango-Adem's brilliant poetics patent a new claim to being as she dares to unknow the truths she was told: one outside discourses of captivity and liberation, inventing a mode of reasoning from the shadows.