Whale Songs

These are songs of oceanic longing taught to me in waking dreams by my grandmothers. Boda, my Ashanti grandmother who survived the Middle Passage and became mother of our Anguillian generations. Nunánuk, my collective Shinnecock grandmothers who witnessed whales beaching themselves on the Long Island shore as a survival offering to their whole community. Augusta Carty/Red Gussie, granddaughter of shipwrecked Irish born in Anguilla, mother out of wedlock to nine children, the last of which was my grandfather. My Jamaican grandmothers, Joyce, Eugenia, Rebecca, Georgianna, Sarah. And the unnamed who speak anyway. My process for listening to all of these grandmothers was consistent. I listened daily to the recorded songs of whales underwater. I wrote daily with short phrases written or spoken by the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter. This is part of what happened. These pieces are excerpts my forthcoming book with Duke University Press, Dub: Finding Ceremony.totorobonsu made the world by breathing. totorobonsu made the world with sound reaching out, bouncing back. totorobonsu moved through depths unseeable. darkness with no beginning and no end. though i am nothing, totorobonsu is now. here.boda remembered the whale god. boda remembered the whale was god. boda remembered the world was made by breathing. boda remembered what the whales already knew. and breathed.by the time she reached the other side she had been reborn. birthed through the belly of the whale. blue from the blood of breathing. brave from the only deep. there it was. the depth of herself. ocean. the black of her self. god.boda made herself by breathing. by being totorobonsu in the deep. boda became. old as ocean. wise as whale. black as undrowned sun. bold as what we been through. totorobonsu. put your forehead in the water. she will show you. here i am.1it’s not the world on our shoulders, it’s the ocean on our hearts. on top of our whole torsos. we get round beneath it. the weight that tries to lift us, the pressure that spreads like if love was sonic and could get everywhere, the sound of your unasked for heartbeat, like if you were the center of something, stretching to try to make the globe not break, like without you the world would spill and lose itself. it’s more like that.they say god moved over the face of the deep, but in the deep there we already were. already pulsing already pulled by moon, relevant to us whether or not it was lit by sun. they fear the depth of the ocean rightly. we know what it means to be encumbered under there. we know what it is to have no choice but to pull from the bottom of ourselves daily. we don’t have the luxury of surface. whether or not we want it.ever wonder why an island woman loves a clean floor? looks down without missing anything? sweeps even the dirt in the yard? well, where do you think we live while you sleep? down here. at the bottom of everything.2sleep? what about sleep? do you think children care if you sleep? and their father? maybe it was to respect his wife’s sleep that he stayed the nights he stayed. maybe it was to get some sleep away from that house. i didn’t ask.yes. i slept like a whale. one part of my brain always alert to drowning. i always heard when he crept in. i always heard when he crept out. yes. i slept like the shipwrecked granddaughter i was. the soothing depth of water can kill you. there are rocks and coral all through here. if i slept. i slept like a mother of nine. you’ve started to know what this feels like. all the parts of you, outside your body but close. and the listening that doesn’t stop. and the rudeness of their own ups and downs. and the impossibility of turning it off. so yes. sometimes i woke up crying and couldn’t say why. but at some point i didn’t really wonder. you learn this on an island. you learn this when a shipwrecked people raise you. you learn this from the sweat of an island man. you learn. from the snot of your beautiful children. the salt water is there, in any form to claim you. so no. i never really slept.3who do you think thought of the ocean? we who would be whales. how could we prepare for the lives we evolved into. immersed in a substance we could not breathe. and nevertheless called to be graceful. huge in ways that the world could not hold. except by these means. unbound by the limits of time. because we thought of the ocean before we became who we were. how could we know the selves we had never been. how could we know places we had not the bodies to see. how do we breathe across generations. ask yourself. this is not the power of positive thinking. this is no birthday wish in smoke. this is existence or absence. no joke.4between you and me, we knew it would never work. just because the singing of the whales had caused bumper stickers and rallies and international bans on their murder and the criminalization of the exploding harpoon (you know. that thing that got under their skin and destroyed them from the inside) didn’t mean it would work for us. i mean how long had we, black women, been singing.when they decided the whale was an intelligent creature, nuanced, descriptive, they decided that the people who killed them were greedy, were savage, were less evolved. isn’t that interesting. the same people who forced the whaling indigenous into sale instead of ceremony now spoke of evolution. spoke of the humane and didn’t choke. this is why we didn’t have much hope. our intelligence and the multiple forms of proof required did not inspire the world to disentangle its hooks from our looks and our attitude.we assert that it was not the song of the whales that saved them. if singing could save we’d be god. it was the fact of other sources of oil to move onto, other deep black resources to extract. it was a fact. they could save the whales once they knew they didn’t need them. it was as simple as that. and they haven’t found a way yet to say it. their needles in our skin, targeting us where we breathe. which is everyone we love. trapping us below and yet extracting us above. chasing us across oceans. they risk their very souls. they know it, though. they need us more than gold.5so we listened. and we started with the top of the head. we listened from the opening of the womb for the futures not yet forgotten. borne not of brain but higher. and at the moment of birth sometimes lower. but we listened. in warm rooms of waiting shaped like the stomachs of whales.if we were whales why would we eat ourselves. why would we turn our bodies into heat and light for the whole community. ask it again. if we were not whales what would we do. waste ourselves. nourish nothing. leave our people cold. and what for?if we were whales then we would know about choosing. about remembering. about remembering even an older self that knew land. about coming back to the belly of the people, to the circle of the story. when you remember, put yourself there. in the belly of the whale. let yourself return. learn what it takes to come from water and find legs and then leave your legs to find water and to hear with your mouth and find lungs and wings in everyone around you.there is an older story. if you want to know about a big enough love for winter. a love deep enough to come back.6i would sing you the shape of the world between us. turn my body into drum to let you know. slam my skin onto the surface of the ocean to tell you. i am here. wherever you are.if it’s dream you are listening for. i’ll dream you. if it’s poetry in the morning. whatever. the radio. just test me. there is nowhere i cannot be. there is no sound i cannot travel through. there is no you i don’t surround.you can look or not look. you can fill your days with running or the shoes of other people. you can suffocate the minutes. i have time. i do not leave you. you can muffle every moment with your fear. it doesn’t matter. i’m still here. and i am here. and i am here.7whales are wise to stay far away. where they can pee in peace and process salt. they find each other by calling out. like i am calling you.if the sound bounces back, between me and god, you are here. i can get the shape of you. if i were a whale would my kidneys be big enough, my gut a filter, could i drink these tears and swim forever.they say our kidneys are small and relatively useless because we need all our energy to find food to eat. when did we start to hide food from each other. and our bodies. so cute. so physically naïve. did we think we wouldn’t ever poison the water.whales are wise. they stay far out at sea. if you chase in a boat they will spit in your face. in salt water, they call each other. like i am calling you.8

Biology · Fishery · Geography · Whale · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Rhetoric and Communication Studies

• The Ceremony Must be Found

  Sylvia Wynter•boundary 2•1984

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