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Poems in Black Water Ecologies (Text Only)

by Hannah Jo King

Me as Water

Although I am an Earth sign (Virgo)

I live my life like a River 

In moments when I pool—getting stagnant or coming
to rest

In moments when I rush—energizing each day with
purpose and love

I wonder to the ones who fly above me 

And thank the stones who still the path below me

I imagine towards my origin, and my destination

The ocean, the sea, our common destiny?1

All Waters exist in a cycle. They move. They drain.
They rain.

We may be like a glacial lake or an underground 

aquifer, far from that so-called “common source.” 

But what is the source? Are not the “isolated” 

reserves the source? Are not the headwater springs
the source? Are not the rains the source? Is not the
ocean the source?

Me as Water

Nothing more than moving in rhythm with the world
around me

[Caption of photo: Black femme-presenting woman walks on rocky beach.]

Figure 1. Me, Hannah Jo, out with my sister Trisha (the photographer) near Northside Valley in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Just a few miles northeast of here are Hams Bluff and Maroon Ridge, where lived an African community who escaped from slavery. (Photograph by Trisha King [@froladyfashion], 2021.)]

What can Water teach us about Black life? And what can Black life teach us about Water?

The poems in this booklet are largely inspired by my experiences during the spring and summer of 2021. During these months, I was a Water Protector in the Stop Line 3 Movement. This is an Indigenous-led movement resisting the expansion of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline in Anishinaabe lands and treaty territories of Northern Minnesota. All the people in this movement, both Native and non-Native, have given me deep lessons about loving Water, who is Nibi in Ojibwe and Mni/Mini in Dakota. In particular, I want to offer thanks to the women who organize with Rights of Mississippi River. You are my teachers, my friends, and a deep well of subconscious healing. At the same time I was organizing to Stop Line 3, I was taking my first Black Studies classes since I was 18! It was amazing for me, a student of environmental sciences, to be enmeshed in topics of Black diaspora cultures, stories, and worldviews. I felt like I’d been called home. Moreover, I found it truly intriguing and validating to notice just how many folks were writing about Water. While my Nibi activism was centered on Anishinaabe worldviews, here I could see Black theorists centering Water too. To explore these connections further, I decided to produce a Black Water Ecologies zine for my final class project in Black Feminist Thought (available at hannahjoking.com). In the zine, I explored relationships between Black life and Water at sites such as memory, ceremony, queerness, resistance, oppression, and freedom. These sites of relationship continue to inspire me and can be found running throughout the poetry in this booklet. I am excited to present these poems to my peers, who I hope will share in the emotional experience of remembering and regenerating Black Water Ecologies with me. 

Ritual

Sunday for Water
Monday for Earth
Tuesday for Air
Wednesday for Fire
Thursday for Other Beings
Friday for Self
Saturday for Stars
Sunday for Water

untitled 

arrests were happening    
and I was off on my own
fuming
“calming down” except not
this is illegal
– this is illegal!
do you know what your job is?
– do you know what your job is!?
my own words echoing in my head
words I shouted, louder than my voice has ever been before
at the police who came
to force Water Protectors away
the worst drought in 50 years
and they took 5 billion gallons3 of water
residents were asked to conserve
and water out of our garden hydrant barely flowed
but 5 billion gallons
they took 5 billion gallons
they keep locking life away

Water is queer

1.

People keep telling me that the Moon is feminine

And the Sun is masculine

So I’ve been thinking about it

And Water is queer

Water is hella non-normative

Shapeshifting, phase-shifting

Living inside us

Cracking open rocks

The very definition of wet

Water expands; Water contracts

Water is erotic

We simply can’t put Water in a box

Levees break, dams overflow, even your drink in the freezer explodes

2.

On the banks of Mississippi River

At our Line 3 encampment

You can’t say where Water ends and Land begins

They are so closely bonded

Intimate

In fierce reciprocity

That’s how Water kept learning us 

Showing us frac after frac3
By lifting up mud

Evidence of the construction-destruction4

Of their violent penetration of the Earth

Because we were literally living in wet-lands

3.

Water led the words we chanted

            Mni—Wi—coni! – Water—Is—Life!

Water inspired the songs we sang

            Nibi, Gizaagi’igo 

             Gimiigwechiwenimigo 

            Gizhawenimigo5

Water connected us to Indigenous relationships with life

Water was our reason to fight

Water Protectors

4.

Mi mati6:

My mate, my shipmate, my lover, my girl

Mi mati:

Linguist remnants of the slaves’ journeys 

To Suriname

Mi mati:

Words that were foreign to me

Now swaddle me in bed 

As we dream together

Of life beyond

5.

An ice sheet that cracked

A crack that grew 

As Waters surfaced and spewed7

She opened something inside me

            Tinsley said that queerness is “a praxis of resistance”8

She gave me love in the darkness

            Queer is the how in how we disrupt and resist

She humanized the horrors

            Queer is the how in how we love through the normative violence

Queerness can’t be quashed

You simply can’t put Black life in a box

“Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic”9

Dreams: for my niece and nephew

I was out in New Jersey staying at your house

Chatting with your Mom and Dad on the living room couch

When I glanced out the back window 

And into the yard

And was shocked instead to find

A pool and a bar!

The pool was unusual

It was more like a lake

Filled with turtles, and cattails, and other pool “mistakes”

I wanted to look closer

I wanted to know why

So I stepped outside—

And jumped into the sky!

Above the ground flying

I finally understood

Your pool was no pool 

But a whole system of good! 

Network of lake after lake

Stretched as far as eye could see

Through all your neighbors’ yards

So the turtles could swim far

The Sounds of a Lake

Source: https://pixabay.com/videos/sunset-sun-warm-summer-lake-water-33417/

It transforms me
Immediately takes me places
To the docks of my childhood
Climbing into a motor boat that hoovers up and down, up and down
The smell of fishy things, the jingle of a tackle box
The unsteadiness, the excitement, and always the tired
As my cousins, siblings, and I settle in for a morning of fishing with
Our parents on Lake Little Wabana

The Great Lakes
So expansive and beautiful

The people sprawled across Chicago beaches
Teenagers, families, locals, out-of-towners
The sunbathers, the sunburns
The tiny bikinis. The cliques. The wondering if you’re gonna run into
anyone you know

The waves
Yes lakes have waves!
At least the big ones do
(And all the times I’ve had to explain this to my California friends)

The freshness of the water as I swim under
The desire to swallow that accidental mouthful I take in
The recollection of the garbage on the shore, the spitting it out
The recollection that this is my water at home, the swallowing it

The softness

The floating on my back until I see a ball whirl by and realize I’ve
drifted into someone else’s experience

The sand
Oh the sand!
The dunesy sand that builds up and up until life grows on it
First grasses, then shrubs, then trees10
The birds, the critters, and of course the people
And the persistence of the sand beneath my feet. The foresty sand…
until eventually it starts to mix with clay

The crickets. The cicadas

The stars!
What is it about water that makes us want to sit there all day, til we can
watch the sunset?
That makes us want to go back in the middle of the night, even in the
freezing cold, to watch the stars?
Wine recommended

Tourmaline says bathtubs are a portal11
Time travel, space travel, heart travel
It’s all a bathtub, lake, river, ocean, and thunderstorm away

Citations & Notes

Cover art by Hannah Jo King. Art accompanying “Water is Queer” by Hannah Jo King. Art accompanying “Dreams: for my niece and nephew” by Molly Schwartz.

1. I wrote this poem after attending a talk by Professor Roderick Ferguson. I suppose he planted below my conscious a question of Black diaspora and the sea. This poem is also musing about Middle Passage Epistemology, which wonders towards where, when, and how we situate origins in the Black diaspora. See Roderick Ferguson, “The Sea is History: Social and Environmental Justice and the Black Radical Tradition,” (virtual presentation, Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, April 21, 2021, https://mediaspace.umn.edu/media/t/1_2n672ce3/197902193); Michelle M. Wright, “The Middle Passage Epistemology,” in Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

2. Enbridge received a state permit to appropriate 4,982,768,568 gallons of surface water and groundwater for Line 3 construction. Later, it was revealed that Enbridge breached three artesian aquifers and lost 262,000,000 gallons (as of March 2022) of groundwater during months of uncontrolled flow. See Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Water Appropriation for Trench and Construction Dewatering Amendment Decision, June 4, 2021, https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/features/line3/decisions/04june2021-update-trench-watering-decisions.pdf; Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, DNR Update on Line 3 Aquifer Breach Investigation and Enforcement, March 21, 2022, https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/line3/index.html.

3. Science for the People–Twin Cities,  “Enbridge is currently attempting to install the Line 3 pipeline across the headwaters of the Mississippi River,” Facebook, July 26, 2021, https://www.facebook.com/SftPTC/posts/974690769771808.

4. My use of the phrase “construction-destruction” is inspired by Queen Quet, Chieftess and Head-of-State of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, who uses the term “destructionment” instead of so-called “development.” For more information, see CREATE Initiative, “St. Helena Island: Gullah/Geechee Nation,” University of Minnesota, ArcGIS Online, October 7, 2021, www.sainthelenagullahgeechee.com. 

5. To listen to and learn about the Nibi Song, see Beatrice Menase Kwe Jackson, “Nibi Song,” Mother Earth Water Walk, http://www.motherearthwaterwalk.com/?attachment_id=2244.

6. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, nos. 2–3 (2008): 192.

7. This language is inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Subjectivity (Duke University Press, 2016).

8. Tinsley, “Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic,” 199.

9. Tinsley, “Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic,” 191–215.

10. To learn more about plant succession and the ecology of Indiana Dunes, see National Park Service, “West Beach Dune Succession: Indiana Dunes National Park,” ArcGIS Online, https://arcg.is/19KvSb0.

11. Tourmaline (fka Reina Gossett), “Long Live Our Mother Week 5: Refusal, Resistance, Existence: Trans Feminisms, Always Already,” IDA Stanford, uploaded May 1, 2019, YouTube video, 1:06:31, https://youtu.be/jRk1CeV_Vio?t=2261.