Heat Is Not a Metaphor
I wanted to write a poem about how the extreme heat of the ocean is breaking my heart, but the whales beat me to it. In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively, they stranded themselves on the shore. As soon as they lost the support of the water, their chest walls crushed their internal organs. They literally broke their hearts. Choreographed under helicopter cameras.
I want to write a poem about how capitalism is a sinking ship and how the extreme wealth-hoarding and extractive polluting systems that benefit a few billionaires are destroying our planet and killing us all. But the orcas beat me to it. Off the Iberian coast of Europe, the orcas collaborated and taught each other how to sink the yachts of the superrich. They literally sank the boats. While Twitter cheered.
The sinking ship is no longer a metaphor. The broken heart is no longer a metaphor. Who needs a metaphor in times as hot and blunt as ours? Let’s make it plain.
Marine mammals have been my poetry teachers for several years now. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, I documented my awe and wonder at how these animals do, with grace, what I flail at every day, breathing in the unbreathable circumstances of global racial capital, racist sexist ableist systemic violence.
Living on a planet with rapidly rising ocean levels, it seems obvious to me that we should pay attention to our closest relatives in the sea. But now sea lions, whales, and other marine mammals are leaving the ocean, confronting beachgoers and boaters, making themselves impossible to ignore.
My theory? With a boost from our faster communication technology and crowdsourced worldwide media to spread the news, marine mammals are coming up out of the ocean, as they have been for decades, to tell us it’s too damn hot. And why do we matter so much? Why should we be so arrogant as to assume marine mammals are telling us anything? The answer is in the question: because it’s our fault.
You know this already. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels, disproportionately burned by corporations and first-world consumers, are drastically heating the planet, causing extreme weather events, raising the temperature of the ocean and the water levels and impacting every species that has adapted to what author Jeff Goodell calls “the Goldilocks zone” of survivable temperatures in his book The Heat Will Kill You First, published last month. Alarmingly, a study this summer estimated a 95 percent chance that the entire system of currents that keep the Atlantic Ocean and every ecosystem it touches in relative balance (i.e., the Gulf Stream and other currents) will collapse as soon as 2025. Drastically. Extreme. Alarmingly. I have to use adverbs and adjectives to emphasize what I am saying here because I haven’t learned yet how to break my Black heart a hundredfold on a beach where everyone can see it. I haven’t taught my friends and family to intentionally sink the most useless ships.
Since what I have to offer are words, I will continue to write in extremes. For example, in Undrowned I suggested that because of the impact of rising temperatures on the Gulf Stream, we are living on a menopausal planet. The whole Earth is going through what my elders cryptically called “the change.” In this midst of this heat wave, which has led to at least one of my cherished Black feminist elders spending a night in the emergency room, I’m even more convinced.
Let me be clear: “Living on a menopausal planet” does not mean the extreme heat we are experiencing is just a natural part of Earth’s life cycle, as climate-change deniers claim. The volatile temperatures we are experiencing are a result of toxic human actions—just like the hot flashes experienced by menopausal people (many women, many gender-expansive people, anyone who has ever had a uterus or ovaries or stewarded the hormone estrogen) may be impacted by the prevalence of hormone-injected animals and processed food in our diets.
Yesterday, my big-sister mentor, the menopause expert and reproductive justice advocate Omisade Burney-Scott, taught me that the heat menopausal people experience can also be impacted by the long-studied relationship between estrogen and cortisol, the stress hormone; and that for oppressed groups of people—who, as a study at Yale recently confirmed, experience higher cortisol levels triggered by systemic violence against themselves and their communities—volatile body temperatures and other menopause systems can be heightened. The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation has confirmed that women of color are experiencing more volatile hot flashes because of these and other factors. I wonder if the “climate anxiety” we are collectively experiencing is increasing cortisol levels, too. Scientific studies will have to work that out. If the heat doesn’t kill us first.
Whereas menopause—in which a body moves beyond a central need for estrogen—is natural, inevitable, volatile symptoms like extreme hot flashes actually are not. Similarly, while change is inevitable for this planet and all life, the heat we are now experiencing is not. It is the result of toxic systems that are putting stress on every one of Earth’s ecosystems at the same time.
I think menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis, and not only because I am a Black woman in my early 40s with menopause in my imminent future. It is also because our most effective poets, the whales, are the other beings on Earth who also experience menopause. Orcas and pilot whales specifically are two of the four species of toothed whales in which the scientific community has identified and studied menopause. (Note that pilot whale studies have focused on the short-finned pilot whales who live in shallow water—and have also performed mass strandings over the past decade—while the long-finned pilot whales who live in deeper water have mostly evaded scientific study. And good for them!)
Orca and pilot whale communities have both also demonstrated that they follow the leadership of what even the scientist poets call “matriarchs,” the elder mothers, past their years of possibly giving birth. Kate Sprogis, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia, theorized that it may have been that the 97 long-finned pilot whales who died on the beach followed a grandmother to shore. What if instead of imagining they died because of her mistake, we imagine they participated in her protest? Biologists keeping track of the orcas who are sinking boats trace the training practice to White Gladis, an orca grandmother. Is it possible these whale leaders learned what they learned, decided what they decided, taught what they taught during menopause? And if so, so what?
Omisade Burney-Scott suggests menopause is a ceremony, a liminal space, a space of possibility. “During liminal periods of transformation,” she writes, “social hierarchies may be reversed or even temporarily dissolved. The constancy of cultural traditions can become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.”
I think about Fannie Lou Hamer, victim of a forced hysterectomy, and Ella Baker in her wise years creating the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and audaciously pushing forward a civil rights agenda in the center of white supremacist violence in the 1960s. I think about Harriet Tubman’s audacity; I think about the upheaval caused by Dominican labor activist Mamá Tingó’s sugar plantation strikes. What did experiencing a drastic change in their bodies teach these community mothers about the possibility of change on the scale of our entire society?
What if we live on a menopausal planet, where underneath this heat, we are supposed to be learning something about change? What if this is where and when we collectively find the wisdom and maturity that comes from letting go of the story about what we are producing, and moving to the eldership vision of what is sustainable for all of us collectively? What if menopause is the greatest undersung gift? The experience that grants us a multigenerational, multi-species consciousness we need. And what are the words that could reach you and get you to join me in trusting the bravest among us, leaders accountable to multiple generations, who have lived long enough to know what is worth risking and when to risk it? Where is my maturity? When will I stop mistaking the excess heat of a toxic system of relations for love? Where else in my life is heat a warning? How can we stop dissociating from what is happening to our largest body, this planet? Is that your chest collapsing or the rainforest burning? What am I sacrificing to try to earn a premium spot on a sinking ship? Is that your breaking heart or an iceberg shattering? And how cool would it be if none of this were a metaphorical? Oh, relief to your furrowed brow, peace to your steaming blowhole. How cool would it be if we followed our teachers and lived what love requires?
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