Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

Winner of the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction!

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.

Undrowned in Practice is a digital immersive space to practice these Black feminist lessons together. Learn more or sign up here.

Praise for Undrowned

"In Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs has written a singular hybrid of hymn, field guide, and self-care manual that urges us to reassess our place among our fellow living beings. Its intellectual risk centers on the premise that love can be our most radical and transformative act. Her tales of sea life entwined with meditations on Black feminism become modern fables that offer new methods of feeling, and insist with the best of environmental literature that protecting the planet’s collapsing animal ecologies is vital to saving what makes us human. This wild prose poem is about an Other that turns out to be ourselves."
—Whiting Foundation Selection Committee

“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

Dub: Finding Ceremony

The concluding volume in a poetic trilogy, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.

— BITCH MAGAZINE

M Archive

The second book in an experimental triptych, M Archive is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following the worldwide cataclysm we are living through now. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story "Evidence," M Archive is told from the perspective of a future researcher who uncovers evidence of the conditions of late capitalism, antiblackness, and environmental crisis while examining possibilities of being that exceed the human. By exploring how Black feminist theory is already after the end of the world, Gumbs reinscribes the possibilities and potentials of scholarship while demonstrating the impossibility of demarcating the lines between art, science, spirit, scholarship, and politics.

—JAKI SHELTON GREEN
NC State Poet Laureate

Spill

Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity is a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black feminist thinkers. Gumbs not only speaks to the spiritual, bodily, and otherworldly experience of Black women but also allows readers to imagine new possibilities for poetry as a portal for understanding and deepening feminist theory.

— ALICE WALKER
Pulitzer Prize winning Author

Revolutionary Mothering

Inspired by the legacy of radical and queer black feminists of the 1970s and ’80s, Revolutionary Mothering places marginalized mothers of color at the center of a world of necessary transformation. The challenges we face as movements working for racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice, as well as anti-violence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation are the same challenges that many mothers face every day. Oppressed mothers create a generous space for life in the face of life-threatening limits, activate a powerful vision of the future while navigating tangible concerns in the present, move beyond individual narratives of choice toward collective solutions, live for more than ourselves, and remain accountable to a future that we cannot always see. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.

“Evidence”

Alexis’s contribution to Octavia’s Brood is titled “Evidence”. The story looks back from a future eutopia to the past seen as dystopia in a period called “Before Silence Broke,” with the period “Breaking the Silence” seen as the beginning of the changes that brought about the eutopia. The eutopia is an open society where everyone is encouraged to develop in their own unique way.

in Octavia’s Brood

edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

“Sweetness of Salt:
Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes)”

Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good includes a contribution from Alexis titled “The Sweetness of Salt: Toni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes)” which is an “offering and gratitude of Toni Cade Bambara, not through her texts but through my personal witness of the impact her self-identified students, loved ones, mentees, and collaborators.” The tributes include Cheryll Greene, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Cara Page, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and Kai Barrow.

in Pleasure Activism

written and gathered by Adrienne Maree Brown