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Final Essay

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If the ocean could talk, it would tell many interesting stories, secrets and knowledge. To think about all the information humans do not know but yet still feel intrigued into creating and telling stories that connect with the ocean is an advancement that we have seen today. Whether it be fictional or factual, the creation allows humans to feel connected to the ocean without having to be close to the water. The impact that humans have through works of art and literature as a tool of representation has allowed this advancement to flourish. As Steve Mentz has created, Blue Humanities, the intersection of science and humanities, two fields that are filled with different materials but yet wouldn’t be the same without the other. 

The ocean used to be viewed as a tool for travel and/ or for a space to regroup in a relaxed form. While this is still true, the ocean has been greatly appreciated through the arts and humanities. Adding a mind and body in connection to the ocean, almost as if it was a person. John Gills in The Blue Humanities, touches on this stating “ Early modern science knew much more about the heavens than about the oceans; and more attention was paid to extracting the wealth of the seas, namely fish, than to the waters themselves.”(Gills) “Extracing” was the correct word for this, as humans only looked at the ocean as something profitable and beneficial to them. Not paying any mind to the lives in the ocean or the ocean itself. Gills explains that up until the 19th century, “The focus was almost entirely on the ships and the skills of the men who manned them, with the sea itself almost an afterthought.”(Gills) The ocean itself is the foundation for the ships and skills of the men, the men had to have to learn and study the science of the ocean in order to perfect their craft at work. So to think of the ocean as an afterthought was to reject the ocean as what it was— an archive that never stops growing. 

This came to be with the help of Blue Humanities, created by Steve Mentz. So what is Blue Humanities? On one hand we have science, very logical and factual driven, who meets humanities, artistic and full of creation, thus creating Blue Humanities. A question that could bounce from this idea is how can these two fields have anything to do with each other if they are quite the opposite? Perhaps the material is different but in order to connect to others on a level of understanding that produces creation and advancement in our world we need the numbers and empathy. John Gills, writer of article The Blue Humanities, explains this combination through the comparative literature department stating “Comparative literature scholars like Margaret Cohen have shown how sea stories, concerned originally with the mechanics of sailing, came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to focus on the ocean itself, turning it into a space within which to imagine modernity.”(Gills) Gills acknowledges the mechanics of sailing that were center focused in comparative literature stories, this is the more logistic and factual side, and how the transition into an imaginative modernity has become what we now see today. When reflecting back on the change in standards, it is important to address what came before so that the past ideas are not lost and abandoned. Past ideas are to be used as a guidance into forming new ways of thinking. 

As an example of creation coming about from this advancement, Gabrielle Tesfaye created a short film titled The Water Will Carry Us Home, in which the story is about a group of female slaves that were thrown overboard on a boat and fall into the hands of mermaids that care for them. Throughout the film, there are images and passages of history of the slaves—perhaps history that was once forgotten or ignored, Tesfaye’s inclusion of this brings light to the real situations that human beings were once in. The slaves being pushed into the ocean to be forgotten was a way to replicate the concealment of history, as anything that is thrown in the ocean will be very hard to retrieve back out, thus being lost. Tesfaye uses her artistic ability to create a video with such detail in order to tell a story, including real images and stories of human beings. This is just what the Blue Humanities promotes, with the connection of science and the humanities as one would not be the same without the other. 

Human connection is very valuable especially when it is created through a human and their emotions towards a remembrance or present state, Bringing back this connection to John Gills he reflects on the symbol of eternity, “It became a symbol of eternity, a comfort to those who, having lost their faith in divine dispensation of everlasting life, came to see in its apparently timeless flows evidence of nature’s immortality and a secular promise of life everlasting.”(Gills) This comfort in faith can be very touching through humans as we crave a connection with something or someone bigger than us. To take away the worries and questions and to bring comfort and answers. The ocean has replicated that sensation for some, it has moved people in a way that they are able to go near a body of water and do some reflection. The serenity that makes humans sane can come from the ocean, which was once viewed as ugly and nonuseful besides for work purposes. The idea of an everlasting life that will continue on after the passing of all of us can bring peace to who we are and how small we are in this world.

Through Steve Mentz creation of Blue Humanities and the open and transformative minds of humans, the ocean has gained a new sense of appreciation. It has become an outlet for many in regards to faith, comfort and artistic creation, all while not removing the science behind the ocean. The Blue Humanities does not remove or take away the factors of both science and art but enhances both of them in order to make sense that on cannot be the same without the other. 

Works Cited

Gillis, John R., et al. “The Blue Humanities.” National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities. Accessed 15 Dec. 2025. 

Tesfaye, Gabrielle. “The Water Will Carry Us Home.” YouTube, youtu.be/dGlhXhIiax8?si=rcc7BYSc9I-XQHmP. Accessed 15 Dec. 2025. 

Final Paper: Acknowledge the water!

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(Tesfaye The Water Will Carry Us Home – Official) 

Archives are usually known as a room with walls filled with historically rich books and documents, in other words, inanimate. Now, imagine water being able to hold history. That would be insane because our earth is mainly covered by water, what would that mean for us, humans? It could mean that there is plenty of unknown history surrounding us because no one has bothered to look into the ocean rather than see through it as a passageway to get to another location. Certain cultures use the water as a metaphorical book binder to hold their ancestral stories such as Yoruba culture. The film, The Water Will Carry Us Home directed by Gabrielle Tesfaye portrays the ocean as an archive of enslaved Africans’ memories, visually emphasized in the video still of a woman tossing white roses, and conceptually reinforced by John R. Gillis and The Penguin Book of Mermaids.

Water helps organisms survive, would that be for history, too? Yoruba culture has placed an importance on water to act as a living archive that holds memory of their myths tied in with real historical events such as the drownings of enslaved women, sometimes pregnant, and young girls that were tossed overboard on purpose during the Transatlantic slave trade. This is all shown in The Water Will Carry Us Home as Yemoja is shown discovering drowned African enslaved women and transforming them into mere beings. Yemoja is known as a yoruba water deity of the sea, fertility, and is the origin for life beginning. She provides the framework for Yoruba and other cultures to tie in History to their mythical ancestry. The sea has been around for centuries before us and will continue to be here after us, still encapsulated with the History of enslaved African Americans, that is for sure. This knowledge of having African ancestors throughout the sea isn’t well known to many because of the anglo-washed history fed to us Americans throughout our educational careers. No matter how much their truth keeps getting silenced / erased, it will be able to survive lifetimes and  be easily accessible for connection to their story. Yoruba culture embraces all of nature as capable of holding history. Americans only believe that history is valid if it’s on land and we are able to see it with our own eyes. Which minimizes our perspective of the world and lack of bandwidth to expand our knowledge. 

Water is a living archive to a whole new world of information that isn’t easily disclosed to humans. Allowing for it to be in a pristine condition that isn’t erased by anglo-obsessive historians that only believe their truth. The first step to accepting the ocean as an archive is to acknowledge that the sea exists which John Gillis mentions in his article,“What might be called the second discovery of the sea, beginning in the late eighteenth century and accelerating in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, produced a vast expansion of scientific and humanistic knowledge of the sea as a three-dimensional living thing with a history, geography, and a life all its own”(Gillis et al.). The second step is to respect the ocean while trying to explore its features as much as it allows humans to. While doing so, it will look like another world and make us realise that humans aren’t the only beings on this earth that need water to survive. Water rejuvenates the earth and allows for nature to thrive, “Given that everything we need to survive, in one way or another, depends on water, it is unsurprising that people across place and time have ascribed religious significance to water and developed water symbolism”(Bacchilega and Brown,pg.xv). These authors provide a reasoning as to why cultures assign an importance to water and the positive aura water exudes to humans that leads them to building their History around that! All water holds memory despite it being years and what keeps it alive is not only the earth but humans storytelling, as well. 

Visual media helps the audiences understand what and why the art being shown is important such as the video still I chose from The Water Will Carry Us Home. The still showcases a woman standing on a manmade ledge a few feet in the ocean tossing white roses onto the sea water. The significance behind this simple action is her acknowledgement of her Yoruba enslaved ancestors in the ocean still having their roots be able to envelop the roses she tossed into the water. She is paying tribute to those lost lives that haven’t been acknowledged by mainstream anglo-history on the transatlantic slave trade. Her choice in white roses and clothing reminds the viewers that this ritual isn’t demonic or negative in any form, it’s just a celebration of their memory that continues to live on through the water. Without water, their memory could not live on to show another generation the truth of their ancestors. As long as the sea exists, so will their History. 

Water holds space for memories and histories of life as we once knew it. The film, combined with Gillis’s and Bacchilega/Brown’s writing assist that claim because they acknowledge water is another realm in which we aren’t too familiar with. It is filled with real and metaphorical skeletons of past lives that don’t seem acknowledged on land to the majority of humans that don’t have a cultural connection to the water. If humans broadened their understanding of archives and acknowledged the sea as one, it would broaden their knowledge of the world and their neighbors. 

Works Cited: 

Bacchilega, Cristina, and Marie Alohalani Brown. The Penguin Book of Mermaids. Penguin Books, 2019. 

Gillis, John R., et al. “The Blue Humanities.” National Endowment for the Humanities, www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities. Accessed 12 Dec. 2025. 

Tesfaye, Gabrielle. “The Water Will Carry Us Home – Official.” YouTube, 24 June 2021, youtu.be/dGlhXhIiax8?si=oKM6G0EAxTSiP-4z. Accessed 13 Dec. 2025.