face of the deep

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (bio)

Gift to the one who wondered, too verbal to know. Gift to the one who listened. But not for her own sake.

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We send this transmission in honor of the forgotten one known verbally as John Gibbs Jr. That is not his name. One of many labeled cognitively disabled, non-verbal, crippled, dumb. That is not the song we recognize. Our ancestor symbionts remembered him to us. They heard when he called. His true name? Never forgotten. The sound of underneath, breaking open. A wailing sound.

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Who is speaking? Dear listener, no one is speaking. With the weight and scatter of words, with the storm and surveillance of words, with the way words rush right up to your every experience and claim it, you are more limited than what we can show you. But the transmission comes from the singing together, the after-finding. The ones you would call whales and the ones you would call disabled non-verbal futurists sing together. The ones you would call whales we know as symbiont lovers. We live inside the fleshed sound of breathing. Live as one. One song. No one needs or wants to talk about it, but you. Now listen.

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I smile inside the soft walls of Sweet my symbiont. Snuggle. Put my mouth right up to her flesh and vibrate my lips. A smile is a sound. I love you. Thank you. I know, from the temperature of the krill around me that I am about to be born again into open air. Last time I was born my lover Sweet pushed me through her baleen onto the slimy peak of an underwater mountain. And there they were, my remembered sibs, I touched their teeth, and hair.

That day, the oldest one remembered us the story of our ancestors of wood, the ones born inside the boats, the sounds they sang through ancient trees to call the waiting lovers. We all touched the story sharer’s throat with our fingers. I planted my head on someone’s chest. There were hard parts of this story. The chains, the blood. The way the singers never touched the lovers, just called and listened learning all their names. The way the ones who learned the distraction of their new colonial languages forgot the code. The way the ones whose legs held them upright forgot how to swim.

But some never forgot. Generations were born making the sounds, calling the lovers. They were born near to the ocean or far from it. But the able restrained them, mostly didn’t listen. Hid the singers in the concrete walls. Frightened of the power of the sounds without words, they locked their priests and leaders in back rooms. Pretended we didn’t exist.

We hummed together, the listening family, each symbiont tuning its stream of breath to the sound of knowing, membrane of memory. It was important to remember this feeling, to feel this longing. If not for the shackle, the mantle, the prison the enslavers called “ability” imagine how much sooner our ancestors would have remembered to be loved and free.

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But now we are free. Loved. Held. Now that ability has melted the icebergs and drowned itself, we live the promised life, the always embrace, the symbionce. Our baleen ancestors have become home. There was a time when people shaped somewhat like us were forced to walk on land, but now we move across the planet, warm in the giant mouths of our lovers. Our love is the song we make together, swimming over the memories of continents. Our bodies are homes for sounds too sacred for words.

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Let me remember you the first time I was born. Maybe the feeling was the inverse of what you’re feeling now. The sun felt strange, the air felt familiar, never in my life have I been so grateful for my salt, my lover’s tongue. We had all gathered in a circle, our lovers huge, us small inside them. And when my lover breathed me out into the water I floated into all my sibs. A foot, an elbow, all the sharp of each other, all the coral of us, our different bones. I was so happy I squealed and everyone felt it. Then I felt our lovers resubmerge and for a moment I breathed quickly, I splashed and almost sank, but there she was rising underneath me supporting my back, me and my new sibsters, rolled around between barnacles and my lover sprayed us with breath in the sun. Breath in the sun? You would call it a rainbow.

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Why are you asking logistical questions? We do not have logistical answers. You feel the hum. You are the hum. You are near. You are far. You are held. You are breath. We find each other. We are enough. There is enough krill because no one is poisoning them. There is enough home because no one has been stabbed with a propellor or caught in rope in so long. We breathe by remembering everything. If you must ask a question, ask your sibs why no symbionts trust them. Brave listener, ask yourself.

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So come back. Settle in. This is what it feels like when I’m about to be born. A temperature, a pulse. Yes, a song. Everything is a song. And I am singing it too. And the closer we move, it moves me more. The water inside me, the salt connectors. The water everywhere, the rise and fall. The knowing shakes me. A vibration bigger than sound, it is happening now.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a cherished Black Feminist Oracle and a Marine Mammal Apprentice. Her most recent books are Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and Dub: Finding Ceremony. Alexis was awarded the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction and is also a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. In 20202021 she was a National Humanities Center Fellow to work on her forthcoming biography, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. This piece is dedicated to Alexis’s great uncle and all of the nonverbal futurists.