Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown (Foreword by)

Overview

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to the ways echolocation changes our understandings of “vision” and visionary action, this is a masterful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781849353977
Publisher:	AK Press
Publication date:	11/17/2020
Series:	Emergent Strategy , #2
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	90,726
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists.

Read an Excerpt

[from "Remember"]

As of two years ago, reports are circulating with evidence that dolphin mothers sing to their babies while they are in the womb, and for a few weeks after so they can learn their names. Not only that, but according to the report the rest of the pod holds space for that learning, quieting their other usual sounds so this can happen.

Several loved ones have sent me the articles that share this information. And as a person whose mother sang and talked to me before I was born, it resonates. And interestingly enough this new research was shared, according to these articles, not at a meeting of marine biologists but at the American Psychological Association meeting in Denver in August 2016. The articles linked never mention the species of dolphin. This is something that it would feel so good to generalize. As mammals, it would satisfy a deep longing to be part of a practice of mother child singing, community listening. Held. Named.

Held. Deep diving as I often do I learned that the observations leading to this insight about mother/baby womb singing were observed in a specific context. Captivity. A mother dolphin who gave birth at the oceanarium DolphinQuest (from the pictures I would say a bottlenose dolphin, but even the DolphinQuest website doesn't name the species). It matters to me that this practice of singing, communal listening, was observed not in the open ocean but in the confines of captive dolphin birth. I think of Debbie Africa, who gave birth secretly in prison, how the other women prisoners used sounds to shield her birth process, protected them from guards so that she and the baby were able to share precious time together, undetected for days. I think of Assata Shakur too, impossibly conceiving and giving birth to her daughter while a political prisoner, mostly in solitary confinement. And how she listened to her angry daughter, and the dreams of her grandmother when they told her she could be free. They could be together. And the community made it real.

I think of captive birth, which is an every day occurrence in the United States of America and in the US the state shackles prisoners giving birth, takes children away almost immediately. What do they sing in the time of the womb? I think of the children of asylum seekers separated from their parents in cages at the border. How does a chorus of grief and loss evolve to share crucial information? How are the over 5 million US children with parents in prison, the uncounted children in cages right now, held? Named?

And I think about you and what you remember. What you keep close for as long as you can. I think about repetition and code, and when we prioritize what communication and why. And how we ever learn our names in this mess. And the need that makes us generalize and identify. Become specific and vague. I think about the dolphin mother (DolphinQuest staff named her Bailey) and what she needed to say. Her own name, in her own way. And what else under strict observation.

If it was me. If it was you. I would say this in the way I could say it, in the too short time, in the high pitched emergence. Remember this feeling, there is something called love. I would say remember, there is something called freedom, even if you can't see it. There is me calling you, in a world I don't control. There is something called freedom and you know how to call it. Even here in the holding pattern, here in the hold remember remember. You are. You are held. Named.

Table of Contents

Preface: a guide to undrowning 1

Foreword adrienne maree brown 3

Introduction 5

1 Listen 15

2 Breathe 21

3 Remember 29

4 Practice 43

5 Collaborate 51

6 Be vulnerable 61

7 Be present 67

8 Be fierce 73

9 Learn from conflict 83

10 Honor your boundaries 87

11 Respect your hair 95

12 End capitalism 101

13 Refuse 109

14 Surrender 121

15 Go deep 127

16 Stay black 131

17 Slow down 141

18 Rest 147

19 Take care of your blessings 151

20 Activities 165

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes us out of our comfort zone and into the sea, where other species are moving and mothering in ways that can teach us how to survive. With her beautifully rendered reflections on the habits and habitats of seals, otters and manatees, Gumbs shows us that humans aren't the only ones affected by climate change, and that other mammals know the pain of having their children hunted. Undrowned is a gift and its message is clear: The natural world offers solutions if we just pay attention.”—Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood

"Reading Undrowned, I am re-convinced of the revolutionary potential of the life sciences, and in particular, of the necessity of a Black feminist biology. Alexis Pauline Gumbs listens so carefully to everybody —humans, whales, dolphins, corals, all beings, living and ancestral. It is a blessing that she has shared with us both what she has heard and the experimental methods for how she enacted her expansive listening. In Undrowned, Gumbs offers much-needed examples and practices for how to become sensitive and responsive to our sensitive, responsive kin-beyond-species. It is this loving attunement that makes Undrowned a work of poetry and of biology at its most perceptive and generative." —Kriti Sharma, author of Interdependence: Biology and Beyond

“Undrowned profoundly exemplifies the distinct ways that Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a liaison between the seen and unseen. Her words are libation, meditation, and an incantation that invites us to re-member the interconnectedness between humans and marine mammals. In centering Black feminist praxis, Undrowned is a non-Christocentric baptism into the depth of the ocean and the depth of ourselves. Dr. Gumbs’s offering reminds us that what is dark, hidden, and immersed in water is sacred and holy. Read it alone and with others, in parts, and whole. Come to the sea and be healed."—Aishah Shahidah Simmons, creator of NO! The Rape Documentary and author of Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

“Alexis Pauline Gumbs breaks the surface of living as human and deep dives the depths of life in the planet’s oceans, where human life began but is now a danger to. Gumbs’s riveting, loving, genre-bending embrace of marine mammals and the human peril facing them, her mammal love, charges us to rethink and re-behave what it means to be human as she reminds us humans are mammals too, all life is sacred. On every page, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers us a new definition of philosophy, a new definition of evolution. If we truly want a more just way of living, of being interspecies. This is a smart, black feminist, queer poetic; a love evangelist trouble making abolitionist offering. Take it. And be the change.” —Alexis DeVeaux, author of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

“This book is a devotional. An invitation to live more intentionally, more in harmony/Aligned.In this book, the Divine Mermaid, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, dives inside the wails of the Ancestors as she gives testament and testimony to the brilliance of Knowing Spirit beyond the veils of time, place and embodiment. Here, Alexis serves as guide and translator of vibrational realities of dreaming into how to survive, thrive and shape shift this world.”—Sharon Bridgforth, Doris Duke Performing Artist

“Alexis Pauline-Gumbs takes us on her journey into deep relationship with marine mammals to offer a much needed mapping for these times. She shares with us how these ancestral whales, dolphins, seals, manatee and walrus cousins know to navigate and survive our carelessness and what they have to teach us about how to show up to ourselves and each other. She weaves brilliantly, as always, a tapestry of investigation, history, enlightenment, and truth-telling. She weaves with a poetic commitment to connect us with our fierce sea species relatives as they help us know how to move forward in a shared commitment to the possibilities of a lived love and justice.” —Tema Okun, author of The Emperor Has No Clothes:Teaching about Race and Racism to People Who Don't Want to Know

"Following Lorde’s definition of survival at the margins, Alexis Pauline Gumbs takes an innovative approach to what it means, in her terms, to be “undrowning”. Like Lorde, Gumbs advocates for a communal approach that recognises wider kinships, but also beyond that, that recognises our (that is, an inclusive us as planetary inhabitants) shared use, abuse, and reliance on our fragile ecologies. The titular “undrowned” are identified with not only the also-titular marine mammals, but also the descendant survivors of Black enslavement and, through our communal responsibilities, all of us. The book offers a set of meditations on a variety of interrelated themes derived from both Black feminist praxis and marine mammal behaviour."
—Aimee Hinds, University of Roehampton