In May 2023, I started reading Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
I am writing this review more than a year-and-a-half later because I didn’t want the book to end. I still don’t!
Undrowned is both deeply inspirational and imminently useful. Even before I finished it, I had gifted it to three other people, recommended it to colleagues, and used passages in small group meetings, retreats, and daily devotionals.
The subtitle is not tongue-in-cheek. Undrowned is a very serious look at what we can learn from marine mammals. The specific “we” Gumbs has in mind is not only Black feminists but “everyone who knows that a world where queer Black feminine folks are living their most abundant, expressed, and loving lives is a world where everyone is free.”
Each chapter of Undrowned takes one lesson from marine mammals and expresses it as a challenge: listen, remember, be vulnerable, be fierce, respect your hair, refuse, go deep, stay black, take care of your blessings.
Within each of these chapters are discrete sections, differentiated by marine mammal. And within each of these sections, Gumbs follows a structure: she describes what is genius about this animal, uses that insight to reflect on herself, and then offers up questions and affirmations directly to the reader, to “everyone.”
It is that final move that so often took my breath away. The loving regard for the reader is palpable. In traditional devotionals this voice would be offered up as the voice of Jesus, God/Allah, or Spirit. Gumbs offers spiritual insight humanistically, from the depths of her own compassion and hope for humanity – and in this way, Undrowned works as the perfect devotional for nones, dones, and doubters (and certainly for anyone else who feels adventuresome for a less conventional perspective).
Gumbs’ loving regard is certainly no less intense when it is the marine mammals themselves she is addressing. Undrowned functions in a secondary way as an appeal for animal rights – specifically the rights of animals to be left alone rather than subjected to science or commerce.
This political sense of Undrowned works together with its devotional power. The invitation of the entire book is to shed our colonialist approach to animals (and other “others”) as things which must be known and controlled, and embrace our power to let them be. It is in our respect for their being (their innate dignity) rather than their doing (their “usefulness”) that we glean from them what is most nourishing to life on earth.
This is the perspective that informed Gumbs and produced this fresh piece of work. I think you will find Undrowned to be one of the most unexpected, wise, penetrating, and loving books you have read in a very long time.
