This week’s poem, The Sea is History by Derek Walcott, was incredibly thought-provoking for me. I really loved how much it related to last week’s film, The Water Will Carry Us Home. Specifically, this stanza,

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women

I really appreciate the comparison used here. equating the sorrow of the Jews who were exiled in Babylonia to the cries of the slaves being transported to the Americas. Using the Old Testament and ancient religious history to make the history of the sea (a setting for slavery) more comprehensible or digestible. The use of “plangent” tells us that the cries of the enslaved people were incredibly loud and mournful and will forever echo in the sea. The shells of the sea (cowries), compared to shackles, highlight just how awful the deaths of these drowned women really were. Even in their death, they were still slaves, but now bound to a different kind of brutality. Although they have passed, they are still shackled to the horrific circumstances that brought them to their watery graves.

This relates to The Water Will Carry Us Home in the sense that these women’s souls still linger in the ocean. The sea holds history in the form of the lives that it has taken and the bodies it holds. After all, the sea may have filled their lungs with water and may hold thousands of slaves, but it was humans who cast those bodies out and disregarded them. It is not humans that remember those horrible acts or hold the evidence, but rather the ocean itself.