Alexis Pauline Gumbs - Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy)
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Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Foreword by adrienne maree brown
Emergent Strategy Series
AK Press
Dedicated to my ancestral mother Boda, who survived the transatlantic initiation and to you Sangodare, my st ar at sea
a guide to undrowning
What is the scale of breathing? You put your hand on your individual chest as it rises and falters all day. But is that the scale of breathing? You share air and chemical exchange with everyone in the room, everyone you pass by today. Is the scale of breathing within one species? All animals participate in this exchange of release for continued life. But not without the plants. The plants in their inverse process, release what we need, take what we give without being asked. And the planet, wrapped in ocean breathing, breathing into sky. What is the scale of breathing? You are part of it now. You are not alone.
And if the scale of breathing is collective, beyond species and sentience, so is the impact of drowning. The massive drowning yet unfinished where the distance of the ocean meant that people could become property, that life could be for sale. I am talking about the middle passage and everyone who drowned and everyone who continued breathing. But I am troubling the distinction between the two. I am saying that those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances are the undrowned, and their breathing is not separate from the drowning of their kin and fellow captives, their breathing is not separate from the breathing of the ocean, their breathing is not separate from the sharp exhale of hunted whales, their kindred also. Their breathing did not make them individual survivors. It made a context. The context of undrowning. Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. And by we, I dont only mean people like myself whose ancestors specifically survived the middle passage, because the scale of our breathing is planetary, at the ve ry least.
Are you still breathing? This is an offering towards our evolution, towards the possibility that instead of continuing the trajectory of slavery, entrapment, separation, and domination and making our atmosphere unbreathable, we might instead practice another way to breathe. I dont know what that will look like, but I do know that our marine mammal kindred are amazing at not drowning. So I call on them as teachers, mentors, guides. And I call on you as breathing kindred souls. May w e evolve.
adrienne maree brown
of course i am writing this on a nineteenth day. and this is a book with nineteen parts. its a week since I learned nineteen-year-old Black lives matter activist oluwatoyin salai was found dead, and its quite possible that i have grieved in nineteen ways already today, although this kind of stranger-grief is a difficult thing to track. today i created a meditation of nineteen wisdoms from Black feminists, listening to the throughline between ancestors and living geniuses the way Alexis Pauline Gumbs taught me to do.
and its not the nineteenth of any month, but of June, June 19th. juneteenth. a day of liberation. given that this is a book of liberation, i wanted to push off into the wat ers today.
with Alexis things always line up in ways that humble me. grief and magic touch, and a ripple unfolds between them that shows how they are the same thing at different moments in the nonlinear timeline of a good life. the universe is coordinated when it comes around Alexis, because she is steady enough to center any space she enters, however vast. in the pages that follow, she is leading us through oceans, inviting us to grab onto her fin as she takes us deep and teaches us how and when to breathe, how to handle the pressure of depth, where to leap and catch the su ns light.
when Alexis first started posting these marine mammal missives, i thoughtoh, emergent strategy from the deep. this is a whole realm of the wild world that i have barely gotten to learn from, and that has a huge amount to teach us right now on how we survive, how we slow down, how we make the air last, how we avoid predation and extinction, ho w we play.
i have always felt myself to be a child of the ocean, but like many Black humans, the lines that tether me to distinct Earth and water were cut long ago. with Undrowned , Alexis offers back to us a set of ancestors, sibling species, a variety of solidarities that can teach me about myself. i didnt know i had so much Blackness in common with the marine mammal world! this text feels like meeting an eccentric and wise and intriguing family. it feels like an unveiling, Alexis pulling up the salt skirt of sea to show us how we belong, how we are echoes of the same brilliance as dolphins and seals an d whales.
i am so grateful that Alexis wrote this down, and that she is letting us publish it as the first comrade text in the Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press. i hope you find a multitude of teachings in these pages, as i did, and that this work deepens your life as it has mine.
adrienne maree brown
from the realm of pandemics and uprisings
6/19/2020
If you happen to be in the ocean and you see someone breathing, what do you do? If you see someone like you, a mammal, but unlike younot bound by boats and masks and landyou might wonder who they are, what they are doing, how do they do it. How do they live in salt and depth and motion? You very well might wonder. And in that case you would need a guidebook. The most available guidebooks around right now are the National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World and the Smithsonian Handbook: Whales, Dolphins & Porpoises. They will summarize the available scientific information on the habitats, habits, and appearances of all the animals they have tracked so you can identify a mammal, and later, when you get out of the ocean, tell someone who you saw.
I identify as a mammal. I identify as a Black woman ascending with and shaped by a whole group of people who were transubstantiated into property and kidnapped across an ocean. And, like many of us, I am simply attracted to the wonder of marine life. And so I went to the aquarium and bought both of those guidebooks hoping to learn abou t my kin.
What I found was that the languages of deviance and denigration (for example, the term vagrant juveniles, used to describe hooded seals), awkwardly binary assignments of biological sex, and a strange criminalization of mammals that escaped the gaze of biologists showed up in what would call itself the neutral scientific language of marine guidebooks. I just wanted to know which whale was which, but I found myself confronted with the colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriachalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill methe net I am already caught in, so to speak. So how can I tell you who and w hat I saw?
At the same time, as I learned more about marine mammals, I learned to look between the loopholes of language, using the poetic practices I have had to use to find and love myself in a world that misnames me daily. And I felt so much love and humility. I felt so much awe and possibility. I had to show you what I felt. So I posted on social media every day what I was learning about marine mammals, from and despite the guidebooks, through my own further research, afro-futuristic speculation, and what was happening to my heart.
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