Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Echolocation as a practice of collective care (Ep439)

Written By kamea chayne
“I think that there’s a delusion that’s possible when we don’t echolocate, when we don’t practice mindfulness for where we are and what our impact is.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs

What can we learn from marine mammals in their practices of echolocation? What is the difference between identification as a colonial tool of control and separation, versus identifying with as an invitation to expand and blur boundaries? And how do Audre Lorde’s poetic dreams of survival continue to reverberate during our times — helping us to reorient the ways that we show up for ourselves, for our communities and our planet?

In this episode, we are honored to welcome Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist, an aspirational cousin to all life, and the author of Undrowned and Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.

Join us in this heartwarming conversation as we explore lessons from marine mammals, teachings from the artful life of Audre Lorde, the significance of what it means to survive, and more.

We invite you to…

 

About our guest:

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life.  She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde and the award-winning Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. She is/they are the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

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episode transcript

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: We have so much to learn from every life form on this planet. And there's something about breathing that is so crucial for us, so central to everything, that it made sense to me to think about the breathing of other mammals, especially marine mammals, because of their breathing. To me, it always boggles my mind that there are mammals that can live in water and breathe. 

When I thought about my ancestors who survived, and did not survive, the Middle Passage, I thought about their kinship with whales, dolphins, and marine animals who live and migrate through those same routes of the transatlantic slave trade.

The slave trade in the Indian Ocean has the same lines of kinship. The fact that boats that were used to kidnap Africans to transform them into commodities for sale in the Americas were also often the very same boats converted, or not even converted that much, to use for whale hunting. The understanding that as somebody who lives inside of and in critique of the United States, I know that the oil from the blubber that whales gave unwillingly when human beings hunted them in the colonial project, was the fuel for everything that happened in that period. It was how people lit their lamps. It was how people lubricated their machinery. It was what allowed colonialism to function and what we now know as the United States to emerge. 

The other crucial element was the enslaved, involuntary labor of my ancestors, the people who did survive the Middle Passage. It's a kinship of oppression. It's a kinship of being shared targets for a project that ultimately is never supposed to benefit you. But then as I listened I kept making space in every way; in my dreams, in my imaginative writing, my poetry. For what my ancestors may have experienced, I thought there was an older kinship than that. 

And I know that the one name of an ancestor who survived the Middle Passage who I know is Boda, was an Ashanti woman. I know that there's a cosmology in that culture that already references whales. As a descendant of Shinnecock ancestors who are from an area now called Long Island in New York, have been in a sacred relationship with the North Atlantic whale for centuries. Some of these relationships exceed that shared capture, that shared extraction, that shared targeting. And so I wanted to find my way to hold both of those things.

There's an energetic connection, a teaching, a mentorship, a blending of species consciousnesses that precedes colonialism and that brings us together.

Everyone now alive, even if they are not descendants of survivors of the Middle Passage, is implicated in these conditions that would not be what they are without these colonial actions. But also we would not be what we are without our inherent interspecies relationship with, not only marine mammals,  but with all other life forms. 

So, it was a specific example that resonated because I believe there is a healing that we're engaged in together. I know for sure, that our continued existence is interconnected and that everything that harms marine mammals harms all life - including human mammals. I wondered if there was a way that other folks could join me in recognizing, or at least wondering about that kinship, with every breath.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you so much. I have chills hearing you share this and it’s also really potent to think about.

Something more specifically that stands out to me is when you share about the practice of ‘echolocation’ that marine mammals engage in to navigate the world. So I'd be curious to have you share more about how marine mammals sense their ways through waters, through this language of vibration in terms of how it's expressed and received as this “technology of bounce”. And then also how can we learn from this way of a slower attunement with the world to guide the ways that we might navigate ours and the uncertainties that we find ourselves in right now?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: So for marine mammals, and also for bats, echolocation is a vibrational technology. It’s a way of understanding space through echo, the ways that the sounds we make bounce back to us. And then we have a sense of the shape, of how far it is to the nearest stone formation, of how deep a certain area in the water might be. It helps marine mammals, most of whom at some point have a reason to find each other and create a shared map of space.

If I could be more mindful of the space I'm in, physically, but also in every other way, the very sound I make could help teach me in the way it comes back to me: how quickly to move, whether I should slow down, who else is here.

That's a very different way of relating to life than what I've been socialized into in my colonial education, which is to say, “just go forward”. If there's something in your way, you're going to just have to knock it out of the way. That's what a colonial philosophy says. It's not about mindfulness of space. It's not about listening to our impact. It's just about this kind of linear drive towards, what?

So, I do think that there's a lot of listening that we need to do. And the way that I echolocate most is through social media. Undrowned, before it was a book, was a series of social media posts. I didn’t know it should be a book, that was the sound that came back to me.

It was the way people related to these reflections on marine mammals that I was doing as part of my mindfulness process that gave me an inkling that some of these things weren't just for me. There was a way that marine mammals could mentor other people in my community through some of the things I was noticing. The reflection back is what determined my actions. Different communities of people are translating Undrowned into the languages that their communities need to work with the work more.

And it's fascinating to listen to that reflection. How is the sound coming back differently, in different languages, in different countries, people whose interface with the ocean is different than mine, someone who lives in the United States and who’s of Caribbean ancestry? I think that there's a delusion that's possible when we don't echolocate, when we don't practice mindfulness for where we are and what our impact is. It's a form of care. It feels so different from what I mostly do, and what I mostly feel happening around me.

We mostly communicate as if the impact of our words is not going to touch someone, and then come back to us and touch us and change us differently. Some words are very influenced by Octavia Butler's theory of change.

Kamea Chayne: I resonate with this. I just saw that you shared in your Instagram stories this article about bowhead whales diving in synchrony, despite being separated by distances over 60 miles. And it just reminds me of all the wonders of the world and how much humility we need to maintain and how much we still don't know.

As you shared about echolocation, this invitation to listen more deeply and become more sensitive to the world and just be able to take some action and listen and see how that is received or see how that is impacting the world and then coming back to us. And then how we might adjust ourselves accordingly because if we don't listen, then, as you emphasize, there is kind of a delusion of not seeing what we're doing and not being a part of all of this.

Something that is an overarching theme and message of Undrowned is making this distinction between “identification” versus “identification with”. What would you like to share about this distinction and the ways that one has been a colonial tool of domination and control that limits and reduces; while the other is more so an invitation to expand and blur boundaries.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: As a listener to this podcast, I know there've been so many guests who are scientists or they’re in a conversation about how science impacts our world. I felt this curiosity about marine mammals, and the first things that I had access to to learn more about them were guidebooks. The standard traditional guidebook is designed to help you identify a species so that you can categorize it.

So if I see a marine mammal out in the water, I can look up and ask what species it is. And the identification process is to say it's this, not that because it has these characteristics. And that's part of the colonial project. It is a project of cataloging. And so if we understand the history of colonialism, you have all these people, including some people called “naturalists”, who go out and they say, “These are all the different things we found here on this land that we're colonizing. And this is maybe what we could use them for, or, “this is what we're going to have to try to exterminate that's here.”

To identify and categorize everything and make determinations about what's useful and what's not… comes from a place of domination, not from a place of recognition or relation.

I do want to know who's around me. I do want to know who these relatives are, how they are, what they need, and how they move through the cycles of either the season of birth and death and life and rebirth. But it's not for domination, it's to be in the right relationship. What I learned should transform my behavior, not as I set myself in a posture to dominate, but as I surrender to the reality of what it is to meet each other, and what it is to be an ecology.

And so I found that there was a contradiction. My identification with my feeling of kinship with marine mammals was interrupted by this inherently colonial process of identification. I use the example in the introduction of hooded seals being called “vagrant juveniles” if they were found in a place where scientists didn't expect to find them. That's the same way that the people in my community who I love are described on the news, vagrant juveniles, really? This is the same process of identification, categorization, and colonization that I am surviving.

And yes, that's another part of our kinship, but I do have to find a way to reach beyond that. And I have to find a poetics that can open space for our kinship to be the primary thing and for my wonder to survive. They do not know why it is that bowhead whales are 100 miles away from each other and diving, they're doing synchronized swimming across this huge distance. That is something that is part of the dignity and the mystery of any relationship. There will be things that we know, but will always have the possibility of being like wow, and of wondering and being transformed.

In my case, with this identification process with identifying with marine mammals, what I was looking for was how I learned something different about myself from noticing something wonderful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring in some cases about this particular marine mammal.

When I posted the article that you were referencing, I just put the words “you and me, we're diving in synchrony across space.”  I don't know who the other bowhead is, but I know that there are lots of ways to think about it. As you know, I have a dear sister, friend, and collaborator, the writer, adrienne maree brown. We have been in friendship and community for over 25 years. And twice without discussing it, just on our timelines, living our lives, we have had books come out on the same day. Undrowned came out on the same day as her book, Holding Change and my new book, Survival is a Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde comes out the same day as her book, Loving Corrections.

And that's a version of that where we're moving in tandem. Sometimes we don't even know, but in a different way, and in a nonlinear way, we do know. We do know that we're doing this together. And sometimes the universe shows us in the poem of synchronicity that we're together on this.

Kamea Chayne: It’s so beautiful how this came together and happened. And to pivot a little bit here and move into honouring the eternal life of Audre Lorde, I know something that has been important to Audre and how she shows up is to introduce herself with her multiplicities of identities. And I know you've embraced a similar approach yourself as well.

I'm curious about this also because I struggle with trying to define myself with nouns and identities whenever I write my “about pages” because I feel drawn to invitations to kind of blur boundaries and undefine. But especially as we continue this discussion on “identification” versus “identifying with”, what can we learn from these different ways of relating to labels that don't necessarily limit and reduce - but can help to expand and maybe also affirm and build relationships as well?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: I also struggle with the about page and my bio. I've written so many bios. I feel like I write a new one every time I'm doing something or I've stopped. Then whenever someone reads my bio, I'm like, that's not quite it because we exceed that. We exceed every identification and at the same time, it's one of the ways we echolocate.

So Audre Lorde said, "I am a Black, lesbian, feminist, warrior, poet, mother, socialist”. And she would say that in her own words. Once when she was asked on the radio, why do you say all those words when you're introducing yourself? She said: “I don't know in any given speech that I'm making in any space that I'm in, what are the aspects of who I am that somebody in that space is gonna need to find in themselves.”

She said that she grew up around folks who were closeted. She knew Langston Hughes, but she never knew that he was gay. And there was a way that she suffered thinking she was the only person who wasn't straight in the spaces she was in, with him and with other people who she didn't know, because they didn't disclose that aspect of who they were. She didn't want there to be people in space with her who could be empowered and feel connected and feel not alone in who they were to lose that because she didn't say it.

There are so many different versions of this for her, just like there are different versions of my bio for me. There are versions that are really long where she includes so many things like fat, nearsightedness, high maintenance, all these ways she describes herself that are about a ceremony of loving all the different parts of herself that happened to occur to her in a particular moment.

And while she didn't specifically use the word echolocation, she also saw it as a responsible way of being in space and understanding that we're in space. Especially if you are the person in the front of the room, you are creating a possibility for reflection for the people who are in there with you.

Even if there are no people who identify with some aspect of who you are, you're also invoking an accountability saying; well, actually if you're not thinking about how a Black-lesbian-feminist-socialist-warrior-mother-poet, impacts a person like that, you need to consider that these are communities and these are ways of being that I remind you exist, by celebrating my existence. 

It is an interesting thing and it does go back to this idea of echolocation” because you're recalling each other. And so when I say, “queer, Black, feminist, love evangelist, aspirational favorite cousin to all living beings”, I'm letting you know that even though to me, all of those things mean the same thing to me, it's just like love, love, love, love love, and I love you.

I'm bringing all of those queer Black ancestors. I'm bringing all of those feminists who helped make my life possible. I'm bringing all of the people who practice relationships, and who held cousinship as sacred.

I'm bringing them forward. And if they are not breathing beings, I am giving them space to breathe through my being and be present in the conversations I'm in, in the rooms that I'm in, in the relationships I'm building.

Kamea Chayne: That’s powerful. Something that just really stands out to me from this book is that it doesn't feel like a traditional biography that follows a sort of chronological timeline and walks readers through the life of the person from the start to the end. And I don't usually enjoy reading biographies - because a lot of the ones I've engaged with at least feel a bit dry. But Survival as a Promise feels very different. In its form and language, it feels warm, inviting, relatable and heartfelt. And I can sense your connection and the significance of this project for you through it. 

I had to even just sit for a moment to sink into part one where you shared about how you were mailed these original manuscripts of Audre's books and entrusted to help these books return to themselves as you write. So with this in mind, what more would you like to share about your intention to depart from the conventional ways that biographies are typically written so that you can best honor Audre Lorde, not just the stories, but also the form, the language, and the artful ways that you weave her poetry with your craft?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Thank you for that question. So I'm glad, first of all, that it felt inviting. My goal, and therefore my process, was wanting this book to be a portable, homeful space where people could be with Audre Lorde. That was my goal.

I want folks who read it. And this is also how I wanted to feel and did feel, the entire time I was writing it — that this is a space where we can be with Audre Lorde and we can be close to her. There could be an intimacy in our experience with her and there could be enough love and beauty and resonance and detail that we could learn something new about ourselves in the process because I know that's what she wanted.

[Audre Lorde] wanted her work to be part of other people learning something new about themselves. And so that's what I wanted to honor with this work. 

And so I did feel that I needed to depart from many of the biographies I've read. Often a biography can be like a consumable commodity. You get all these facts about some important figure and now you know, you move on. Or sometimes you get all these facts and the biographer intends to give you all these facts and then you can continue to have a relationship with that person because you know these details. And I think that in my case I wanted to embrace the reader more than that. I hope it's not a controlling thing, but I wanted to have some impact on what their relationship with Audre Lorde could be. What I'm trying to honor is many decades of people who have testified to me about their experience of reading Audre Lorde's work and it is like a rebirth for them.

They did love themselves more, they were more honest with themselves and other people, they were more committed to the things that they're here on this planet to make a difference around. They were more mindful of their relationships. These are the types of things that came out of people's reading of Audre Lorde's work, especially for her loved ones, her students and her mentees. This is how they describe her impact. I felt responsible for creating an invitation and for creating an offering. I wanted to offer enough context, examples, and aesthetic beauty that a person could feel that way. 

So yes, I don't have control over how people engage with it. And I wrote in the introduction, "I think people can start with any chapter they want”, and they'll be OK because it's not linear in that way. But I also really have so much faith because I know; I’ve had other people witness to me as I've witnessed it in my own life. The power of  Audre Lorde's work is that it meets you where you are. And then it just continues to meet you where you are, even though you're not in the same place anymore. I wanted to create a work that would meet people where they were and not have them feel as if this was just a separate life. That this is some person who lived once.

What makes Audre Lorde's life eternal is that we're still participating in it. And she's participating in our lives. 

My life, even though I never met Audre Lorde, is completely shaped by her and how to account for that. How to even account for my gratitude about that? But also I couldn't pretend I'm just an objective researcher and that the person reading it is just a bystander. That is not the case. That is not the point. It is because our survival is at stake. After all, our transformation into beings that can be in a relationship is the goal, a possibility. It then has to be something that, in its very experience, allows us to embody that interconnectivity.

Kamea Chayne: This also reminds me about how Western science and the approach of Western science is to objectify. The approach of Western journalism is also to kind of remove the subjectivity of the person who is writing the article. So similarly, maybe more conventional biographies also try to remove the authorship and their relationality to what is happening, but this feels very different and personal and honors that relationality that you have in this work. 

And it also just feels like a continuation of echolocation, like we were talking about earlier. Her vibrations are still reverberating in this world and you're picking that up and you're kind of resending what you've picked up on into the world. We're feeling that and we're giving feedback and everything is in conversation with each other, even beyond the lifetime of a person. This is beautiful to think about.

And of course, we can't talk about Survival as a Promise without putting a spotlight on the word “survival”. You shared in your book launch discussion with Prentis Hemphill and adrienne maree brown, “Survival is not subsistence. Survival is not a small thing. Survival is this possibility that will tap so deeply into the truth of our connection that something within that will outlast us."

So with this, what else would you like to weave into this conversation on this underlying theme of survival? And I know Audre's work was created in the context of her times, but what offerings or words of guidance do you sense she might want to share as we face our own context of challenging and urgent times of today to help us reorient the ways that we show up for ourselves, for our communities and our planet?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Survival was a keyword for Audre Lorde. I was just talking to a friend of mine about the poem, “A Litany for Survival”. There are multiple times where she’s reading that poem in public and she says, it's “Litany for Survival”. And then she says some number like 6,724 because survival is not something we decide about once. It's a daily decision. It's a daily practice of understanding what survival is. And I love that so much. In the book, I have ten sections and each section has an epigraph that I think speaks to Audre Lorde's different definitions or pieces of her definition of survival. Audre did understand survival to be a collective possibility and a personal assignment and imperative. 

So there was a way that we each could participate in something called survival that's collective. I wonder sometimes, Prentis mentioned this, sometimes people are like, “I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive or enjoy those things”. Survival doesn't exclude thriving. In fact, it requires it. And it does not exclude joy, it is expansive in that inside of it we need each other.

And sometimes I wonder about the bad rep that the word “survival” gets. I have this suspicion that it could have to do with its collectivity. Like, I don't want to be responsible for our collective survival. I want to feel like I'm just thriving as an individual. I want to feel like I could be a self-made person rewarded by capitalism. That's kind of sometimes what I hear in the downplaying of what a big deal survival is. Because survival is its root time travel. Survival means life after, life when something has tried to take life away, or life when others have died. And that’s part of Audre Lorde's definition of life.

Audre Lorde understood that she had a responsibility to people who had passed away before her. She understood that there was something that was going to go beyond her physical life form and that it was important for her to be in alignment with that today. And I think it's just such an exciting assignment to promise survival to each other, but to people that we'll never meet and to people who never knew us and we may or may not know their names. It's inherently collective.

Audre Lorde for sure said survival is not individual. It just doesn't work that way. And we know that no individual species and certainly no individual being within a species can survive on that scale alone.

There are many things I could say about survival, but it's not a coincidence that the word ‘survival’ is key in Audre Lorde's lexicon. She was talking about the rising atmospheric and ocean temperatures and their impact on storms like Hurricane Hugo, which she survived in St. Croix in the late 1980s. 

I don't think that it's a mere coincidence that she was thinking about survival and she was on the committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, which is an activist organization that she was involved in from her days as a student. I think that for Audre Lorde, but also the Black feminist who she was in conversation with, survival is a key term for the folks in the Combahee River Collective. If you read the notes from their Black feminist retreats, survival is a term that comes up all the time. Other organizations that Audre Lorde was peripheral to and involved in in some ways like the Salsa Soul Sisters. You just look at their newsletters and it's like survival, survival, survival…

Many of these people are themselves or they are raised by, or subject to decisions, by people who have survived world wars. And this is the generation, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, who as children had to reckon with the fact that human beings had invented the capacity to completely eradicate itself. They saw that come into being in their childhood.

So thinking about survival is something that is not simply metaphorical. It was this question of "Is this species trying to be here or what?” And so for Audre Lorde that was connected to everything. And this is why she was so interested. She was very interested in geology. She was very interested in astrophysics. She was so interested in biology and learning about other species.

The question of survival must have a real impact on the decisions that we make together and the tendencies that we practice together in the ways that we care for each other in the future that we imagine. 

And so the poetics of survival that Audre Lorde, her interlocutors, her comrades, her friends and her peers thought about is, and what I sometimes grieve, what we might be doing now and what climate catastrophes we might not even be facing now. Decades ago, 40, or 50 years ago, black feminists were organizing and protesting around nuclear policies and were thinking about energy, pollution, and extraction of resources. 

If we had made a turn collectively, in alignment with their visions, where would we be now? Would we have generations of people who are experiencing a level of climate grief that is maybe even similar to the type of grief that the young people in Audre Lorde's generation felt when they watched human beings drop atomic bombs?

// musical intermission //

Kamea Chayne:  What has been one of the most impactful books you've read or publications you follow?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: I know, because I'm just like, so I'll just because because, you know, I'm here for Audrey. Audrey Lorde's book of poems, The Black Unicorn, is definitely one of the most impactful books I've ever read. I mean, really all of her poems and you know, what I hold close to me is her collected poems. But the poem A Litany for Survival is in the book The Black Unicorn. And it's this incredible time travel book that she understands as a conversation with an ancestor.

And my goodness it just has new questions for me every time I read a poem from that book I have a question to ask myself about my life that is pressing and urgent and deep and complex and it it really influences me to be a questioning curious person about who I can even be and to understand that the answers to those questions are connected with my communities and with the past and with the future and with the ancestors and with those to come. I recommend it. I recommend it to everyone.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: So, so many practices, but I'll mention that one practice, and it's a mantra practice. I guess I'm kind of answering both, but it is Black feminist breathing. And Black feminist breathing has been my process of turning some of the words of Black feminists, like Audre Lorde said, “I am who I am, doing what I came to do”, turning that into a mantra and repeating it or really constantly forever. But really sitting with it as a meditation and as something that I feel is like a recoding of my colonial education, of some of the negative messages, the scarcity messages, the isolationist messages that I feel really immersed in inside of this culture and inside of this moment. And so that's one. I mean, there's different mantras from so many ancestors.

Kamea Chayne: As we come to a close here, what final words of wisdom would you like to leave with us as green dreamers beyond all the wisdom already shared today?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Maybe this is just my shared assignment for myself and for everyone who's listening. It's just to take a breath and just remember that that breath is connected to so much. It's connected to every life form on this planet. It's connected beyond our atmosphere to the energy exchange of the universe. That’s my assignment: to take a breath.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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