#alexis pauline gumbs

[elwenyere]

"I wanted to write a poem about how the extreme heat of the ocean is breaking my heart, but the whales beat me to it. In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively, they stranded themselves on the shore. As soon as they lost the support of the water, their chest walls crushed their internal organs. They literally broke their hearts. Choreographed under helicopter cameras.

I want to write a poem about how capitalism is a sinking ship and how the extreme wealth-hoarding and extractive polluting systems that benefit a few billionaires are destroying our planet and killing us all. But the orcas beat me to it. Off the Iberian coast of Europe, the orcas collaborated and taught each other how to sink the yachts of the superrich. They literally sank the boats. While Twitter cheered.

The sinking ship is no longer a metaphor. The broken heart is no longer a metaphor. Who needs a metaphor in times as hot and blunt as ours? Let’s make it plain."

-- Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[notchainedtotrauma]

they had always been here. every indigenous community massacred, every single prophet assassinated, every child sacrificed to colonialism, every slave rebel shackled in their grave, every unassigned body piled as refuse somewhere, had never disappeared. whatever part they burned into air, whatever part they buried underground, whatever part they threw in the sea, came whole again in every breathing growing thing, and when the warning time came they were all of them (all of them) screaming.

from M. Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[gatheringbones]

[“After just a couple of semesters as an English major and philosophy minor at Hunter College, Audre felt she knew which fiction was worth respecting. Even though the subtitle described her as a fan, and she called herself a sci-fi “addict” by the end of the piece, she also alluded to her own discerning tastes. She knew how to judge the “character studies” and “emotional integrity” and “artistry” that truly good science fiction authors demonstrated. She called Ray Bradbury a “master craftsman” for his “dexterity” in seriously portraying the imagined perspectives of people living on Mars. She called August Derleth a “master of all fantasy fiction.” All of this before her critique, decades later, of the master’s tools and the master’s house.

For Audre, it was important that good science fiction and fantasy get the science right. As she pointed out, even children know the basics of science. Sci-fi authors cannot irresponsibly portray humans walking on the moon, breathing without any special apparatus. In this piece our young Audre, with the hopeful comradery of a fellow fan, suggests that Seventeen readers start with the collections she calls “excellent,” especially Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Derleth’s edited anthologies The Outer Reaches, The Other Side of the Moon, and Beyond Time and Space.

Audre thought the rise in science fiction’s profile was timely, and timeless. “The unconquerable drive that will always urge man to scan the future and to seek knowledge of what he knows not, is ageless,” she wrote. But the timing of this piece in her life is also telling. The future-oriented work she was reading and writing about may also have reflected her own desire to move into a new stage of life or, in her words, a “preoccupation with things to come and with the better world of tomorrow.” She empathized with a society, especially people in her own generation, who felt “caught in a world very little of our own making.” At the same time, she saw science fiction as an important form of worldmaking, noting that what science fiction depicts will eventually come into being. “Fifty years before the submarine was invented, Jules Verne equipped his fabulous Nautilus with forerunners of present-day submarine equipment,” she pointed out.

And if nineteen-year-old Audre were to make a world, what world would she make? Her own future had a lot in common with the other side of the moon. She had no idea what was going to happen. But she knew she wanted something different. Remember, this was the high school poet who wrote: Strange other lands do call me With alien songs I heed …”]

alexis pauline gumbs, from survival is a promise: the eternal life of audre lorde, 2024

[ladespeinada]

I love you with a love of screams. I love you with a love of witness. I love you with a love so old and deep, so complicated I can’t name it. … I live a love you cannot grasp or capture. I want to live inside my name. My name is love. I want to live in love as home, I want to live in it. Expansive and influential. Specific and sacred. I want to earn the right to say it to you. Love.  

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals · Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[apparitionhood]

at some point the work of pretending we weren't going to die, that our children weren't going to die, that our deaths and lives weren't going to be forgotten, became unsustainable. it was hard enough to just breathe and metabolize. to find something to metabolize. to find people to metabolize near. now some people call it the true end of whiteness, when the world could finally operate based on something other than fear of blackness, of being, of death. but at the time all we knew was the story had run out. all the stories. of staying young to cheat death. of thinking young people wouldn't die. of immortality via "making a difference." of genetic imprint as stability. of stacking money and etching names on buildings. people used to do those things before. not to mention that they would not mention death and would hide the dying away and strive to protect the eyes of the children who already knew everything. at some point. all the dead being here anyway and all of us here being obviously doomed, we let go of that particular game. and we started breathing. and saw our hands. we let go. i felt like i could fly. - from M Archive: After The End of The World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[ntaliavr]

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals · Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[rainbowpopeworld]

from “Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex” available here for free. Source

[thatsleepymermaid]

Tidepool's Top Five List of Environmental Books

(personal opinion this is just a list of book recs)

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmer This book expertly blends indigenous knowledge and Western scientific methods. Highly emphasizes precocity and living with the environment instead of separating ourselves further as many Western green movements would have you believe. This book also has realistic strategies for dealing with the climate crisis other than just personal choice.

Hope for Animals and Their World by Jane Goodall Amazing conservation wins from animals that have been brought back from the brink of extinction by zoos and aquariums. Stories like the California condor and the black-footed ferret are featured prominently. This book gave me hope that there may be a solution to saving species from extinction.

We Are All Whalers by Michael Moore Focuses on threats the northern right whale and other whales face out in the ocean and the connection we all have to it as consumers. This book does not shame consumers for their choices though, but rather calls for systematic changes in the fishing and plastic industry. One of the four books that made me cry while I was reading it.

Fresh Banana Leaves by Dr. Jessica Hernandez Amazing criticisms focusing on the Western Conservation Movement and the role of displacement in the environmental movement. The editing could be a bit better, but the message that indigenous knowledge should be centered in the environmentalist movement is impact.

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gums: This book is the second in the "Emergent Strategies" anthology. While all the books are amazing this one is my favorite. The book focuses on the shared relationship between white-western colonialism and the current ways we are affecting the marine environment. She gets a few scientific facts wrong regarding marine biology, but this book is so beautifully poetic I'm willing to over look it.

[outstanding-quotes]

Breathe deep, beloved young and frightened self, and then let go. And you will hold on. So then let go again.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Evidence”

[notchainedtotrauma]

"What I need to say is, you are. The walls around your life, the silence around your death, and the language all work to erase you and remove you from me, but they are no stronger than my grief, because my grief is fueled by love and I claim you. And I’ve come back for all the names I’ve never known since you were stolen. '

from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

J. Alphonse Nicholson as Lil Murda and John Clarence Stewart as Thaddeus (Teak) Wilks in P. Valley created and executive produced by Katori Hall

[gatheringbones]

[“When Audre Lorde came back from Mexico, she returned to an activist life. She moved in with her activist friend Ruth in the East Village and took a number of low-paying, strenuous jobs to work her way through Hunter College and then Columbia’s School of Library Service. As a student, a worker, a poet, a friend, a lover, Audre was a study in branching. Multiple permeable compartments gave her breathing room to be. As she wrote in a letter to Adrienne Rich, “I knew I was a lesbian before I was twenty, and I swaggered in the knowledge even though it left me terribly alone.”

[….]

Audre cultivated a porous boundary between friendship and romance while living in the Village, going to school in the familiar landscape of the Hunter College campus, and meeting a variety of people in activist organizations and the downtown lesbian bar scene. She presented her gender differently in different settings, inhabiting a range of masculine and feminine styles. She had female and male lovers. She saw all of it as crucial to her emotional and political growth, her increased capacity to know herself and impact the world.

[…]

This was also the time when Audre and another intimate friend, named Ed Rollins, decided to get married and have children. They were close friends, and they both knew about each other’s same-sex lovers and desires. But their families of origin had concerns. Audre’s mother was suspicious of Rollins because he was white. Rollins’s family didn’t even come to the wedding. His father sent a letter warning that their marriage would kill Ed’s mother. Marion and other ex-partners and loving friends also refused to attend. But Audre and Ed decided to make a life together as an interracial married couple with as much bravery and acceptance as they could. Their reception was at Roosevelt House on Hunter College’s campus. Many of Audre’s lesbian friends and lovers were in attendance.

Years later, when an interviewer blurted out that she could not imagine Audre Lorde married to a man, Audre took a breath and began to speak over her: “I had a lot of joy being married with my husband until we went different directions. I don’t see why these directions need to be contradictory. I love individuals. I have the capacity for loving.”]

alexis pauline gumbs, from survival is a promise: the eternal life of audre lorde, 2024

[burntsoft]

SEVEN POSSIBLE FUTURES FOR THE BLACK FEMINIST ARTIST - Alexis Pauline Gumbs

[blueneighbor]

an altar to those who have been dispossessed, those who are haunting, and anyone who has been affected by colonialism.

this project was deeply inspired by "Before Dispossession, or Surviving It" by Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?" by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, Octavia's Brood, an anthology dedicated to Octavia Butler, DUB: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

much gratitude for lexi, who helped me bring an idea into reality, and my critical race and ethnic studies professor micha cárdenas who challenged me greatly this quarter.

let us reimagine the future. a future with a free Palestine and an end to all colonial domination. a future where care and community is central to life.

[sisteroutsiders]

Collage honoring Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs [x]

[mysticqueerdragon]

Community (text): learning from the ancestors who left text to study.

Today, I woke up with gratitude and awe for the power of study.

Last night I took a familiar ride down the rabbit hole of Octavia E. Butler. I’ve read about half of her books and short stories. I put some of her work off because I wasn’t ready. But now I feel ready to study. I was drawn to this class created by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I now understand why it is called an “immersion”. Because there is a deep sea of knowing here. There is community here as well.

Gloria Anzaldua talks about the sacredness of art and how indigenous peoples recognize art as something that is living and therefore art must be shared with the people - with community. 

I am learning that writing can also be a practice of community. When an author writes in their full authentic self, and then shares their work with others, there is a relational energy exchange that occurs. There is magick here. Something I don’t quite have the words for (yet) but that I can feel in my chest.

This same energy is what gives me awe. Knowing that other writers put themselves on the page and share(d) it. Now, I can read Octavia E. Butler and know her. Form a relation with her. Drink a cup of coffee with her. Be in community with her.

I realized that Octavia E. Butler considered herself an asocial hermit. Yet, through her writing she has created legacy. She is the center of so many communities. So, when Kianna Middleton wrote about the three things that are privileged in her dissertation being “self, community (text), and theory,” I felt that. It changed something inside me.

           All that you touch

           You change

           All that you Change

           Changes you.

           The only lasting truth

           Is change.

           God

           Is change.

           - Earthseed: The Books of the Living

So, I’ve started reading Parable of the Sower. I’ve put this off for a long time. Even though I’ve heard so much about this book. I’m going to take it slow. I’m going to indulge in adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon. 

Last night when I watched their podcast about chapter one, I wrote down several more journal prompts. Another reason why study has put me in awe. The curriculum keeps presenting itself to me. I set my intention for this class to deepen. And I hear Octavia whispering in my ear, calling me down a vast ocean of ideas and feelings whispering “deeper, swim deep”.

I’m only a few pages in and she has already given me so much to think about.