Tag Archives: History with a capital H

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.