Undrowned is a book-length meditation for the entire human
species, based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine
mammals. Alexis Pauline Gumbs has spent hundreds of hours watching
our aquatic cousins. 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. 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.
The result is a powerful work of creative nonfiction that produces
not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wonder and
questioning.
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. 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. An absolutely unique read!
