Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
When I deliberately opted for Undrowned/Udruknet in its translated Danish version, this gesture appeared to be my own peculiar way of honoring its translator, Danish poet Mikas Lang. Lang’s tireless efforts to channel Black radical feminist thought to Danish publics have carved out a much-needed space where the instrumental teachings of Angela Davis, Dionne Brand, Jesmyn Ward, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and now, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, find fertile ground, and seem to only resonate and grow deeper amongst those of us, myself included, in societies marred by erasure, racial othering, and daily (micro)aggressions, palpable in the undercurrents of prevailing assimilationist politics. Undrowned, taking up a compelling field of breathability, might serve as the anchor we may hold onto.
It lays bare a narrative of a world bifurcated along two divergent cosmologies: reciprocity and segregation. In the latter, systems and infrastructures that separate and alienate us from our broader ecology of existence conspire to transform complex, interspecial relationships into profit-making apparatuses. And where colonialism, as Achille Mbembe observes, crystallizes as one of such systems of rupture and segregation. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, however, deflates this cosmology and rejects the racializing logic inherent to the workings and mechanisms of capitalism. Through her blend of prose and poetry, she casts the world in principles of reciprocity, relation, and resonance. And therewith, powerfully rebuffs the grip of capitalism’s toxicity, confinement, and captivity. At its core, Undrowned is, in its poetics, breath, and complexities, a poignant love letter – a tender testament to the interconnected web of life and the enduring, kindred relations forged across generations between terrestrial and aquatic relatives, passed down by our foremothers and forefathers. Within its poetic depths lie subtle invitations to listen – and learn – from ancestral wisdom, strategies, and practices embodied and performed by our aquatic cousins. It beckons us in our desires to escape the ubiquitous atmospheres engineered and designed to suffocate and constrain some of us; our desires to breathe in racialized, sexist, and ableist strangleholds that permeate our societies and stand in the way of our collective liberation through radical acts of care and forging pathways for planetary solidarity with our nonhuman relatives.
Margarida Waco
