Read it alone and with others, in parts, and whole. Gumbs’s offering reminds us that what is dark, hidden, and immersed in water is sacred and holy. In centering Black feminist praxis, Undrowned is a non-Christocentric baptism into the depth of the ocean and the depth of ourselves. Her words are libation, meditation, and an incantation that invites us to re-member the interconnectedness between humans and marine mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a liaison between the seen and unseen. “ Undrowned profoundly exemplifies the distinct ways that Dr. Kriti Sharma, author of Interdependence: Biology and Beyond It is this loving attunement that makes Undrowned a work of poetry and of biology at its most perceptive and generative."
#Sparks notes how to#
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 a blessing that she has shared with us both what she has heard and the experimental methods for how she enacted her expansive listening. Alexis Pauline Gumbs listens so carefully to everybody -humans, whales, dolphins, corals, all beings, living and ancestral. "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.
Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood Undrowned is a gift and its message is clear: The natural world offers solutions if we just pay attention.” 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. “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. This wild prose poem is about an Other that turns out to be ourselves." 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. Its intellectual risk centers on the premise that love can be our most radical and transformative act.
#Sparks notes manual#
"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.
Gumbs’s narrative moves seamlessly between dolphins born in captivity and Black political prisoners giving birth behind bars, between the migratory patterns of dolphins and the Atlantic slave trade. Part of the "Emergent Strategy" series, the book is divided into eighty short meditations, each grouped into “movements” with names like “Listen,” “Breath,” “Stay Black,” and “Go Deep.” A graceful use of metaphor and natural models in the service of social justice, it explores themes that range from the ways that echolocation might inform our understandings of visionary action to the similar ways that humans and marine mammals do-or might-adapt within our increasingly dire circumstances. The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and questioning. Employing a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility, naturalist observation, and Black feminist insights, she translates their submerged wisdom to reveal what they might teach us. She has found them to be queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions humans have imposed on the ocean. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching our aquatic cousins. Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. Undrowned is part of the Emergent Strategy Series. 2022 Whiting Foundation Winner in Nonfiction.
0 kommentar(er)
