Connecting how sea creatures live with the struggles of Black, queer feminists isn’t an obvious correlation — unless you’re Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
The author, a self-described love evangelist who is a scholar, activist and educator, has a gift for finding parallels between seemingly unrelated material through her research. She pushes boundaries in her words that are poetic and powerful.
Gumbs will be the featured speaker of the Elizabeth River Project on Friday for a two-hour talk beginning at 6 p.m. The gathering in the Ryan Resilience Lab at 4610 Colley Ave. in Norfolk will draw inspiration from the life lessons she shares in “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.”
Luísa Black Ellis, the nonprofit’s director of resilience and community engagement, drew from Gumbs’ acclaimed book, which she read during the pandemic. She said it read like a devotional. Its use of metaphor to reveal the importance of ecological awareness stayed with her when she was hired by the Elizabeth River Project, which restores the historic urban river through partnerships, community and collaboration.
Declared “dead” in the 1980s because of excessive pollution, the Elizabeth River is in recovery, though the challenges to cleaning up one of the most contaminated waterways in the nation haven’t gone away.
Earlier this month, a sewer main break released 3.15 million gallons of sewage into Hull Creek, which flows into the western branch of the river. The waste is a potential threat for fish and bottom-dwelling invertebrates, according to Ella DiPetto, lead scientist at the Project.
Over the last few decades, however, marine life in the river has returned, an encouraging sign that Gumbs’ talk will amplify. The evening will include readings from the book, winner of the 2022 Whiting Award for nonfiction, as well as reflection and breathing exercises.
“I love the way the book connects the resilience of marine mammals like dolphins and whales to the resilience of the people we see all around us,” Black Ellis said. “Not everybody can wrap their head around the details and logistics of how you clean up the river. But almost everybody can recognize a dolphin and know that a dolphin swimming in a river is an important and powerful sign of the health of the river.”
Gumbs was lost when she first started the journaling that led to “Undrowned.” As the visiting chair in liberal arts at the University of Minnesota, she was unsure how to process the sudden loss of her father to prostate cancer. Gumbs found unexpected comfort by listening to whale songs.
The sounds helped her sleep. They helped her be alone at a time when she felt as if she were drowning in the saltwater of her tears. The effect prompted the ever-curious Gumbs to dig into sea life to draw herself closer to it.
It turns out the rebirth of a soul is not unlike the rebirth of a river. Both require resilience, a topic Gumbs revisits often in her work on Black feminist theory.
“There’s not actually a separation between bringing a river back to life and setting the conditions for us to really bring ourselves as a species back to life,” said Gumbs, who lives in Durham, North Carolina. “The oceans are rising, and the icebergs are melting, and everything that threatens the marine mammals threatens everyone I love.”
Gumbs encourages us to listen and learn from marine mammals and their survival strategies to guide our collective resilience.
“I learned about the hooded seal that barely spends any time with its parents,” Gumbs said. “The three-to-five-day weaning cycle of the hooded seal is the shortest among mammals. But the seal has what it needs and then just goes all over the world.”
She found that comforting in navigating the grief of her father, also a writer and passionately supportive of her work.
“Even though I wanted to have a lot more time with my dad, I got what I needed.”
The 19 instructional chapters in "Undrowned" are akin to a handbook that focuses on building resilience through simple concepts: listen, be present, collaborate, be fierce, honor your boundaries.
Chapter 15, titled “go deep,” asks, “What does it take to go deep, below the surface of current events and social media reactions? What would allow you to look at what is under your actions and under that, and under that. Sperm whales dive a mile deep. Maybe they can give us some advice.”
Admission for Friday’s talk is $5 for members of the Elizabeth River Project; $10 for non-members. Visit Elizabethriver.org for more information.
