In Gabrielle Tesfaye’s film The Water Will Carry Us Home the artist shows a vision of the people murdered in the Middle Passage during the slave trade as still being part of this world even after their deaths. As the ocean is often depicted as the void of Earth, the act of killing in this way left little physical evidence of the atrocities committed compared to the terrestrial that proceeded and followed the path of the Middle Passage. This film shows how those murdered are still part of Earth even when they are not part of the terrestrial plane.

Being stolen from their homes and land, Tesfaye depicted a life in the ocean where the water deities of mermaids welcome those murdered by drowning to a new home in the water. Many of the people in the film who are killed are pregnant women, with their deaths it shows the end of lineage that happened during the heinous act of enslavement.

Tesfaye included in her film not only the second or next lives of those murdered but the continuation of life in the ocean. There is love, community, and descendants; all of the things enslavers thought they ended by throwing people into the void of the ocean to cover their crimes. These murderers at the time viewed this as minor disruption to the surface world, but no matter what they believed the bodies and souls of those killed stayed in the world and are still part of it. These brutal acts are remembered and those lost are honored and live on in the world that they will always be a part of. Tesfaye also shows a person with white hair who is murdered by drowning, there is generational significance to this as elders are often the source of knowledge and explanation. Without elders’ generational exchanges, knowledge will be stopped and in turn strength in cultural understanding and beliefs. But Tesfaye shows that the knowledge was not stopped.

Tesfaye bookends this vision depicted in paintings and stop-motion with filming herself in spiritual practice, adding not only that there is a terrestrial remembrance but shifting the images away from the imagined images and grounding it in a reality that this happened to real people. She connects to the sand and water and can hear the voices of those whose next lives are within the ocean, showing the continuation that happened not only in the ocean but on land.

swallowing up