The Future of Listening: A Fictitious Conversation with a Student of Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Introduction: This is a fictitious conversation on listening—an imagined dialogue between an unnamed interviewer and a student, a devoted listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Though this conversation never took place in reality, it is an attempt at deep listening to her work, her ethos, and her poetic approach to knowledge, as absorbed and interpreted by someone who has been profoundly shaped by her teachings.

The questions posed are meant to open space rather than close it, to invite resonance rather than merely extract knowledge. Listening itself is the framework of this exchange—a practice of attunement to what is said and unsaid, to what is remembered and what remains to be imagined. It is a conversation that invites the reader into a resonant space, where listening is not just an act, but an ongoing practice of care, transformation, and survival.

—

Interviewer: Alexis, I want to begin with the premise that listening is not just an act of receiving, but of creating. That to listen is to compose a world, to sculpt silence, to gather echoes into new meanings. What does listening mean to you as a practice, as a way of being in the world?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Listening is the first act of love. Before we even know how to name it, before language folds itself around us, we listen. In the womb, we listen to the oceanic rhythm of our mother’s blood, the percussive pulsing of her heart. And then later, we listen to what is said and, more crucially, to what is unsaid. Listening is how we learn what we are allowed to be. And sometimes, listening is how we begin to undo those limitations.

But I love what you said—listening as composing a world. Yes. Listening is creative. It is generative. Because when we listen, we allow something outside of ourselves to reshape our inner terrain. And the moment we do that, we become different. We become new. This is why listening is a practice of transformation, why it is so often resisted by those who want to remain unchanged.

Interviewer: That makes me think about listening as an ethical practice. If to listen is to let the world enter you, then what we choose to listen to—or refuse to listen to—shapes our responsibilities. Do you think there are forms of listening that the world needs more of? Ways of listening that don’t yet exist, but should?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Absolutely. I think about the kind of listening that doesn’t presume to know what it is hearing. Because so often, we listen only to confirm what we already believe. But what if we listened without expectation? What if we listened with the belief that what is speaking to us is carrying something we do not yet understand, something we need?

And I think about listening across species, across time. We need a listening practice for the voices we have been trained not to hear—the voices of water, of wind, of ancestors, of beings we do not even have names for. There is a listening we have not yet learned because colonialism, capitalism, and supremacy have trained us to hear only what is convenient to power. But the world is still whispering to us, singing to us, warning us. Are we listening?

Interviewer: And yet, listening is difficult. It requires a kind of attunement, a willingness to be vulnerable, to be changed. How do we cultivate a listening that is deep, one that does not merely extract but honors what is being shared?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: I return to breath. Breath is the practice. When we listen deeply, we are listening not just with our ears, but with our whole bodies. It is a kind of presence, an embodied openness. And breath teaches us how to do that. It teaches us to receive without grasping, to be present without controlling.

And I think listening requires unlearning. We need to unlearn the habit of listening only to respond, of listening only to be right. Instead, what if we listened to become more spacious? What if listening was not about accumulating knowledge but about dissolving barriers? When we listen in that way, we become permeable, and in that permeability, we become something else: a chorus, a bridge, a vessel.

Interviewer: That feels like a poetics of listening. Listening as a poetic act rather than a utilitarian one. But also, I hear in what you are saying a politics of listening. How do we think about the political stakes of who gets to be listened to? Who is silenced? What is ignored?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Every form of oppression is a form of imposed silence. And every revolution begins with listening. Not just to what is being said, but to what has been buried, erased, drowned out. There are entire histories submerged beneath dominant narratives, voices that have been systematically ignored. Listening is how we excavate them, how we bring them back into relationship.

This is why listening is not neutral. It is a choice. When we choose to listen to the marginalized, the dispossessed, the exiled, we are making a political decision. We are saying that their voices matter, that their knowledge is valuable. And that is dangerous to power, because power depends on control over who is heard and who is not.

Interviewer: I keep thinking about how listening is tied to survival, not just in the human sense, but ecologically. Your work in Undrowned engages deeply with marine life, with the wisdom of species that listen in ways we do not. What can we learn from them?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Oh, everything. We are so arrogant in our belief that only humans have knowledge worth listening to. But take whales, for example. They listen across vast distances, across generations. A whale’s song is a form of memory, a form of teaching. And whales do not listen just with their ears; they listen with their entire bodies, through vibration, through resonance. What would it mean for us to listen like that?

And then there are octopuses, who listen not just through sound but through color, through texture. Their bodies are instruments of attunement. Or coral reefs, which are symphonies of collective listening, where organisms respond to the slightest shifts in water temperature, in chemical composition. The ocean is a great listener, a teacher of listening. But we have not been listening to it. And now, the ocean is rising, speaking in a language of flood and storm. What happens when we refuse to listen for too long?

Interviewer: That makes me wonder—what is the future of listening? What forms of listening are still waiting to emerge?

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: I hope for a listening that is more-than-human, a listening that is planetary. I hope for a listening that is not about extraction but about communion, about reciprocity. And I wonder—what if we could listen to the future? What if the future is already whispering to us, calling to us through dreams, through intuition, through the things we cannot quite explain?

I think the future of listening will require a breaking open. It will require a surrendering of the rigid ways we think listening should happen. Maybe listening will not always be about words. Maybe it will be about sensation, about frequency, about patterns we have not yet learned to recognize. Maybe it will be about listening to what we have tried to forget. Maybe the future of listening is already here, waiting for us to become quiet enough to hear it.

Interviewer: That feels like a beautiful place to pause, though I hesitate to call it an ending. Because listening, as you describe it, is not something we finish. It is a continuous unfolding, a practice, an opening. Thank you, Alexis. This has been a moment of listening in itself.

A student/listener of Alexis Pauline Gumbs: Thank you. May we all keep listening, and may we all be changed by what we hear.