In an artistic workshop I attended, I heard of a book called Undrowned – Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. The title grabbed me straight away, as if this were the book that I needed to read right now. “Undrowning” sounds like something I’ve been trying to do for a long time, even though I’m not part of a minority or a disenfranchised species.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist who has devoted herself to observing marine mammals, not as an objective researcher but as a mammalian relative. To learn from them, to be with them, to breathe with them.
Hers is an original, visionary voice from which there is much to be learnt about understanding the relationship of inter-being and the breath. Here are two excerpts from the section called “Breath” in Undrowned – Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals:
“Breath is a practice of presence. One of the physical characteristics that unites us with marine mammals is that they process air in a way similar to us. Though they spend most or all of their time in water, they do not have gills. We, too, on land are often navigating contexts that seem impossible for us to breathe in, and yet we must. The adaptations that marine mammals have made in relationship to breathing are some of the most relevant for us to observe, not only in relationship to our survival in an atmosphere we have polluted on a planet where we are causing the ocean to rise, but also in relationship to our intentional living, our mindful relation to each other.
With meditations on the different ways that narwhal, beluga, and bowhead whales breathe in the Arctic, the ways baby seals learn to redefine breath in infancy, the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic right whale and my Shinneocock and enslaved ancestors, and even a surprise visit by a Blacktip reef shark, this section offers us opportunities to look at what blocks our breathing, and the stakes of a society that puts profit over breath. May our breathing open up to the possibility of peace.”
“Since I live here, at the confluence, I cannot afford to hide. Instead my very breathing is critique. It takes up space. It moves my blood. To where I need. You see me living and you think it is my skin. And underneath, I am a muscle of response and shifting shape. I am. I am. And I am who I need to be. I am not hiding.”
Source: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Emergent Strategy, 2020