I love you: A personal essay for life on Earth

In Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Gumbs uses two marine mammal guidebooks as reference (from the National Audubon Society & the Smithsonian). However, she finds their approach to understanding and description to be disappointing:

What I found was that the languages of deviance and denigration (for example, the term “vagrant juveniles,” used to describe hooded seals), awkwardly binary assignments of biological sex, and a strange criminalization of mammals that escaped the gaze of biologists showed up in what would call itself the “neutral” scientific language of marine guidebooks. I just wanted to know which whale was which, but I found myself confronted with the colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriarchalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill me–the net I am already caught in, so to speak. So how can I tell you who and what I saw?” (6)

She then says she “learned to look through the loopholes of language, using the poetic practices I have had to use to find and love myself in a world that misnames me daily.”

While Gumbs uses both of the scientific guidebooks as references throughout her book, she also writes in a way that contradicts and challenges the norms of objective writing and scientific texts which leave out any trace of the personal:

“Nothing is objective. And think about it, scientists, especially those people who have designed their entire lives around the hope, the possibility that they will encounter a marine mammal…cannot be unmoved. They are clearly obsessed, and most likely, like me, in love. Whether they can admit it in their publications or not” (8).

Gumbs is saying that in order to address & begin to heal structural harm (climate change, colonialism, etc.), we have to learn how to relate in new ways.  Instead of defining and categorizing from afar, we might learn to listen and sit with what may be unfamiliar in order to feel our connections and intimacies with other lives on earth. To acknowledge our full relationships and accept the unknown, rather than argue that our full selves–our dreams & desires–can and should be locked out of knowledge production and that we must know everything.

I also want to make the connection here between the history of reason-based knowledge and white supremacy:

Basically, Gumbs is challenging the supremacy of Western models of knowledge-making (rationalism, individualism, and skepticism) that come from Western Europe’s Enlightenment period (late 1600s-1800). This was a time that saw the birth of capitalism and an explosion of European colonial expansion (particularly British (Links to an external site.)) through much of the world, including the Americas, which profited from and relied on the forced labor of captive Africans from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. (This also brings us to Gumbs’ desire to focus on the mammals of the ocean, who can breathe in the salt water world that still holds the atoms  (Links to an external site.)of over 2 million Africans who did not survive the brutal passage).

This is also the time period that we can attribute to the creation of whiteness (Links to an external site.) as a political tool of the rich–AKA the enslavers and plantation owners–meant to dissolve the solidarity and commonalities between indentured servants (temporarily enslaved people) of European descent and enslaved people of African/Caribbean descent, who were forced into plantation labor together. “Whiteness” created a new hierarchy that separated Europeans from Africans and ensured them a higher social status (of being Christian and therefore “redeemable/valuable,” but also of being a particular thing, “white,” this vague identity category, which was not something an African could convert to like Christianity). This new hierarchy helped to reduce the chance of uprisings by breaking down/splitting up the collective power of dispossessed Europeans & Africans. This is what it means when we say “white supremacy”–we’re referring to social hierarchies that were created and enforced in order to make sure that wealthy people of European descent could hold on to their power and wealth.

Whiteness also became the reason (a rational thing, a category, an idea) that Europeans could point to when explaining why it was acceptable to continue capturing and enslaving Africans (“because they were not white”), though it was an invented social weapon that they used to gain more wealth and power. And while whiteness is generally connected to Western Europe, its social power has been attributed to and removed from different ethnic groups at will by those in power–for example, the Irish Catholics who, upon immigrating to the US in the mid-to-late 1800s, had very little social or cultural power in a Protestant society, were not considered white, and shared a similar class identity to freed Black people living in the north. That is, until Irish Catholics embraced whiteness as a racial identity that would allow them to have more social and economic power at the expense of Black people. This served a similar function of breaking up class-based solidarity among people who suffered under capitalism, creating a new hierarchy that gave wealthy whites more power through this common identity based on the invented category of race. We still see this today with working-class whites siding with white people in power rather than with BIPOC people who share a similar class status and some of the same resource-based struggles. Whiteness becomes a gateway to power, even if rich white people have no intention of making conditions better for poor white people.

The invention of whiteness as a social/racial category is a direct product of Enlightenment thinking–establishing objective truths through categorizing and measuring (see phrenology as a science of racism), and creating a hierarchy of knowledge that was narrow and conformed to the cultural and social norms of a European patriarchy, which divided the mind (logic, critique, reason) from the body (intuition, sensation, connection to the earth). Objective reasoning is central to Western institutions of learning. It is one way of knowing, and has given us very important tools for understanding our world, but it is not the only way of knowing.

And that’s part of what Gumbs is responding to in Undrowned–how do we go about knowing? What are the many forms of knowing that have been ignored or suppressed in dominant cultures? How can we be open to learning new ways to perceive life on earth that doesn’t rely on a knowledge system based on separation and deadly hierarchies? How do we all begin to heal from the harm we’ve experienced and participated in through these systems? What else is possible, if we are to survive together?

For this creative experiment, I would like you to consider what other earthly life forms you would like to learn from. What moves you? What are you obsessed with, in love with?
This could be anything: butterflies, termites, fungal networks, grass, mangoes, worms, cheetahs, coral…anything alive besides humans!

(As a child, I loved dolphins and manatees, and I still think manatees are some of the most beautiful and gentle creatures on earth. Sea cows!)

1. Choose your life form.
2. Do some research–what scientific, objective descriptions can you find? Pay attention to the language and the way it is written. Look at the diction, the sentence structure. Can you see the author, or are they invisible–have they removed themselves from their own writing?
3. Take notes–statistics, scientific terms, facts, Latin names, physical properties, theories, etc.
4. Look up pictures. Watch a video on your life form. Imagine spending time with it. What could we learn from it? What kinds of things does it know how to do really well? What kinds of knowledges does it have? (Dolphins, for example, have particular knowledges of sound and distance through their use of sonar). What qualities does it have? How does it move, breathe, feed, reproduce? How does it communicate? What other life does it support or interact with? How can it teach us ways to survive together? Spend some time freewriting about these questions and whatever else comes up for you.
5. Using your notes and freewrite, write a prose piece that shares the details of your exploratory research. How will you look through the “loopholes of language” to describe the depths of this life form?
   • By prose piece, I mean writing that is not broken into lines like standard poetry. Fiction, nonfiction, essays, etc. are prose. Undrowned is an essay–from the French verb essayer, “to try.” Gumbs is trying to demonstrate how we can relate to and learn from our nonhuman earthly companions. What are you trying to communicate or demonstrate?
6. As always, it is okay if what you write does not look exactly like what this prompt asks for. It is only a starting point. Let your writing go where it needs to go.
7. Think about how you want to style your piece–Gumbs mimics objective descriptions in her writing and then transitions into a more personal, meditative style of writing. Maybe you’ll do a similar thing. Or maybe you’ll write a piece that includes dialogue between a human and the other life form. Maybe you’re a translator who has figured out how to translate a message from this life form to humans. Maybe this will be a personal essay about many things in your life and how they relate to what you might be able to learn from this other life form. Maybe this will be about a “you” that is not exactly you. Maybe a scientist is writing an academic report and suddenly inserts their feelings and desires into the text. And so on!