“Water,” writes Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, “is the first thing in my memory. The sea sounded like a thousand secrets, all whispered at the same time.”[1] What might it mean to read the ocean as whispers and secrets – as an archive? What pasts might float ashore, what new stories might be carried on the currents, what materials might be washed away, eroding into unknowable and irretrievable memories?
As Derek Walcott reminds us, “The sea is History.”[2] The ocean is a repository of human memory, both metaphorical and material. Polluted with the debris of the Atlantic slave trade and histories of indenture, as well as the muck of penal ships, refugee journeys, and other detainments, these seas are not the “timeless, unchanging, unmarked, deeply unhistoric” waters of our imagination.[3] Rather, the ocean – whose histories are shaped by imperial quests for wealth, domination and control – is unknowable. Too vast, it is overwhelming. Too mobile, it challenges desires for fixity, solidity, and control.[4] Time, here, is not linear; rather, it is relational, experienced through the interaction of different forces – terrestrial, aqueous, and lunar.
If the ocean is unbounded, how might this unboundedness also allow us to imagine the archives of enslavement differently: What happens when archives of containment, capture, violence, and indeed erasure, flood?[5] When stories exceed their banks? When identities rupture, surge, spill, overflow, escape?[6] Alternatively, following Carolyn Steedman, if archives are places of dreams,[7] then what might it mean to imagine lost, silenced, and forgotten dreams through oceanic swells, currents, sprays, and saltings?
Scholars and poets of the Black Atlantic figure water – here understood primarily as the Atlantic of the Middle Passage – as a site of haunting that is both life giving and life destroying. In the words of Guyanese poet Grace Nichols, “Yes, I rippling to the music / I slipping pass the ghost ships / Watching old mast turn flowering tree / Even in the heart of all this bacchanal / The Sea returns to haunt this carnival.”[8]Thinking about oceans as archives asks us to honour not only those for whom the ocean has been a grave, but also those who have journeyed across its waves, journeys that transformed people into chattel, erasing names for numbers, journeys haunted by violent erasures and unfinished dreams.[9]
Thinking about oceans as archives asks us also to think about time in relation to memory. In the words of Janine McLeod, the sea might be imagined as “an infinite water in which everything is retained, and where all times mingle together.”[10] Oceanic time cannot be contained in an endless march forward: it cycles forward and back with the tides, washing with the waves, eroding land and memories.[11]
Oceanic archival thinking requires us to interrogate notions of boundaries and borders, the ways that water erodes shorelines, remapping territory and undermining claims to land, and to think about time and geography in relation to memory — “an infinite water in which everything is retained, and where all times mingle together.”[12] Along the shores in Suriname, for example, entire plantations have eroded, their histories – and their violences – claimed by the sea. And yet, in the process, erosion – as a form of oceanic time – has also revealed submerged truths, with lost slave cemeteries rising to the surface.
There is both a softness and a brittleness to oceanic time. Tumbling rocks soften in ocean waves; rough edges become smooth. But we also need to attend to the salting that both hardens and burns, preserves and destroys. We might consider, here, the essential role of salted, preserved fish. Salt fish was fed to the enslaved and remains an essential part of contemporary Caribbean diets, culture, and identity, but also, and simultaneously, is destructive in relation to broader questions of health. But we can also look to the material conditions of enslaved labour. In The History Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Mary Prince recounts her time working in the salt ponds on Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the sores, boils, and blisters that ate right down to the bone.[13]
In the haunted space-time of oceans as archives, past, present, and impossible-but-hoped-for futures collide with one another. How can we make sense of histories of ruination? How can we, following M. NourbeSe Philip, tell impossible stories that must be told?[14] But also, how can we live well in what Christina Sharpe calls the wake, a mode of reckoning and a reminder of a “past that is not yet past,”[15] in the ongoing afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade? What stories might the ocean be able to tell us, and what might we learn? What might it mean, following Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to breathe with the ocean?[16]
The work of artist and scholar Camille Turner offers one way forward. In 2019, when interviewed about an art installation that considered Newfoundland and Labrador’s imbrication in the transatlantic slave trade, she underscored the importance of understanding these pasts. “We didn’t create this history,” she said. “None of us did. We weren’t here, but it is what shaped us. By not dealing with it, we can never move on from here. We can’t really move into a future where things are equitable. So I think it’s really important to acknowledge these stories.”
This blog post draws on an essay I wrote for Daze Jefferies: Stay Here Stay How Stay (St. John’s: The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, 2024), as well as on “Thinking with Oceans,” a blog post I wrote for the Social Sciences and Humanities Ocean Research and Education (SSHORE) network (https://sshoresite.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/thinking-with-oceans/). My thanks to The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery for permission to quote from the essay.
[1] Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2001, 8.
[2] Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History,” in Collected Poems, 1948-1984. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 364. https://www.theparisreview.org/poetry/7020/the-sea-is-history-derek-walcott
[3] Suvendrini Perera, “Oceanic Corpo-Graphies, Refugee Bodies and the Making and Unmaking of Waters.” Feminist Review 103 (2013): 58-79, 62.
[4] See, for example, Renisa Mawani’s oceanic methodology in Across Oceans of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), which relies on currents layering over and against one another.
[5] For more on flooding and memory, see Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” where she writes: “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was” (“The site of memory.” In Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser, 83-102. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995, 98-99.
[6] See, for example, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
[7] Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
[8] Grace Nichols, I Have Crossed an Ocean, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2010, 103.
[9] For one powerful example of restorying the Middle Passage, see M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, Westeyan University Press, 2008.
[10] Janine McLeod. “Water and the Material Imagination: Reading the Sea of Memory against the Flows of Capital.” In Thinking With Water, eds. Cecilia Chen, Janine McLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, 40-60 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 40.
[11] Stefanie Hessler, “Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science.” In Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview Through Art and Science, ed. Stefanie Hessler, 31-81 (Boston: MIT Press, 2018); Mawani, Across Oceans of Law; and McLeod. “Water and the Material Imagination.”
[12] McLeod, “Water and the Material Imagination,” 40.
[13] Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. London: F. Westley and A.H. Davis, 1831)
[14] M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
[15] In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 13.
[16] Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020).
