Undrowned Quotes

“May you study the pink of yourself. Know yourself riverine and coast. May you taste the fresh and the saltwater of yourself and know what only you can know. May you live in the mouth of the river, meeting place of the tides, may all blessings flow through you.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“I respect you as so much bigger than my own understanding. And me too. I don't have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don't have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don't have to be visible to be viable on my path. I don't have to be shy to be sacred about my time. There are only two things I have to do, my mom taught me, and I can do them in the company of my choosing. The company of myself, my living, my dead, my folks, my dreams. 1. Stay Black. 2. Breathe.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“Where do you think you are going so fast? [Marine mammals] offer slowing down as a strategic intervention in a world on speed, and an appropriate response to the exact urgencies that made us feel we cannot slow down. It is the speed, the speed boats, the momentum of capitalism, the expediency of pollution that threatens the ocean, our marine mammal mentors, and our own lives. What if we could release ourselves from an internalized time clock and remember that slow is efficient, slow is effective, slow is beautiful?”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“What are your dorsal practices? What evolutionary repetitions have you cultivated to move through oceans? What are the ones you need to cultivate for the waves moving you now?”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“I do know that sometimes people have seen a part of themselves in me too messy to bear. Do I cherish my wildness more than I fear their rejection?”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“I think often about the consequences of colonialism within a threatened group. The cost of losing almost everything. The impact of military normalcy. The multiple violences we endure. What if the path to conservation of any of species remaining on the planet is demilitarization? What is the solidarity, evolutionary sistering, ancestral imperative called for in this moment where US colonial territories are in active refusal? What does it look like to be intolerant of colonialism? What life would spring up, what recovery is possible if the colonial force actually shuts down? I’m asking for a sister of mine, wherever she is now. Three million years ago she taught me something about us. I haven’t forgotten. We deserve to be free.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“Could we communicate more like manatees, who stay in communication in all kinds of emergencies, place their bodies in a way that protects children, touch each other to remember and know?”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“There are at least three ways to love you: as you were, as you are, as you will be. I love you. That means I choose all three. The baby Weddell seal has not grown into her flippers.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

“What do we need to remember that will push back against the forgetting encouraged by consumer culture and linear time? What can we remember that will surround us in oceans of history and potential? And how?”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals