Of course i am writing this on a nineteenth day. and this is a book with nineteen parts. it’s a week since i learned nineteen-year-old Black lives matter activist oluwatoyin salau was found dead, and it’s quite possible that i have grieved in nineteen ways already today, although this kind of stranger-grief is a difficult thing to track. today i created a meditation of nineteen wisdoms from Black feminists, listening to the throughline between ancestors and living geniuses the way Alexis Pauline Gumbs taught me to do.

and it’s not the nineteenth of any month, but of June, June 19th. juneteenth. a day of liberation. given that this is a book of liberation, i wanted to push off into the waters today.

with Alexis things always line up in ways that humble me. grief and magic touch, and a ripple unfolds between them that shows how they are the same thing at different moments in the nonlinear timeline of a good life. the universe is coordinated when it comes around Alexis, because she is steady enough to center any space she enters, however vast. in the pages that follow, she is leading us through oceans, inviting us to grab onto her fin as she takes us deep and teaches us how and when to breathe, how to handle the pressure of depth, where to leap and catch the sun’s light.

when Alexis first started posting these marine mammal missives, i thought—oh, emergent strategy from the deep. this is a whole realm of the wild world that i have barely gotten to learn from, and that has a huge amount to teach us right now on how we survive, how we slow down, how we make the air last, how we avoid predation and extinction, how we play.

i have always felt myself to be a child of the ocean, but like many Black humans, the lines that tether me to distinct Earth and water were cut long ago. with Undrowned, Alexis offers back to us a set of ancestors, sibling species, a variety of solidarities that can teach me about myself. i didn’t know i had so much Blackness in common with the marine mammal world! this text feels like meeting an eccentric and wise and intriguing family. it feels like an unveiling, Alexis pulling up the salt skirt of sea to show us how we belong, how we are echoes of the same brilliance as dolphins and seals and whales.

i am so grateful that Alexis wrote this down, and that she is letting us publish it as the first comrade text in the Emergent Strategy Series at AK Press. i hope you find a multitude of teachings in these pages, as i did, and that this work deepens your life as it has mine.

adrienne maree brown
from the realm of pandemics and uprisings
6/19/2020

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