Breach: A portolan of multimodal practice

Abstract

A portolan-a written description of the course along which ships sailed, indicating bays, capes, coves, ports, magnetic rhumb lines, and the distances between places." -Dionne Brand (2001, 52) Sometime in 2017, Joanne Douglas, an environmental humanist and boat specialist, and I sat at my kitchen table in Northwest Philadelphia to discuss Black women and water. Joanne talked about Black creativity and vulnerability around the waterways of Philadelphia, and I mused on the historical landscape of the region and present-day climate realities. Our conversation swayed back and forth between the past and future, buoyed by our present preoccupation with Black women's ecological intelligences, preparedness for environmental recalibration (also known as disaster), and migration. Like many conversations about Black women, survival, and the Delaware River Valley region do, our conversation drifted to the stories of the "great conductor": Harriet Tubman. While the iconography of Tubman overwhelmingly places her on land, our exchange was ignited as we talked about Tubman the seafarer, who spent significant time (though she could not swim) wading water, traveling in disguise by boat up the Maryland Eastern Shore, and most famously fighting at the US Civil War Combahee River raid of 1863. As we mentally charted Tubman's routes, the conversation veered when Joanne pulled up maps on her phone of the same region that Tubman traversed that also mark present-day food deserts, heat islands, and future projections of flooding, erosion, and possible water submersion of Black residential communities. The history and science crashed hard on our sensibilities.Several months passed, hurricanes raged, water levels rose, and we continued to consider Black women's relationship to the environment and rapid climate and political changes. Despite the scientific and popular language that demonizes the environment as acting on and against humanity, we recognized that the environment was reconfiguring herself in response to grave mistreatment. As Black women, we understood being called angry, ruthless, and wild in response to our selfcare. At the same time, we contended with the evidence that our bod-ies, loved ones, and possessions were most vulnerable to the ecological shifts occurring all around us.And still, as we reflected on the physical and environmental dangers that threatened Tubman's movements toward freedom, we knew that Black women's survival depended on engaging our local and global ecosystems as partners, helpmates, guides, and healers. With this in mind, Joanne invited her co-conspirator and award-winning folk artist Emily Carris-Duncan to share her awareness of the folk and the plants that stain and sustain. We shared readings and techniques. We studied other Black women's lists and made lists of things we have or might/would need for a journey when the waters rise (Butler 1993, 80). We brewed. As we kitchen table pressed (see Smith 1989) in coffee shops and studios, we veered into an emergent strategy (Brown 2017). We knew that,...