Alexis Pauline Gumbs > 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

“My love to my pod in all directions. The smooth and the not quite so smooth. Those of you showing your back and those showing your belly. Those of you breaking through the surface and those staying in the deep. It's an honor to be in the midst of you. Look around, listen out. Here we are.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“and when you love. you let it go. you put it down. you show your shoulders what to do with sky. and love is how. and love is when. and love is why.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony

“Our definition of queer is that which fundamentally transforms our state of being and the possibilities for life. That which is queer is that which does not reproduce the status quo.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

“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

“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

“Yesterday I learned that the breathing of whales is as crucial to our own breathing in the carbon cycle of the planet as are the forests of the world. Researchers say, if whales returned to their pre-commercial whaling numbers, their gigantic breathing would store as much carbon is 110,000 hectares of forest, or a forest the size of Rocky Mountain National Park.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals Emergent Strategy Series

“Maybe the world can exist without you in it. But I cannot. There is no such thing as home unless I'm with you. No such thing as home unless you're here.”
― 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 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

“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

“It is telling that communal mothering, childcare, and caregiving continue to be one of the most neglected interventions in revolutionary struggle by virtue of their being considered mundane and cumbersome, unlike “real” political work. When this happens, the message poor mothers and their children receive is essentially that their presence and participation in revolutionary struggle do not matter, that they have nothing to contribute.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

“Reproductive Justice is (1) The human right to not have a child; (2) The human right to have a child; and (3) The human right to parent in safe and healthy environments.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

“The ethos of mothering involves valuing in and of itself a commitment to the survival and thriving of other bodies. It presents a fundamental contradiction to the logic of capitalism, which un-moors us from each other.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

“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

“Breathe deep, baby girl, we won. Now life, though not exactly easier, is life all the time. Not chopped down into billable minutes, not narrowed into excuses to hurt and forget each other. I am writing you from the future to remind you to act on your behalf, to live your life as a tribute to our victory and not as a stifling reaction to the past. I am here with so many people that you love and their children and we are eating together and we are tired from full days of working and loving but never too tired to remember where we come from. never exhausted past passion and writing. So I am writing you now.”
― Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

“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