The Poetic Science-Nonfiction of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned

By Donna Lee Davidson

In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs actualizes how marine mammals survive and how they die in a capitalistic society as one in the same with Black survival and death. This might sound conspiratorial—because it is. Yet this book truly is a scientific guide on marine mammals. Gumbs uses marine life as a water reflection to see myself. She says you and I with poetic intimacy. “This book is for you/I wrote this with you in mind/I am mostly asking questions of myself and you in this text/I cannot live without you.” Initially it scares me, this intimacy, but it grows and as it does, I start to believe she loves me in the very first movement (her preference for expressing the flow of each section into the next rather than the stillness of a chapter). “It was always you I loved,” moves into, “There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three.” I became willing to believe her love as a part of the scientific method to test her hypothesis, asking If I believe her, that she loves me, what more can I observe than if I don’t? Gumbs challenges me to accept a beautiful thing, which immediately makes me suspicious of her.

“I wonder what our sensitive edges have to teach us…What could enable us to live more porously, more mindful of the infinite changeability of our own context?” Many marine mammals are identified by their scars, and the more they have, the more known they tend to be by watchers. Her goal, as she says it in the introduction, is to identify marine mammals, meaning not just pointing to a dolphin or whale to tell its name and where it swims, but with an expansion of how I can identify with swimming in the experience of another species to measure the distance between us. And the boundaries that separate me from them. Gumbs is right to move the cursor on which process she wants me to focus—from how my identity makes me different to how, because I identify with others, my differences don’t have to make me wicked.

Also in her introduction, Gumbs lets us know that “the word Black is capitalized” throughout the book, always. First, she acknowledges that the capitalization of it is to reference people while its lower case is to reference color, but “Blackness is more expansive than the human,” she says. Is it? I ask myself because I had not known this expanse for myself. But because I have chosen to trust Gumbs, at least for the sake of scientific experiment, I let it be so. Then she turns her phrase. “There is no symbolic or descriptive reference to the term Black in this society that does not also impact Black lives.” The expanse is beyond skin, more than mostly what I have been able to experience of it.

“What is the scale of breathing…the scale of breathing is collective.” The book was published in 2020, but it certainly wasn’t written in 2020. Each movement is taken from a pre-pandemic series of online posts, making this book an oracle. Gumbs juxtaposes the marine life in the transatlantic slave-trade with the middle passage, and the humans drowned by the “unbreathable circumstances in the underbellies of the ships of slave traders.” She delves into the physical characteristics of processing air in water, impossible for us to do, but to survive is to adapt—adaptations to breathing not just in relationship to our survival, but also in relationship to our intentional and mindful relation to one another. In this section, Gumbs gives me “opportunities to look at what blocks our breathing.” We are wearing masks to protect from the unbreathable circumstances of shared spaces, but also unbreathable masks that don’t exhale when we do and gives us nothing to inhale in return. We take them off to breathe, but then drown in that middle passage. “Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we do every day,” she says.

With Covid-19 traveling from one person’s exhale to another person’s inhale, Gumbs not unwittingly covers the pandemic just by covering the slave trade and the marine life destroyed in its wake. The Atlantic gray whale disappeared as the transatlantic slave trade came to an end, she explains. But in her research, Gumbs found no reference to the slave trade and the extinction of the gray whale. “I wonder if the toxicity of the slave trade and its impact on the ocean have been under-reported.” Me too.

“What do we need to remember that will push back against the forgetting…?” 144 dolphins have died at Sea Life Park on the island of Oahu in Hawaii over its 60 years of operation, despite the fact that dolphins, depending on species, have lifespans of anywhere between 40 to 90 years. The average lifespan of dolphins in captivity is 12 years, 9 months, and 8 days. “Several of the captives have gained renown as quick learners and creative performers,” Sea Life Park’s self-promotion reads. In response, Gumbs says, “They were talking about the oceanarium lives…but I thought they were talking about you. And me.” Me too.

Gumbs stood on the dock of the Combahee River “looking for Harriet Tubman” on the 149th anniversary of Tubman’s successful military operation that freed 750 slaves. She saw three Atlantic bottlenose dolphins instead. The average life expectancy of slaves at birth was 22 years. What do I look for that still exists somewhere in someone’s heart—maybe my own—still in the genealogical flesh of a beating heart—maybe my own—that everyone has forgotten? Tubman went back to the ecosystem where she was being hunted to extinction for her muscles and bones. She was ensuring my birth.

There is a 23-ton sea mammal in the Bering Sea that was discovered in 1741, but was hunted to extinction in only twenty-seven years after a goldrush for its fur and sealskin. “So she knows what we know. It is dangerous to be discovered,” Gumbs writes. Then I learn that the Minke whale was considered by whalers to be too small to bother with. Only after these whalers destroyed the populations of bigger whales—the whales that were too big to fail but, lo, failed them anyway—they turned their attention to the Minke whales. Now I understand why it’s dangerous to be discovered: I’m not too small and insignificant to be targeted.

White-beaked dolphins have a northern limit range that edges out in the Arctic and yet they are not adapted to ice. The rising sea temperatures are diminishing their food supply, forcing them further north, pricing them out of their own habitat, icing them out of survival, “suffocating them under what seems like a sudden white weigh.” Interspecies gentrification. “Marine mammals live in a volatile substance whose temperature is changing for reasons not of their own making.”

Other facts Gumbs shares include that the Beluga whale shapeshifts, can fit into and out of shallow estuaries using its breath to change the shape of its head. (I know something about this) “Beluga is known for being whatever and changing forever into whatever’s around.” Does this make me unknown, static, changeless? Or does it make me unknowable, defined in my vessel yet hinting always at an eventual discovery? The narwhal changes color over the course of its life. (I don’t know anything about that) The bowhead grows forever. (I can only hope) The baby Weddell seal doesn’t know she can breathe underwater. She doesn’t know that in her blood, there is breath; that her blood has an oxygenating capacity to breathe underwater. Her mother pushes her into water and holds her there, drowning her baby seal, kicking, before the baby undrowns. Black mothers don’t get to pass down their oxygenating blood. Their Black sons cry out that they can’t breathe. Their Black sons don’t undrown. I thank my own mothers who pushed me to undrown so I could discover myself before I am discovered—the New World, they would call me—which as the sea mammal of the Bering sea knows, is dangerous.

“Impoverished individual fishers actually kill marine mammals because they perceive them as threatening competition in a fishing market where they already can’t compete.” Capitalism occurs on an interspecies scale, Gumbs writes. This is the movement entitled “end capitalism”. It sounds analogous to end myself because I don’t know how I can outlive the only system in which I’ve learned to undrown. This competitive marketplace makes me wonder who or what I kill because I feel threatened.  

There are marine mammals who have escaped observation. That Atlantic gray whale that disappeared during the Atlantic slave trade? It has recently reappeared. How is that possible? Maybe it ran. Or maybe it just hid, remained undetected for 205 years after the Atlantic slave trade (not slavery) was abolished. In 2013, a gray whale is spotted off the coast of Namibia. Ten years ago, it decided it was ready to appear again in the Atlantic Ocean and no one knows why. For me, Gumbs asks, “What would allow you to look at what is under your actions, and under that, and under that?” Does she mean, what would force me? What would force me to look under and beneath and at the bottom of my actions? (And the force of it being more truthful than my voluntary preference for where to look)

300-400 meters deep in the ocean is a number unable to be counted of tiny swim bladders that reflected sonar back to operators who thought they had found the bottom of the ocean floor. False bottoms. Not rock bottoms, but false bottoms. A swim bladder, an organ filled with air, allows fish to maintain their depth. It’s not about air, it’s about pressure, and not only the pressure going down, but the pressure going up, too. “False bottoms in the ocean that sound can’t travel through.” The musician in me knows this is here for me to reflect—not rock bottom itself, but the needs of it: what it needed from me, what it needed from others, and what it needed to be possible. “This is not the bottom…This is not the floor…not even a wall, this is our air.”

There was a female North Atlantic right whale that survived being stabbed by boat propellers. But when she got pregnant fourteen years later, the expansion of her body reopened the wound. It got infected. She died. I wouldn’t say that she survived the stabbing. Growing is always a painful process. Being confronted by my wounds, these lessons from marine mammals make me wonder:

If I have a wound that will kill me if it opens, is it safe to grow?

About the author

Donna Lee Davidson

Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Donna (she/her) is the youngest of 11 children. She is an orchestral percussionist, jazz vibraphonist, and a writer with nonfiction life experiences. Her writing has appeared in American Composers Forum I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, Early Music America Magazine, The New York Times, and New Music USA. She is currently an MFA student at Columbia University.