Archive of the Sea

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At the beginning of Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Sea is History,” the poet rethinks the idea that history is solely confined to land by noting that the sea holds remnants of history and can act as an archive of historical events. The sea becomes a history book that catalogs the many incidents that have occurred on or around the Caribbean waters. This shift in viewpoint becomes significant because it gives a voice to those who have long been silenced by the denial and erasure of Caribbean history as a result of not being seen as tangible or documented as other Western narratives.

Right from the start of the poem, Walcott begins questioning the definition of history by asking people of the Caribbean where their “monuments,” “battles,” “martyrs,” and “tribal memories” are (1-2). Here, Walcott engages with the traditional idea of history as something that is recorded on land and has concrete artifacts to solidify its validity. History is limited to things that have written accounts or artifacts that people can study and inspect. However, Walcott repositions this outlook when answering the question in the subsequent lines as he notes that Caribbean history is “in the grey vault” (3), also known as the sea. Rather than history being found in museums or archived on paper, “The Sea is History”(Walcott 4) and contains the narrative of Caribbean ancestry. The audience is no longer in the realm of traditional Western history since it becomes something that is written in the waves and below the water. Their identity is intermingled with the sea that witnessed the suffering of many of their ancestors and is the resting spot of those who were thrown overboard before they could be sold into slavery in a new land, making their bones the “mosaics” (Walcott 14) that become the artifacts of Caribbean history. Walcott embraces a more inclusive view of history that encompasses the environment as a place where humans can find out more about historical occurrences, since nature has been a constant throughout history. Looking at history through this environmental lens allows us to uncover the stories and histories of people who have been left out of more traditional narratives because of a lack of tangible history. We are then able to get a fuller picture of history since it becomes more inclusive with the addition of historical stories that have been locked in “the grey vault.” They are brought out from the depths of the sea to showcase how these communities do have a history and are not confined to a Western account of Caribbean history.

The Grey Archive

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In Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” there is a conversation within the poem that analyzes the concept of origin stories and what is marked a history as opposed to myth. What is considered history is framed in terrestrial markers by the speaker of the question at the beginning of the poem. The question is answered with elements of the reoccurring concept in our mermaid readings of the below surface ocean being a locked up and restricted place, but the poem will unlock that history that has always been there. While the themes of religious myth work as an entry point for comparison Walcott blends the events that happened on and within the ocean to link the land events that was remembered in the ocean. Walcott brings History as being measured outside the confines of imperialist definitions.

What stood out to me was his play on language with the ocean creatures and oceanic elements carrying double meanings to aid in the historic importance of the ocean. He links oceanic terms to the terrestrial, bringing balance and attention to a connection the terra-dominant language typically denies. Lines such as “the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women…”. Yellow cowries (on land) were used as a shell money in Africa (“cowrie”). Being made into manacles also known as handcuffs, references the enslavement of African people who were monetarily measured in their worth to the system they were violently dragged in to.

The designation of “white” cowries, carries with it the meaning of the monetary price placed on black African people enslaved by white (European/imperialist) forces. As Walcott characterizes the sea as grey, it brings not only imagery of the ocean in stormy conditions but of the result of the colors of black and white combined together. This not only holds the meaning of the acts witnessed by the ocean, but integrates the ocean into being part of the human experience, not just the other or a setting.

Work Cited

“Cowrie.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., www.britannica.com/animal/cowrie. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Walcott, Derek. “The Sea Is History.” Poets.Org, Academy of American Poets, 28 Mar. 2025, poets.org/poem/sea-history. 

Walcott’s Challenge to Eurocentric History

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In stanzas ten and eleven of Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History” employs vivid imagery, allusions, and metaphors to argue that the Caribbean’s true history is buried beneath the surface of Western narratives. Walcott’s poem asks his readers to look deeper into who gets remembered and who gets erased in history, and that history is not simply something written in stone but alive in people and places (such as the sea) that has been long silenced. 

Stanza ten of the poem challenges Eurocentric understandings and definitions of “history” and “civilization.” Walcott starts the stanza by describing “the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, / and that was Jonah, / but where is your Renaissance?” In light of some research, the poem’s allusion to Port Royal is a reference to a wealthy city, a haven for debauchery and pirates, in Jamaica which was destroyed by an earthquake and massive tidal wave in 1692. Furthermore, the poem also alludes to Jonah, the prophet swallowed by a whale. The combination of these two allusions with the tidal wave “swallowing” Port Royal parallels Jonah’s swallowing by the whale, symbolizing natural retribution and an almost divine judgement. Walcott, in tandem with the allusions, reflects on a Eurocentric narrative of progress and civilization rhetorically posing the question: “where is your Renaissance?” The question presents the audience with a sense of irony, a contrast of Europe’s time of cultural rebirth with the Caribbean’s history of destruction and loss. The tenth stanza is a reframing of Western progress taking into account the Caribbean’s past, of slavery and conquest, and gives the Caribbean a “renaissance” of its own.  

Then going into stanza eleven Walcott depicts the sea’s history, specifically the Caribbean, as something that is “submerged” not erased. Stanza eleven begins by “answering” the rhetorical question from stanza ten: “Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands / out there past the reef’s mailing shelf, / where the men-o’-war floated down” The speaker notably uses a creole-inflected dialect, “them sea-sands,” which emphasizes and asserts Caribbean identity and oral storytelling tradition. This type of narration frames the poem in a point of view that isn’t Western, but from someone and someplace that version of history has yet to be told. A version of history “locked in them sea-sands” implying that the ocean is an archive for a past tossed in the ocean at the hands of colonial suffering. 

The mystery out in the ocean

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In the film Sironomelia where it is apart of a decommissioned Nato base and the silence of the film has. It has an impact of what humans are not really knowing what is out in the world where the most isolated and unknown.

From all the previous lectures and how it impacts on what we know about mermaids is very limited. Through out the film It shows how not immersed and knowledgeable that humans know very little about the ocean and the Arctic itself. From Eric Paul Roorda article “The ocean reader theory culture, politics Introduction” where it says humans have unbalanced relationship with the Ocean and how humans are aggressively treating the Ocean as if it were nothing and only care about land borders that is worth conquering. The one thing I often notice is the there is lots of humans aren’t really in the picture because of scientific discoveries isn’t often presented. There is more to the film that is audio and sound has showed that there is a message in the film of not many people are trying to have explorations into the vastness into the unknown ocean. Humans for centuries have been know have the absence of destruction and greed.

So what the film tells us is how life is precious and it prevails in nature unseeded. What the Mermaid sees is peace and quiet that no one else can live a life like them. It is very unique to them and them alone.

Week 12: The Sea is history

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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.

Week 12: The Ocean as Archive

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 Enslavement of the African people and colonization of the Americas took place during what is described as the ‘rebirth’ or the peak of Western European civilization, the Renaissance. It is omitted from History or purposely emphasized as two separate entities of human cultural movements. The exploration of the seas, the discovery of the Americas, enslavement and massacre of indigenous Americans, and the forced enslavement and commodification of Black Africans occurred at the same time that all these civilizations were experiencing a strong rebirth in culture, that were the result of complex and intricate organizations of cities and kingdoms. However, the European perspective of history can only attest to its own grandeur.

Derek Walcott reminds us of this in ‘The Sea is History’ when he links the movements of the middle passage, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to a period highly regarded as the scientific, artistic, and architectural overhaul of European culture:

“but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf,
where the men-o’-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.
It’s all subtle and submarine (lines 33-38)”

A civilization underwater is a byproduct of the atrocities committed against black bodies on a crowded cargo ship, which, like we saw in Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home,” readily disposed of unwanted bodies in the waters of the Atlantic: children, pregnant women, the sick, the dying, or dead.

The ocean represents the history stripped from the people that were conquered and enslaved, a massive interruption and erasure of the written and oral histories of multiple cultures, and the disappearance of their people. Walcott shows us a culture carried down to the depths of the ocean, a history as distorted as our vision underwater, of which we need goggles to see better.

This poem, which repeatedly tells us what isn’t history, until nations are organized, which is history, makes us question the validity of History. Why are certain events omitted? Why do some histories count but others do not. Is there a danger in verifying that while millions of people were forced across the middle passage, and thrown into the ocean, and the survivors forced into harsh labor; that Europeans were luxuriating in what slavery and colonization had to offer: raw materials, sugar, gold, silver?

Under History, our legacy and contribution to the world did not exist until the moment everyone arrived on solid land and worked for one crown or another. What is taken from us when history is viewed from this lens but proof of our existence on earth: our lineage, our story, where and who we come from. What was experienced in the water is erased by History, but is witnessed by the Ocean and the ones buried in “that grey vault, the sea,” and there is still more to learn and recover.

The Sea as History

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In Derek Walcott’s “The Sea Is History” one line that really stood out to me was “Bone scolded by coral to bone”. This line comes in the part that is describing the middle passage which was the forced journey of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. This shows us that human loss becomes part of the natural world. When Walcott chooses to blend bone and coral and death and growth it shows us that the sea doesn’t just hide history, it transforms it. Walcott is suggesting that the Caribbean’s identity is literally built on the remains of its past. 

When Walcott writes of bones “soldered” by coral he turns the ocean into both a graveyard and an artist. “Soldered” is usually a word used in metalwork. It means to fuse pieces together permanently. By using this word it makes me think that the sea itself is welding different fragments of lives into a new creation. The coral becomes a natural sculptor that binds human remains into living coral reefs. In this poem, death doesn’t end the story, it becomes a foundation for a new life to begin in an ecosystem that keeps growing. The bones are never truly gone; they now become a part of the sea’s body. 

This line also shows us how history in the Caribbean isn’t written in books, it’s embedded in the landscapes. When Walcott says the sea “has locked them up” he’s talking about memories being submerged but not erased. The coral literally covers the bones of the enslaved and preserves them. This is sort of like a natural archive that holds memory in silence instead of language. For Walcott, the sea is beautiful but inseparable from the violence that shaped it. When you look at the ocean you don’t just see water but centuries of hidden stories. 

By fusing bones and coral, this poem brings the idea that history is something that is separate from nature. The Caribbean’s landscape is historical because it carries physical evidence of what happened. The line “bone soldered by coral to bone” captures the scary truth that the past is never gone. It’s still there living quietly beneath the surface. The Caribbean’s history is not shown in books but in the coral’s slow but persistent growth. 

Week 12 Reading Response

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

In the poem, “The Sea is History” by Derek Walcott the excerpt above caught my attention because it shines a light on lost history of slaves while on ships, especially the enslaved women who were often thrown overboard while being pregnant.

Dissecting the first line, “plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,” with finding the meaning of each word. Plangent definition, according to Cambridge English Dictionary, is a deep/low sound expressing sadness. A Harp is a large wooden stringed instrument. The phrase, Babylonian bondage, is closely referencing The Holy Bible and when the enslavement of Jews occurred in Babylon. So, the author is comparing the sorrowful music of Jewish people being enslaved to black people being enslaved as well. Suffering the same, if not worse, fate like them. It’s a bitter way of showing how history tends to repeat itself and colonization and superiority never dies.

The second line, “as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women,” is more focused on the enslaved females being drowned and forgotten that upon discovering their corpses their shackles seemed to be lined with white cowries. White cowries are a shell for a sea snail. During the TransAtlantic slave trade, cowries were used as currency to purchase slaves. So there is a heavy negative connection to this sea made item and it’s still in control of deceased slaves by having something concrete and constricting on their body.

In the ocean, the manacles of white cowries will remain as evidence and a makeshift tomb embedded with history in the sea, because even if human bodies disintegrate over time, the history of our truth is there where no white man is willing to explore and manipulate.

Week 12: The Sea is History

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In Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Sea Is History”, one statement that stood out to me was: “The sea is History.” This short statement explains the deepness of the challenge to conventional perspectives of history and encourages readers to continuously rethink what composes history. This statement puts forth Walcott’s larger argument that real Caribbean history does not exist in official monuments or texts, but lies beneath the ocean, as the depths of the ocean represent buried memories that resist colonial suppression and seek reclamation.

At its most basic meaning, “The sea is history,” suggests the sea to be a vibrant archive, a store of pasts, saturated with the memories, stories, and traumas of people in the Caribbean. This statement invites consideration of the writings of history in any sense of monumentalism, written records, and even grand narratives that the poem suggests are either absent or erased from the Caribbean experience. Walcott’s positioning makes the sea more than a natural landscape and draws our attention to the sea as an agent of archiving memory through history. The sea is home to the bones of enslaved ancestors as Walcott notes, “soldered by coral,” that reference history that is physically and metaphorically submerged, under colonial amnesia.

The statement further signals that history is fluid and not just found in a book-it is changing and therefore, should be studied as we do water for its depth. The fluidity of the sea and its hanging tides and depths also resonates with the endless, fragile return to claim identity and histories in the Caribbean. The assertion also invokes thoughts that undermine simple/accepted stories of history through implying that history should be studied below the surface, and consequences of proximity to loss, silence and fragmentation (often the narratives that govern postcolonial memory) can be accepted if not embraced.

In addition, Walcott, through his juxtaposition of sea and history, attempts to link the Caribbean experience with other human experiences. The sea–the actual spatial/geographic site of the transatlantic slave trade–connects many histories of individual and collective exile, suffering, and triumph to experiences similar with, and within, a global context. The sea is a site of trauma; yet it is also a site of resurrection of restored, reclaimed stories that have been willfully erased and forgotten. The sea seemingly encapsulates both trauma and restoration. The sea has both a traumatic and redemptive significance, bestowed with theological and cultural significance, and most especially with respect to the connections made to the belief that, like the sea, history is both grave and womb of life.

In short, “The sea is history,” is a succinct statement that asserts a claim for history to be re-conceived as a contested living organism that exists within a collective remembrance beyond an existence that is simply written. It asserts and acknowledges some of the histories that have fallen out of the collective Caribbean consciousness and have contributed to Caribbean identity, and it also provides a strong engagement and relationship to Caribbean historiography that honors the past and provides a space for Caribbean people to engage with history now.

Aerial Spirits and the Natural World–Halloween Extra Credit

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While thinking of our relationship with the natural world, I wanted to embody something less tangible than animals or plants–but as something we oftentimes take for granted and can’t live without: air! Air, in its invisibility, surrounds and sustains every living thing in this world, yet we rarely notice it until it’s either gone or polluted. That invisibility feels symbolic of how easily we overlook what’s essential, how often we ignore the unseen forces that hold together our world–and our emotions. Dressing as “air” became my way of representing both that invisibility and necessity.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the idea of air takes on a spiritual and moral weight. After all of her suffering and transformation into a human, the little mermaid becomes an “aerial spirit,” a daughter of air, freed from the physical confinement of the sea and her body. She can no longer belong to the water, nor can she belong to the human world–so she transitions into something of the between, a breath, a presence that moves unseen. That transformation struck me as deeply environmental. Air exists between worlds: the sea meets it, the earth breathes it, and it circulates through everything. To me, dressing as “air” was a way of acknowledging that liminal space, that delicate threshold and boundary where transformation and connection all coexist.

In the ending of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the mermaid’s transformation into an air spirit is bittersweet. She loses her voice, her body, but gains a kind of transcendence–a second life of observation and care, unseen yet intimately involved with the world. That mirrors our own relationship to nature today because of the way we impact what we can’t see. It also reminds me of the moral undertone Andersen ties to the air spirits–they earn their souls by performing good deeds, by aiding humankind. I thought about that while putting together my costume–how air, in its quiet omnipresence, is always giving, sustaining, even when we don’t notice.

So, in choosing to dress as “air,” I wanted to embody that unseen grace of Andersen’s aerial spirit–the aftermath of longing, the cost of transformation, and the quiet power of something that exists everywhere but is rarely seen. It’s all about presence without visibility, giving without reward, and how even what seems weightless can carry the heaviest of meanings.

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