In the “Sea is History” Derek Walcott juxtaposes humanity’s conventional history in relation to the ocean with biblical references. Humanity hunting for whale oil, for land, for toiling bodies. Tsunamis purging wanton cities. Piracy, progress, the separation of nations. All, like the bible, history is made of social construct; hoisted to importance to impart control and manipulate erasure. Conventional human history is not the sea’s history or earth’s history. By contrasting transcribed history to the documented bible, Walcott demonstrates how history is picked apart and molded to maintain dominance. Also tangled among the typical images of transcribed history are fragments of submerged history: “bone soldered by coral to bone” and “the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women”. Hidden by history are the enslaved who never braced American soil. Those who never had the chance to seek freedom, still fettered to the ocean floor. “but where is your renaissance?” the poem asks. “Strop on these goggles, I’ll guide you there myself.” Their renaissance is tombed in coral and sand. One that could not exist because the men and women who would have constituted this renaissance have been silenced. Instead millions of minds are lain beneath sheets of lapping waves.
At first when Walcott presented the animals in his explanation of History “really beginning” I read it as the Earth’s and the Sea’s history coinciding with natural events. A representation of animals and nature being true history. But another look showed that the animals resemble the oppressor. The Clergy of flies, bullfrog voters, bat ambassadors, mantis police, and caterpillar judges. What is happening here? Are animals creating their own system, demonstrating that earth and its other inhabitants can thrive independent of us. Or are they us? An explanation that we are just animals, surrounded by sea, erecting systems of manipulation.