Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs

On ceremony, wonder, and salt water situations.

Below is a conversation I had with Alexis while she transitioned from airport to airplane. Alexis is filled with brilliance and wisdom that she shares abundantly. You can find more about her work here.

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Murphy Barney (MB): Please introduce yourself how you most like to be introduced.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (APG): I am Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I love being introduced that way because I am named after my mom. Her name is Pauline, and I identify as a Queer Black Troublemaker, Prayer Poet Priests, Aspirational Cousin to All Life. 

MB: Beautiful, beautiful. I would like to ask you first and foremost about your work around finding ceremony and the importance of ceremony in life as we think about this world that we want to build with more freedom and more ceremony. What does finding ceremony mean to you and why do you center it in your work?

APG: Thank you for that. Ceremony is so expansive. I really think of everything, now, in my life as ceremony. Like ceremony as how my life is organized. How my repetition is — how I align on what my repetitions are. What are the materials that are involved in my process, which are sacred materials, but all materials are also sacred. 

So, the finding ceremony, especially as a subtitle for my book Dub comes out of Sylvia Wynter's ideas. Sylvia Wynter is drawing on a poem by John Bishop that is about a fellow in Desdemona and how basically a world doesn’t exist for them to be together but the ceremony must be found. So Sylvia Wynter takes this and she’s thinking of what makes it possible to think of a world beyond European colonial ideas of humanism, and — you know, I think that she returns to that and is like “the ceremony hasn’t been found yet” and she thinks about her creative process and her intellectual process as always looking for that. I was really inspired by that because I feel like what is happening for me in my life and my work as an artist is that I am seeking the ceremony for worlds that I have been told are impossible. Reconnections across distances, whether that is life and death or time or space or partition or diaspora that I have been told are impossible to reconnect. I don’t necessarily think that I know what all those ceremonies are, but I do feel like I am in a process of remembering ceremony, seeking ceremony, and I think that my faith is that there is a ceremony for whatever connection, whatever solidarity, whatever ethical remaking of relationship we need. The ceremony can be found. Right? So that has become a mantra for me.

MB: The ceremony can be found. I love that. I recently moved from New York City to Vermont and I wake up in the morning and I start a fire in my wood stove and just all of these things that I have started to see as ceremony that otherwise might be tasks. But, instead, are in honor of the trees and learning a home. It is in these moments of daily life and daily practice that we find it. I love so much how from that, that sort of smaller daily practice of ceremony comes this larger idea that you are speaking to of creating worlds that we have been told are not possible and all of that is within this ability of a human to find and create ceremony.

APG: Yeah, I think that is right. I think that is right. And, I agree. I mean, I think we don’t always know why we are in the ceremonies that we are in. I was thinking recently about my physical practice. I do yoga and pilates everyday through videos that dear friends of mine have made because they are intergenerational experts in yoga and pilates. I started to do it because I have scoliosis and it just makes a big difference about how my body feels if I do those practices everyday, and it wasn’t until maybe like this week that — it has been years I have been doing this — but it wasn’t until this week that I was like “you know what? This is also a part of my ceremony for relearning to be in my body.” As a person who has had a tendency to dissociate from my body as a survivor and sexual violence but also as a person whose body is gendered and racialized in a way that it sometimes it doesn’t even feel safe to be here inside of those institutions and patterns of oppression and that this physical practice. I was like “I do my spiritual practice and then I do my workout”, and then I was like, “actually they are not separate.” It is still a ceremony, and it is a ceremony of reclamation and it is a ceremony of love for my physical presence here, but it also continues to be an ancestral ceremony as much as everything else I do. It continues to reclaim my body as a sight for healing for generations in my lineage and hopefully generations to come. I think that is why I have such an expansive and inclusive sense of ceremony right now in my life because I am like “oh, even the things that I just consider mundane parts or instrumental in any way is like, this whole thing is a ceremony.”

MB: It is so healing to hear you say that as somebody who has been forcibly removed through generations from ceremonies that my ancestors heard dear due to boarding school systems in the US and other systems, but a lot of times I have this sort of fear or trepidation of doing ceremony “wrong” and approaching it with the knowledge that I have, but also with this fear of doing something wrong. This idea of expanding ceremony to what we can do, where we are now, and redefining it is very healing to hear. So, I so appreciate you sharing that. I just think it is an important remembrance or reminder to not be ahistorical and remember that all of these things have happened, so maybe we can’t practice in the exact same ways that our ancestors did, but we can still practice and we can still find and create ceremony.

APG: That is so true. I think it really is revolutionary to remember that no one can separate our ancestors from us. You know? Like I think that certainly the residential schools and the boarding schools and the entire colonial education system that has impacted multiple groups in multiple ways seems to really want to enforce that separation, and I think that there is absolutely —  as you say —the reality of what has happened and the grief of that, and the ongoing mourning of that. There is also the truth that we are the place where our ancestors exist. They are part of us in more ways than we can even think about. Even in more ways than biology can account for. I think that it has been really very grounding for me to understand that that is what is at stake in my relationship to my “self.” That is what is happening is that I am unlearning a lie of separation that has been used to suppress and control and reproduce unsustainable, harmful definitions of what life is — colonial definitions of what life is that are untrue. We ourselves are proof of what the truth is. But, of course, like everyone else, I think I am on a lifelong journey to really discover the truth that is happening here in the place that appears to be my one body. 

MB: Such a journey, and I love that we are speaking of this journey as you are on a physical journey in an airport. Because we have so many parallel journeys running at one time. So, something that I love so much about your work and the way you so generously share it with all of us is the breadth of it. You know, like we are talking Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals all the way to mothering and redefining motherhood and mothering and giving permission to folx to identify as mothering individuals despite so much of what we have been told mothering is and looks like and who it is for. So I wonder if you can speak a bit to just how — or what draws you asking these massive questions and exploring this work on this full breadth of what you are drawn to.

APG: Thank you for that. I was thinking about this. One of my favorite thinkers, the political scientist Cathy Cohen says “we have these huge ideas, but really it comes down to the people we love.” Like when we think about what our motivation is, and that resonates so much for me. Because, I mean, the seed of Revolutionary Mothering and all my research and all my archival searching of the terms that Black feminists and other feminists of color have used around mothering — it all is about my mother. You know? There was a time where I tried to pretend it wasn’t and I was completely lying to myself. It really is because my relationship with my mother is so complicated that it requires my creativity. It requires my thought. It requires an extended research process, a community anthology process. All of the things. And I still am learning more all the time about what that relationship has to teach me and what she has to teach me. 

So it gets interesting because of course it is huge. Mothering is something we say in the anthology “mothering is something that has existed as a form of care beyond the definition — any definitions— of gender.” Where there is life there is that life-giving that we now call “mothering.” And, it has this seed that is like “here I am, Alexis, trying to understand my relationship to my mom.” 

Similarly with Undrowend, I mean maybe it feels a little more nonlinear with Undrowend but I started listening to recordings of marine mammals and really seeking to learn about them in the wake of my father passing away. It was — I mean really it is — an experience of grief that you use the word “massive.” It just was more massive than anything I knew from my previous experience. I don’t know if it — I mean I think part of it is because every age of who I am grieves my dad. There is relationship I have with him when I was a baby, when I was three years old, and so on. All of those parts of me have grief to express. I think there is that combined with the fact that as I was alluding to a little bit earlier — I have had a practice of really suppressing my emotions and containing my emotions and I see that as part of the way  I was colonized through my education, so I have done all this work to be present to my emotions, and then I am present to this huge, huge grief that felt very overwhelming to me. The only thing I could think of that was bigger was the ocean, and then thinking about how here I am, how could I possibly cry more? This is a saltwater situation. And then there are these amazing beings that exist that are just in a saltwater situation with grace and with total brilliance and they are our relatives. So I was like “I really have so much to learn and basically what I need to do everyday is I need to learn about marine mammals.” That is what I need to do because I need to find the ways to understanding that I can move through what feels impossible for me to move through as well. Maybe not with as much grace. In retrospect it seems like sort of a leap. Like “who is this person? her research is about Black feminism, now she is writing about marine mammals. She is not a marine biologist at all.” But, at the same time, I am also a being — and there is saltwater always with me. Saltwater is flowing through me. That is something that we have in common, certainly as mammals but even beyond that. So, as you say, it becomes something that is a huge question about how we grieve on this massive scale? But it comes out of the situation of just what held me as I was just really knocked over by my grief — just listening to whales and identifying with how big that is. The sound that they make and the vibration of how big it is that we can even exist and love each other. I don’t think I describe anything in Undrowned as the whales are communicating and describing life right now. I don’t see it as some kind of direct translation of that. I, too, can express this vibration, this connection, this ongoing miracle and paradox that I don’t seek to fully understand but just that I can be with, and I can invite my communities to be with through this poetic practice of being with it everyday. 

MB: Something that comes up for me there is you saying “I am not a marine biologist” and I think it is so important that we see marine mammals and all other other than human relations through lenses, yes from experts and also from experts as we define them — you being one of them — in a saltwater situation. I think about my 4 year old nephew who has so many questions that — as somebody who would think of themselves as well versed in certain things would never ask, and we need him to be asking those question from his point of view because it brings us to a new understanding of it and takes us out of the idea that there is just one way — or limited ways of knowing our relations with other beings and other ideas. So, I love that you approached it from your salt water looking at their salt water. Something I have been thinking a lot about is grief. Our relationship to grief. This coming of it and you finding relation in it with whales and other beings is just a reminder to explore in ways and in approaches that don’t fall under the more colonial umbrella of “expertise” if you will.

APG: Yeah, I think it is really important. I love that you bring your nephew up because I think that just relearning what learning even is and the wonder within it. Like wondering, but also just the experience of wonder before there is even a question that I can associate with it. It is so important and I do feel like I have had an education and also I am living in a society that seems like it really tries to skip over that piece. 

MB: Even on a daily basis I think about how I stop myself from wondering a lot because it is easily findable to look at someone else’s answer for something by Googling it or listening to somebody else’s thoughts on something. The practice of wondering, especially of wondering community is so sacred and important and easy to go without because we can find someone else’s answers very readily. 

Something else that I would love to hear your thoughts is when you say “freedom is not a secret, it is a practice.” That phrase in and of itself is of course complete and beautiful, but I wonder if you can talk a bit more about the practice of freedom. 

APG: Yeah, sometimes I am like “It is all the same thing.” It is the ceremony. It is the practice. It is all one and the same. But I think it was important to have a way to describe the fact that freedom isn’t like a place that we are eventually going to go. It is not something that some people can own. It is something that we believe and we are bringing our practices into alignment with that. So, one of my favorite stores about Harriet Tubman — who was a great dreamer and was somebody who we are pretty sure had frontal lobe epilepsy. She had this dream where she saw the end of slavery and she woke up and all day she said “my people are free” in the present tense. I think about her as somebody who went ahead and practiced that freedom right away. She didn’t simply predict it. She was like “well what would I do if I was free?’ Evidently what she would do is go to South Carolina and help 800 enslaved people burn down 32 plantation buildings and be decisive in the end of the civil war. So, I think we all have that and it is important for me to be able to think about what this day looks like. What my plan for this week is as an opportunity to practice freedom. Not to practice for freedom, but to practice freedom itself as something that can flow through me now. And can flow through you now. I think you are right. Practicing together, like practicing wonder as you were saying is such a sacred aspect of that. Because we are building embodied memories and knowledges of what it feels like to be free together? To be wondering together? To be not knowing together and like really happy about it. What does that feel like? 

MB: Yes, just blissed out in uncertainty. I am also somebody who is new-ish to really inhabiting my body and so I am working a lot with my constriction, and I have realized recently how much I constrict around putting off joy or putting off rest and all of these other things and these practices that would mean freedom and would embody freedom and putting it off until this sort of constantly moving line that I have drawn for myself of when that will be real for me. But the idea of it being real for you happens when you make it real for you. Of course that is true and it took me 28 years until this morning to get there in conversation with you to fully let that integrate and click in. 

APG: That is beautiful. I love that. 

MB: It can just be challenging to not think we have to wait until we can bring everybody along. But — as you are saying — that moment doesn’t exist. That moment has to be made. Thank you so much for your time. It was so wonderful to speak with you. 

APG: It was great to speak with you. It was interesting to do it in the transition from airport to airplane. You are right. We are definitely on a journey and I see us as fellow travelers. So glad to have met you and I look forward to the next time we get to connect.