Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals Emergent Strategy Series: 2 - Tapa blanda

Acerca del autor

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet, independent scholar, and activist. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Dub: Finding Ceremony; coeditor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines; and the founder of Brilliance Remastered, an online network and series of retreats and online intensives serving community accountable intellectuals and artists.

adrienne maree brown is author of Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism and co-editor of Octavis's Brood.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

[from "Remember"]

As of two years ago, reports are circulating with evidence that dolphin mothers sing to their babies while they are in the womb, and for a few weeks after so they can learn their names. Not only that, but according to the report the rest of the pod holds space for that learning, quieting their other usual sounds so this can happen.

Several loved ones have sent me the articles that share this information. And as a person whose mother sang and talked to me before I was born, it resonates. And interestingly enough this new research was shared, according to these articles, not at a meeting of marine biologists but at the American Psychological Association meeting in Denver in August 2016. The articles linked never mention the species of dolphin. This is something that it would feel so good to generalize. As mammals, it would satisfy a deep longing to be part of a practice of mother child singing, community listening. Held. Named.

Held. Deep diving as I often do I learned that the observations leading to this insight about mother/baby womb singing were observed in a specific context. Captivity. A mother dolphin who gave birth at the oceanarium DolphinQuest (from the pictures I would say a bottlenose dolphin, but even the DolphinQuest website doesn't name the species). It matters to me that this practice of singing, communal listening, was observed not in the open ocean but in the confines of captive dolphin birth. I think of Debbie Africa, who gave birth secretly in prison, how the other women prisoners used sounds to shield her birth process, protected them from guards so that she and the baby were able to share precious time together, undetected for days. I think of Assata Shakur too, impossibly conceiving and giving birth to her daughter while a political prisoner, mostly in solitary confinement. And how she listened to her angry daughter, and the dreams of her grandmother when they told her she could be free. They could be together. And the community made it real.

I think of captive birth, which is an every day occurrence in the United States of America and in the US the state shackles prisoners giving birth, takes children away almost immediately. What do they sing in the time of the womb? I think of the children of asylum seekers separated from their parents in cages at the border. How does a chorus of grief and loss evolve to share crucial information? How are the over 5 million US children with parents in prison, the uncounted children in cages right now, held? Named?

And I think about you and what you remember. What you keep close for as long as you can. I think about repetition and code, and when we prioritize what communication and why. And how we ever learn our names in this mess. And the need that makes us generalize and identify. Become specific and vague. I think about the dolphin mother (DolphinQuest staff named her Bailey) and what she needed to say. Her own name, in her own way. And what else under strict observation.

If it was me. If it was you. I would say this in the way I could say it, in the too short time, in the high pitched emergence. Remember this feeling, there is something called love. I would say remember, there is something called freedom, even if you can't see it. There is me calling you, in a world I don't control. There is something called freedom and you know how to call it. Even here in the holding pattern, here in the hold remember remember. You are. You are held. Named.