Taylor on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Saltwater Apprenticeship” Lecture at Cooper Union
On Tuesday, November 6th , I attended a lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs at the Cooper Union. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a black feminist scholar and poet and a graduate of Barnard College ’04. Her work has been really important to me since I was in high school when I stumbled upon her Dissertation “’We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves’”: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996. The dissertation focuses on the pedagogical implications of the work that late 20th century black feminists cultivated as well as the politics of feminist publishing and Black queer survival strategies. Cooper Union, NYU and Columbia University are hosting her this week in a trilogy of free lectures concerning her work in black feminist studies.
Her lecture at Cooper Union was Saltwater Apprenticeship: Black Being Beyond the Human. Gumbs is engaging in a project of trying to negotiate her relationship with saltwater and her saltwater relationships—that is, those that are born of sweat and tears. To do that, Gumbs decided to look at other mammals who are similarly hunted and endangered and who have mastered the art of breathing in saltwater. The lecture focused on the work she has begun to engage in concerning Marine Biology and the history, life and survivals of Marine Mammals. She concerns herself with the ways in which the systems of oppression which threaten the survival of Marine Mammals are co-constructive with those systems of oppression which threaten the survival of black folks. She also looks at different categorizing narratives of marine mammals which sound frighteningly similar to the deeply racialized categorizations of black people within white history and STEM texts.
What I found most salient about her lecture as it pertains to our class are two central themes and lecture points in her talk. First, she talked about the sediment at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. She talked about what lies there: So many of our ancestors. She urged the audience to understand that if so many of our ancestors lie there, there must be wisdom in the saltwater. She said “don’t sleep on sediment, at the bottom, knowledge grows”. This comment of course drew me to all of the dialogue we have seen in our texts surrounding the roots of people of color and the knowledge that grows at the roots of people.
Another even more salient discussion she had in the lecture was surrounding rituals. During the question section, someone asked her about her process in writing. She talked about how she gets up at 4am, each morning she can—when people cannot and will not dare disturb her. When she wakes up, she likes to engage in a series of “rituals”. Those rituals included chants that she says to herself in the mirror and breathing exercise, as well as visualization exercise. Her vision practice was particularly important as she spoke of sitting down and visualizing “traveling [somewhere in her mind and imagination] to access the ceremony I need to create for myself and for us”. For example, one ceremony she imagines is a space in which she is spending time with her sister and her nieces and experiencing joy with them.
Her description of the importance of rituals in one’s life to ensure that she grounded and connected with the project of liberation really reminded me of all of the rituals we saw in Sassafras, Cyprus & Indigo. It certainty made me think critically about the rituals that I perform, which ones I know about and practice deliberately and which ones I just do within out realizing it. It made me think of rituals that are perpetuated, for better or for worse in classrooms as well.
At the end of the day, the lecture that I was at was a classroom and we were in an academic building where regular lectures happen each day and where lectures were happening in the room over. But there was something very different about the experience in the space that night. One difference is that each time she would deliver a section of her lecture, as a repeated ritual, she would ask the entire ‘class’ to take a group breath. That was something really radical to experience and something I haven’t had a teacher ask the class to do since high school. I’m not completely sure what to do with the experience yet or how to articulate fully the pedagogical implications of the constructed rituals of her ‘class’ but I certainty believe that the experience opened me up to thinking critically about classroom rituals. I think it would be a really interesting line of discussion to critically approach, in our own class, the rituals we can bee seen performing within our classroom and within other classrooms we engage in.
For more info about Alexis Pauline Gumbs: https://www.alexispauline.com
For info about her lecture Series:
-NYU: Nov. 6:
https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/-with-our-freedom—an-oracle-of-june-jordan
-Columbia: Nov. 7:
http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/calendar/necessary-as-water-queer-black-ceremony-and-the-depth-of-listening-gn5c3
To access Alexis Pauline Gumbs Instagram: @alexispauline