An Experience with Gumbs

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Introducing Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, or as they are colloquially called Sista Docta Pauline Gumbs, is a Queer Black American writer, independent scholar, poet, activist and educator who works to end sexual violence, honor their LGBTQ+ ancestors, and open access to the brilliance of the Black feminist traditional. Dr. Gumbs was the first person to do archival research in the papers of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Lucille Clifton all while achieving multiple PhD’s at Duke University. Dr. Gumbs loves and believes in Black feminist traditions as an extension of her own life and thinks that others should learn it and live it and children are taught to read, as to say that these traditions are a fundamental part of a person’s growth. 

Dr. Gumbs remains true to this ideology in her everyday practices and the people that she surrounds herself with. Gumbs and her partner Ṣangodare, also known as Julia Roxanne Wallace, founded Mobile Homecoming, a national experiential archive project where APG and Sangodare traveled in a retro RV to find queer and LGTBQ Black elders to create an extensive community and effectively extend the shoreline. It is vital that this archival knowledge and ancestral listening happens because the weight of these untold stories can be suffocating.

Link to Mobile Homecoming: https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/

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Welcome to the Shoreline

The shoreline is traditionally defined as the line along which a large body of water meets the land, but for Gumbs, the Shoreline is the connection between the ancestors and the living and a place at which those still living can meet to honor and listen to the ancestors. For a long time in her life, Dr. Gumbs has been inspired by archival research because she finds it amazing that she can read the direct words of someone who has long since passed and feel as though she is hearing them speak. Primary sources and research can sometimes provide more insight than any other source. This is not just a way of connecting with one’s ancestors, but it is a method of passing down traditions, practices, stories, and love to generations that will come long after us (Beenash, “Intellectuals Outside the Academy.”).

The power of the Shoreline is the willingness for all those who are women of color and queer people of color to come together to be around people who can relate to them to learn from common ancestors. The world will very consistently attempt to break down this collective action by labeling large groups of people of color together as dangerous or gang-related but they will always persevere and even when the world is destroyed and bodies are broken down, these women and queer individuals will still survive. They will survive in the memories of the living or as physical imprints on the world. It is because Dr. Gumbs knows this as fact that she writes on Black life being as persistent as roaches; this is borrowed from Audre Lorde’s “The Brown Menace, or Poem To the Survival of Roaches.” I’m sure anyone new to this idea will find it ridiculous and a bit disturbing to be referred to as roaches. However, Gumbs explains that there is a certain power within black people that make them almost nuclear to the point of having the survival abilities of a roach. We may be pathologized by society and made into constant targets of hate and abuse, but our resilience and persistence is what has kept us alive up to this point and it is what will keep us alive (even if only in spirit and essence) for future that awaits us.

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Black Mothering

The most popular, and thought to be, breakthrough work of Dr. Gumbs is "We Can Learn To Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism, her 2010 dissertation which addresses the question of mothering and surviving and what each of those processes looks like, both from the perspective of a Queer Black feminist. Being a Black Mother does not mean that you have to be a Black female, identify as a woman, or even have children because mothering is a practice of care for one’s community that anyone can engage in, assuming they love their fellow women and queers unconditionally and with full hearts. Black Mothers can be biological mothers, peer of the same age or even younger, family members, mentors, teachers, one’s self, any black individual that experiences what it means to be Black, and to live, and to struggle, and to survive, and to nurture...

The above image is a poem I wrote in my senior year of high school of honor the black mothers in my life and to express my love and gratitude that I have for them and their teachings. Just as Gumbs want us to learn, it acknowledges the queerness in mothering one’s self (loving one’s self), and the queerness within the idea that anyone in the black community (of any age, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.) can take on the role of a mother and teach the survival strategies and skill necessary for navigating an oppressive society. We even mother those outside out our own race because the Queer Black community’s goal is to spread love.

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Dubbing and “Interspecies Ancestral Listening”

Black mothering and Dr. Gumbs’ theory of Dubbing rewrites how Blackness can see itself in the world to be one that is more positive and community-based even when the world is beating down that Blackness and all of its intersectional identities are garbage to be left to the margins. Dr. Gumbs explains dubbing to depend on and disrupt rhythm and riddim. It asks about the limits of possibility and what happens if you keep going when you reach that limit. Through dubbing, Black people are able to listen to their never-considered-human ancestors, such as whales and corals, and find existence with them. Dub is about the connection we have with each other and the powerful things we can do with that. Dubbing counteracts silencing the ability to make requests that can be heard and met and the ability to commit and have others commit back.  The practice of dubbing also actively goes against objectification. Objects aren’t able to make choices and determine their own life but those that define themselves can and do. These are all part of the “intimate practices of making a livable world” that Dr. Gumbs describes after her archival work with June Jordan (Mayer and Robertson, “WE CAN MAKE SOMETHING OUT OF ANYTHING”).

Black people can learn to remember their roots from the whales that evolved in the sea and still hold the knowledge of the specific migratory routes to follow at certain times of the year. They can learn how to sync with nature and each other to create neat and unique movements that flow with each other. They can learn effective communication and remind ourselves and each other that our communication can have ripple effects into the future. The coral teach the power of just being and how those on the shoreline peacefully co-exist with each other. Sista Gumbs tells us that our ancestor are not just the humans that came before us, but the powerful animals that have been ruling in the ocean long before we came and the Earth and its water and lands that breath in a way humans cannot even imagine. Subcultures and networks established by minorities like Gumbs give rise to cultures of resistance (Weeks, “The Social Construction os Sexuality”). These cultural resistance practices involve using things like art and literature to challenge oppressive structures, such as those that enact violence on black people, queer people, and black and queer people.

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Embodying the Teachings of a Queer, Black, Feminist Troublemaker

Dr. Gumbs gives explicit instructions to “tell them how we found each other again…tell them why we needed armor and what we did before the harm. tell them about … god… and what we left to tell the tale. tell them about the whales… how they taught us to make time out of salt. how they deepened our lungs. opened the top of our heads. how they made their whole bodies into drums to show us how it would be,” because it provides a necessary counter-history to what whiteness has tried to define Black life as and limit it to (Gumbs, Dub, 2020).  

I chose to do this project based on Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs because when I learned of her work, even though I had learned it in the competitive arena of debate, I learned that competition did not always need to be antagonistic and when facing other queer, Black folk, it was a chance to grow and extend the Shoreline. I loved that I was able to learn more about my identity in such a peaceful and mindful way. Her work of using poetry to break normative teachings and create coalitions around Black, Queer individuals how been brought to life through her literature as well as through the way I have chosen to interact with it.

The above images are matching tattoos that I have with my best-friend. She is my debate partner, my soul sista, one of my most important Black Mothers, and a lifelong companion that has chosen to learn about Gumbs and experience the Shoreline together with me. What we have done not only helps us reclaim autonomy over our identities but our bodies as well: “Black women’s literary and expressive culture is as invested in recovering a diasporic past as it is with creating alternative diasporic futures as a new avenue for exploring core themes in contemporary feminist thought, such as motherhood, women’s activism, women’s relationships, gender roles, and female sexualities... Women writers attempt to reclaim the terms of eroticism and desire, rescuing sexuality and the sexualized female (and male) body from the strictures of established social practice. ”(Montgomery, The Postapocalyptic Black Female Imagination). It’s not secret that the black female body is overly sexualized by society. Our chose with these tattoos reclaimed our sexuality in regards to our own bodies, while honoring our ancestors and reminding us to “inhale” and “exhale”. And in time when it’s too tough to breath, he have each other and our other black queer family with breath for us, allowing us to live through them. We have borrowed from the teaching of Gumbs and Montgomery and have chosen to embody our Black Queerness.