Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home” focuses on the Igbo peoples time on a slave ship through the middle passage, and who were thrown out to the sea. Tesfaye’s depiction of this story de-centers land as the main source of history on earth, and instead portrays the ocean as an ancestral world of transformation. There is fluidity to her imagery, with floating figures, womb-like forms, and gentle water coloring creating a space of rebirth, continuity, and liberation for a people considered lost to history (3:56).

The setting in the given frame isn’t merely a backdrop but a fully lived in, active, and inhabited world. The use of water color dissolves borders and boundaries and creates something more fluid and alive, contrasting that of the static and grounded imagery associated with land. In western civilization history is written on and in monuments and borders, it is fixed and owned. Imagery in the short film rejects that, through the frame ancestry is something in motion and situated in memory rather than geography. By turning to water, Tesfaye implores her audience to “see” in a decolonized point of view. In resisting the idea that home, belonging, and history are anchored to land one remembers the history of people thrown to the sea. There are people, such as the Igbo people, whose history—usually that of migration—is tied to the ocean. In this case, the ocean is a sort of archive without any edges where spirits go to live, transform and remember. 

What is most striking in the frame is the curled, womb-like figures. Though these women’s bodies were tossed in the sea with intentions of death, the imagery of the figures suggests a sense of rebirth despite not being on solid ground of earth. These forms are untethered, they float in suspension emphasizing a weightlessness compared to a rootedness. Furthermore, many of the figures cradle their wombs; their nurture is literally happening in water much like how we are born from the water in the womb. The ocean itself becomes a symbol of the womb, a sight of gestation instead of intended destruction from Western colonizers. Western ideology often imagines birth and creation coming from solid ground, Adam from Earth and civilization from soil for example. Tesfaye shifts this land centric point of view to that of creation from the sea. This aligns more closely to African mythologies where water spirits (such as Omambala) embody life and power. The given frame, specifically, reframes the Ocean as a source giving life rather than devouring it, offering a counter narrative to that of a Westernized history. The Igbo people are depicted as a part of history that lives on instead of lost souls in the sea. 

Tesfaye’s short film invites the audience to rethink how history is written. That a terra centric history is not the only history just because it is what is most commonly taught. The enslaved people who were thrown out to sea have a history, and though it may not be on land it lives on. “The Water Will Carry Us Home” is a short film that asks people to see a history of water and the sea, one beyond Westernized ideology.