Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I just wanted to know which whale was which, but I found myself confronted with the colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriachalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill me—the net I am already caught in, so to speak.

Where Emergent Strategy offers us the opportunity to study and practice the work of shaping change by understanding ourselves as part of the ongoing emergence of nature, this guide to undrowning listens to marine mammals specifically as a form of life that has much to teach us about the vulnerability, collaboration, and adaptation we need in order to be with change at this time, especially since one of the major changes we are living through, causing, and shaping in this climate crisis is this rising of the ocean.

there was ever a time to humbly submit to the mentorship of marine mammals it is now. Did I mention the ocean is rising?

At the same time, part of what is at stake for me in this apprenticeship is a transformed relationship to my own breathing, the salt-water within me, the depth of my grief, and the leagues of my love.

And in order to have space for the relationship to the learning and unlearning that is necessary for me in this process, I have to do some work to disrupt the violent colonizing languages of almost all the texts in which I have accessed information about marine mammals and their lives, and families and super-powers and struggles.

They are clearly obsessed, and most likely, like me, in love. Whether they can admit it in their publications or not.

The words “I love you” appear more than any other phrase in this book.

This is a tricky task because I’m vulnerable, not only to the messiness of my emotions, but also to the possibility of just projecting onto a whole set of beings who can’t verbally protest my projections. And though the systems of oppression that harm me also harm advanced marine mammals (I am a beginner marine mammal very early in my journey), we are not having the same experience

Instead, the intimacy, the intentional ambiguity about who is who, speaking to whom and when is about undoing a definition of the human, which is so tangled in separation and domination that it is consistently making our lives incompatible with the planet.

To see what happens when I rethink and refeel my own relations, possibilities, and practices inspired by the relations, possibilities, and practices of advanced marine mammal life.