We don't have dorsal fins physically, but what are our dorsal practices?
We don't have dorsal fins physically, but what are our dorsal practices?
“We don’t have dorsal fins physically, but what are our dorsal practices? What are the practices that keep us present to a moment where it’s like one thing after another is rushing in, and it’s all very destabilizing, triggering, and can be re-traumatizing.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
“The existence of that grief is the evidence that love and that stream of love is not stopped, even by death.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs
A few years ago, ProPublica published a report identifying more than one thousand hot spots of cancer-causing air. Of course, these hot spots are not distributed equally. Census tracts with high populations of people of color experience 40% more cancer-causing pollution on average in comparison to mostly white census tracts. The cancer risk from toxic air pollution in predominately Black census tracts is more than double that of majority-white census tracts. The top polluters producing cancer-causing emissions are a handful of major corporations. The impact of living near top polluters is suffocating. Brittany Madison, a resident of Baytown, Texas enjoyed long walks and taking her kids to the playground but now spends more time inside. She lives near one of the largest ExxonMobile refineries, and a particularly smokey fire in 2019 caused by the refinery gave her a migraine. Her toddler, not understanding the concept of headaches, said his brain hurt. Unable to spend time outside safely, the toxic air makes people who must live near it captive in their homes.
In Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about marine mammals in a way that invites us to consider our relationality to other forms of life. Writing about the marine mammals living in captivity at Sea Life Park in Hawaii, she tells a story of the death the mammals experience in captivity. In captivity, Gumbs notes that a once famous hybrid dolphin only lived for four years and that dozens of spinner dolphins, bottlenoses, sea lions, and seals have died in the park.
What connects the experiences of captivity of those breathing toxic air and marine mammals forced to live in captivity and die prematurely? And why are these connections important to make? Gumbs asks us to see how the forces that capture and create death for both human and non-human forms of life are related. She also asks us to consider what it means to communicate with and to find meaning, understanding, and admiration in all forms of life – human and nonhuman. What can we learn about the world we want to build and the world we want to break when we see ourselves in all forms of life? Gumbs offers: “I am related to all marine mammals. I am related to all those in captivity.”
This interrelatedness that Gumbs invites us to consider is the reason I continue to return to Undrowned year after year. I first read the book in 2020 where death, grief, and loss were omnipresent. And now, we find ourselves in yet another period of these continuous periods of loss, grief, and death. What can be made out of the grief we all experience? The grief we continue to experience. This is a question I’ve been asking myself a lot lately as I’ve been navigating my own grief and also as I bear witness to the insurmountable grief taking place here and across the globe–from Haiti to Congo to Palestine. In describing how she came to marine mammals, Gumbs says that grief led her to them in the first place. The way she describes this resonates with me deeply, particularly the clarity with which she articulates feelings I know so well: “I felt like I was in an ocean of grief. It felt as if I might drown in my own tears — it was that overwhelming and vast. I had never before made space to learn from such a powerful, unpredictable, and consuming emotion.” And so, enter the marine mammals: “It felt like navigating an ocean, and I thought, ‘Who better to navigate the ocean than those who live in it?’ Marine mammals do, and how do they do that?”
How might we move collectively within the grief we feel? In a recent essay, Christina Sharpe speaks about grief as a connective tissue: “I know that grief is a vessel, a conduit for relation, but I am nevertheless startled into a new understanding when I hear that. Danticat expands what I understand grief to be and to make. She enlarges its shapes. Names it as connective tissue.” I think this is exactly the project of Undrowned. What is the connective tissue within our grief as living beings forced to live through unimaginable pain? And how might we engage in practices that affirm the possibilities of a “more liveable future” by observing how marine mammals navigate the ocean? Undrowned is a meditation that I can always return to because it reminds me of how we might move forward to build in solidarity potentialities of life, breath, and liberation.
- Maya Pendleton
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