In April 2022, the Whiting Foundation announced that author Alexis Pauline Gumbs ’04 had won a prestigious 2022 Whiting Award — for her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals — which honors 10 exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry each with $50,000. Awardees are anonymously nominated and judged by 100 people from the literary world, including writers, critics, and editors, and often go on to win additional coveted awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship.
Undrowned is a work of powerful creative nonfiction that meditates on the survival of the human species based on the subversive and transformative lessons of marine mammals. It tells tales of sea lives alongside Black feminist thought with poetic narratives, which concomitantly build a solid connection between the human condition and the lives of those in oceans and seas. The selection committee for the Whiting Award praised Gumbs for presenting a “singular hybrid of hymn, field guide, and self-care manual that urges us to reassess our place among our fellow living beings.”
A fierce storyteller and amplifier of Black feminist art, Gumbs — who has a Ph.D. in English, African and African American studies, and women’s and gender studies — is an independent scholar, poet, activist, and co-founder of the Black Feminist Film School. In 2020, she was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her narrative project based on another Black feminist poet, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Her previous books include 2020’s three-volume narrative Dub: Finding Ceremony (read her Break This Down interview about the book), 2018’s M Archive: After the End of the World (2018), and 2016’s Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, which explored the contemporary afterlives of slavery.
Here, Gumbs shares the motivation behind the book, as well as her writing principles.
What led you to address the problem of climate change through marine mammals in Undrowned?
I started what I call my “marine mammal apprenticeship” because I had to learn to breathe in saltwater. We all do. The ocean is rising because of us. What I learned, though, is [that the] primary ocean that I am breathing through is an internal ocean. My father dying is what increased the depth of my tears. He died in 2016. His mother, my grandmother, was a marine mammal listener too. She designed the revolutionary Anguillian flag with the three dolphins. My grandmother also revered our Shinnecock ancestors, who taught us to be in a sacred relationship with the North Atlantic right whale.
What is one important lesson that readers should take away from your environmental literature?
I hope that people will feel connected in areas and situations where they have been taught that we are separate. The connection in the book is to marine mammals, but all separation can ultimately fall away. That’s especially important to remember in a time of physical isolation. I think our actions in relationship with this planet would shift if we understood that we are not separate from our environment, nor from any other species. We are related. We are interdependent. We belong to each other.
What tips would you offer to future writers?
When I was a teenager, the writer asha bandele told me at a conference, “Write first.” She wrote early in the morning, first thing every day. That’s how she [created] some of my favorite books — The Prisoner’s Wife, Absence in the Palms of my Hands, and Daughter — while raising her daughter on her own and working full time. I [now] write first; it is a practice of making myself available to what wants to happen creatively, before I make myself available to the rest of the world and the rest of the day.
My Women’s Writing Intensive program teacher in Durham, Zelda Lockhart, who was also a Black mom raising her daughter on her own when she taught me this, said, “Write everyday.” And so, I write first — and I write everyday.
The most important thing asha and Zelda taught me was that it is possible to show up consistently for creative practice, not just for people who have intergenerational wealth and paid staff, or unpaid wives, but also for Black working mothers who are the heads of their own households. And therefore it is possible for me, a neurodivergent space cadet. And therefore it is possible for you.
What was your favorite hangout spot when you were at Barnard?
When it is warm enough to be outside, the Low Library steps are like a public beach. That was the center of my social world, especially since I lived at far-flung corners of Columbia’s campus — East Campus in the Pan-African special interest house, and the InterCultural resource center — and had to walk past those steps to get to Barnard. But my very favorite place to be was this beautiful flowering tree on the Barnard lawn. It’s gone now, but sitting under that tree was intimate. I could hear my thoughts. Or I could talk with a friend. Now I wonder whether I was drawn to the energy of generations of Barnard students before flowering up from those roots. A tree can do things a building can’t.
If you could go back in time and tell your Barnard self one thing, what would it be?
I would whisper, “Don’t rush.”
- REPORTED BY ZUYU SHEN '24
