How to Breathe, and Other Survival Lessons From Marine Mammals with Alexis Pauline Gumbs

In this episode, we interview #AlexisPaulineGumbs, a writer, independent scholar, poet, activist, and educator based in Durham, North Carolina, United States of America. From her earlier work on Revolutionary Mothering, she has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative, and oracular writing with her poetic triptych of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (published in 2016), M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020). All of Alexis’s work is grounded in a community-building ethic and would not be possible without her communities of accountability in Durham, the broader US Southeast and the global south.
Her most recent book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, 2020, part of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press, won the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction, and is an artifact and tool for interspecies ancestral listening. The book flows from her previous works in a poetic continuum, with water playing a central role.
In Undrowned, Gumbs takes us through 19 thematic movements, lessons from marine mammals, and kindred beyond taxonomy. From echolocation to the evolution of dorsal fins, each movement takes us deeper into listening, breathing, practicing, surrendering, refusing, honouring our boundaries, slowing down, and taking care of our blessings, amongst a range of other meditations. Through anecdotes and illustration, she draws us into a world of breathing in unbreathable circumstances. Learning from whales, dolphins, seals, otters, and walruses, we discover surprising ways to care, love, and survive.
Gumbs disrupts and critiques our mostly unthinking and unexamined acceptance of capitalist narratives and discourse. As a queer Black feminist love evangelist, as she describes herself, and a marine mammal apprentice, she draws on archives of Black feminist practice and theorists. Gumbs asks in the book, “What indentation am I making on the surface of this Earth, even if it is so far underwater no one can see?”, something we all need to be asking ourselves.
She is currently working on her next book, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
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