Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an award-winning author of nonfiction and poetry. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (FSG) has been named a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 book of 2024 and a Time Magazine must-read book of 2024.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice. Her poetic work in response to the needs of her cherished communities has held space for multitudes in mourning and movement. Alexis’s co-edited volume Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) has shifted the conversation on mothering, parenting, and queer transformation. Alexis has transformed the scope of intellectual, creative, and oracular writing with her triptych of experimental works published by Duke University Press (Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity in 2016, M Archive: After the End of the World in 2018, and Dub: Finding Ceremony, 2020.) Alexis is a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize Winner in Poetry. Her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals won the 2022 Whiting Award in Nonfiction. Alexis was a 2020-2021 National Humanities Center Fellow, funded by the Founders Award, and is a 2022 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. Her most recent book Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (FSG) has been named a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 book of 2024, a Time Magazine must-read book of 2024, a Guardian book of the week, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction.
*note from Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Each of the following poems is for the painter Alma Thomas. The footnotes reference the paintings that inspired the poems and in relevant cases the page where you can find them in the catalog for the Alma Thomas retrospective Everything is Beautiful.
theology
all of us women
held in pieces by our clothes
standing on the cobbled gravestones
of our names
and the light pink world around us
a shattered sunrise shaded
what we did to our eyes
looking for stars
we are blood we are rain
we are gold bow before us
standing tight and close
against the cold
once upon a time
there was a drum
it woke us
once upon a time
there was a barn
we found it
once upon a time
there was a night
we broke it
with our gifts*
* Three Wise Men, 1966
Acrylic on Canvas, 36 ½ by 23 ½ in.
study in sistering
this is how light works
your face my face
lean back into the triangle of sun
and reach don’t look away
your face my face
our tilted heads one smile
and reach don’t look away
how much i love you
our tilted heads one smile
framed by the green that knows
how much i love you
a million leaves
framed by the green that knows
i am never leaving
a million leaves
a million stays
i am never leaving
lean back into the triangle of sun
a million stitches million stays
that’s how light works*
* “Alma and Sister Maurice” 1922/23 Caption by John Maurice Thomas “Alma and Sister Maurice. The costume made and designed by my Mother. Picture made in the back yard of our home in DC.” p39
a ceremony for thicker skin
first the red dirt
they let me breathe it
the basins the rags
boiled and scrubbed Saturday nights
then the gauntlet of weekday Georgia
forcefield training
a repeated decision
to escape the hanging tree
you must grow bark and never bite the hand
the land with all its mineral advice
would line our pores with memories and salt
the lubricated dinners lined us too
warm from the inside
the thin petaled flowers
they planted in a circle
but not before they let me touch
the roots*
* Reverse of Antares (detail 1972) and Reverse of The Eclipse (detail 1970) where the ground seeps through the back of the canvas. Fig 6 and 7 p 98
on being blue I
“There is little to make a black officer feel blue; other than sadness…”*
Karl Osborne (a black NYPD officer and student of Audre Lorde)
i learned to call you from underneath
and the signal went up in all directions
i learned the ocean had hallways
where a sound could get lost
and the signal went up in all directions
and i sunk ever further
where a sound could get lost
this was my hiding place
and i sunk ever further
surrendered to depth
this was my hiding place
this was my peace
surrendered to depth
i forgot my name
this was my peace
in blue
i forgot my name
in the hallways of the sea
in blue
i learned how to call you**
*Audre Lorde Papers, Box 82, Folder 2.
**Untitled 1977
Acrylic on paper, 22 x 30 in
#169 p 318
on being blue II
for Detective Capers and Patrolman Wright (two of the black NYPD officers shot and killed by white NYPD officers in the 1970s)
i am the sea monster
press my hands
into waves
they become sharks
and sinking ships
and this is why i’m blue
and this is why i’m strong
and this is why you don’t see me
at night
red lights
warn in whispers
from my breast
and both my knees
i brace myself
against the sea
as if
it’s ground
as if i’m free
as if there’s any solid earth
for me*
*Blue Night (At Sea), 1959
Oil on canvas 40 x 30 1/8 in
#155 p305
THE INTERVIEW
This interview was conducted between Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Jae Nichelle on Dec 13th, 2024.
It’s an honor to read these pieces from your forthcoming project Primary, which honors the painter Alma Thomas. Can you speak a little bit about how this project came to be? What drew you to her work?
I was really just living my Black feminist life. I was in Nashville for the great Black feminist literary theorist Hortense Spillers’s retirement symposium at Vanderbilt and I remembered that the lesbian feminist photographer had advised me to go to the Alma Thomas retrospective “Everything is Beautiful” when it was in Thomas’s hometown of DC, but I missed it. And so the morning after the symposium my partner and I went to the exhibit. Right away I knew I was going to need much more than one morning with her work. There were so many synergies. Her interest in the cosmos, her work as an educator. And honestly, I needed time to wrap my head around how in the world a Black girl born in Columbus Georgia in eighteen ninety-one at the height of lynching became one of the most influential theorists of color in contemporary art. What does color even mean when you are a Black girl born in the nadir of blatant racism in the U.S. South? And so I challenged myself to write inspired by her work every morning. Indefinitely. And I found so much. Her colors took me to so many places, especially in my own childhood and adolescence. The flowers outside my childhood home, my fun-dip and skittle sugar era, my dark lipstick dreams. But I also started to develop a listening for her life as an art teacher, a community member, an oldest sister (like me!), and a trickster.
“Theology” is inspired by Thomas’ painting “Three Wise Men.” You nod to the vibrant colors of the art piece in the poem while simultaneously subverting the story of the wise men. I’m wondering how your relationship to Thomas’ work has felt from poem to poem. Is there tension? Synergy? Surprise?
YES! All of those things are there. My method has been to surrender and to listen. I don’t approach the work trying to say something about the painting with the poem. The poem is an artifact of what happens when I allow myself to welcome the unexpected associations that her colors and shapes bring to my body, mind, and spirit. I free myself from any mandate to make sense. Often it was not until I went back and read the poems (after about a year) that I started to almost understand them. Alma Thomas deeply studied the emotional and spiritual resonance of specific colors. This was core to her practice as a color theorist. She also intentionally infused her paintings with “energy” and my job was just to move out of my own way, open my heart, and allow it to find me. Many of the poems in the manuscript are almost maps for where that energy met me.
“On being blue I” begins with a quote from the papers of Audre Lorde, which makes this work feel like it is in conversation with your new book Survival is a Promise: the Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. How are you feeling now that this biography has made its recent debut into the world?
For sure. While I was writing these poems I was also doing the layers and layers of work that resulted in Survival is a Promise. I wish I could sit and listen to Audre Lorde and Alma Thomas in an actual conversation. Especially since they were both such impactful educators. In fact, that epigraph is evidence of Audre Lorde making space in her classroom at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for her students, police officers in this case a Black police officer who had been shot at by his own white colleagues, to theorize what “blue” meant to him and to them. The poem is accountable to that work.
And how do I feel now that Survival is a Promise is actually in the world? It feels like what Beautiful Chorus says “gratitude brings room for more things to be grateful for.” Survival is a Promise is a work of gratitude for Audre Lorde and sharing it in the world has expanded the field of gratitude. The events celebrating the book have been such sacred spaces of love and possibility. It’s like exactly the inspiration and care that I have experienced from Audre Lorde’s work and her impact through her students…exactly the inspiration that made me want to write a biography that brings her to even more people IS the quality of the response to the book in our communities. It also is a commitment to anyone who didn’t already know that I am ready to bring Audre Lorde into the conversation at ANY time.
You once mentioned that your first three books came “from the same decision,” which was to write daily using the words of three scholars. What decisions have you made recently that currently inform your work?
Well, I am still in the decision to write daily, which was an admonition from an early mentor asha bandele, who was also a student of Audre Lorde! And it was my community writing teacher Zelda Lockhart who really provided the structure to learn for myself what makes it possible for me to write every day no matter what. But the decisions to engage in a particular project feel like answering my own attraction. My own curiosity and queer desire because I really never know what is going to happen inside the work. The work is teaching me. Right now in my daily practice, I am inside a decision I made for my daily writing to engage my curiosity about my ancestors. I am learning so much.
What’s the oldest piece of clothing you have? Why have you kept it this long?
I have a lot of old clothes. For a long time, I could still fit into clothes from my literal childhood, but I have finally come into my thickness so that’s not an excuse anymore. Praises!
But I do have an archival adornment practice of wearing old clothes. I think my oldest articles are T-shirts that my grandparents wore. My grandmother’s NAACP shirt and my grandfather’s logo shirt for the hotel my grandparents founded, Rendezvous Bay Hotel in Anguilla. They are both blue and I love the feeling of accompaniment I get when I wear them.
You’ve been part of several organizations, projects, and initiatives including UBUNTU and the Mobile Homecoming Project. What work are you currently excited about?
So much! I’m excited about the technology company that my partner Sangodare started. It’s called QUIRC which is a combination of the words queer and circuit. It’s about bringing our communities together through this polymatching innovation Sangodare invented that can facilitate us finding each other and transforming the world on purpose. It blows my mind that Sangodare actually created a technology that makes our work in the Mobile Homecoming project of intergenerational queer black feminist liberation accessible to everyone on the planet as a mode of relation. (more at quirc.app)
I’m also excited to be part of the visioning council for The Embodiment Institute’s new retreat center in North Carolina. All of it is about being present and profoundly connected to each other.
What are your favorite places to spend your time in Durham?
On my office floor. I have a rug that’s like the ocean. I really love our home and the sweet small gatherings we have there with our community. And then we live a couple of blocks away from Tierra Negra, the farm at Earthseed, a Black and brown land collective that Sangodare and I helped to found. I love being on the farm. I love being in the barn (which is also where I get to participate in Mama Ruby’s West African dance class.). And I also love Duke Gardens. It feels like part of my reparations to benefit from the WILD amount of money they pour into curating those gardens.
How can people support you right now?
Honestly, it would feel supportive if people offered their prayers and magic for my uncle. I have an uncle recovering from brain surgery right now that is the first thing that came to my heart. Please send positive energy his way and to my whole family. And it is tangibly supportive for folks to support our ongoing queer listening and community building with Mobile Homecoming at mobilehomecoming.org. And of course please read Survival is a Promise (or listen to the audiobook…it’s me reading it!) we need Audre Lorde as much as we ever have.
Name another Black Woman writer people should know.
Well of course I already said Audre Lorde, asha bandele, and Zelda Lockhart. There are so many. But I’ll say Cheryl Boyce Taylor, another student of Audre Lorde and mentor of mine. Such a beautiful writer and an example for me of how we can bring writing to every day of our lives.
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