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Week 12: The Water Will Carry Us Home—The Ocean as a Preservation of History

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Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home” establishes that this is not the white-washed, Christian version of history that we are told in high school about the transatlantic slave trade. Tesfaye doesn’t set out to give us a realistic explanation; however, she sets out to tell a story, which is neglected by the education system as a whole. We are told that the transatlantic slave trade was tragic, but that’s about all we learn. We learn nothing of what happened to these lost souls who died during the journey from the continent of Africa to the “New World.” We don’t even know the stories of those enslaved people before they became enslaved people. What Tesfaye sets out to do is offer a story for these souls, almost as if she were granting them a final resting wish to tell their stories.

The transitions between watching real-life Tesfaye holding a ritual to the painted stop motion illustrating the slave trade back to real-life Tesfaye demonstrate not just the past and present day, but also represent what stories can be told. Tesfaye, in the “real world,” is able to tell her story because she can create something that communicates her story. She creates this art that punctuates her existence to the world. But for the lost souls of the slave trade, they cannot. What Tesfaye does is create a story for them so that they may not be forgotten. Tesfaye offers them a story that does not lead to a watery, unmarked death. Instead, she offers them new life in the underwater, being reborn and returned to the water—the water from which we all came.

When we go back to real-life Tesfaye, we see her plugging her headphones into the sand. Yes, she physically connects herself to the land, but she also listens to the voices of the ancestors whose lives were lost. She honors them by hearing them, then creating something to tell their story. The land and the ocean both act as an archive in these instances, preserving the history that has been lost to, ironically, an ocean. Their souls might have been lost to the ocean, but the ocean gave them a home. It gave them a second life, as Tesfaye aims to communicate in her film.

Week 12: The Sea is History

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In “The Sea is History,” Derek Walcott reframes the ocean as an archive that resists the neat documentation associated with Western historiography. Walcott suggests that the sea functions as both a repository and ruin, one where it is a space where traditional historial “records” dissolve, yet the collective memory endures in non-material ways.

This tension emerges in the passage “the sea had locked them up. The sea is History.” Walcott’s choice in using the verb “locked” implies both safekeeping and imprisonment. The drowned bodies of enslaved Africans, unnamed and unarchived, are not lost; rather they are held in a space where history often overlooks. Walcott also elevates the ocean from backdrop to narrator and the sea becomes a historical text written by its currents, storms, and absences. He deepens this idea in the lines describing “the rusting cannons and broken statues.” These symbols of empire are not glorified; they decay underwater, stripped of authority. Their ruin exposes the fragility of colonial narratives that once claimed permanence.

Ultimately, the poem argues that history cannot only be found written in documents, but also what they gloss over: the trauma, silence, and memories embedded in places often ignored. Walcott’s ocean demands that we listen to the history that has been submerged for centuries.

Week 12: A Place of Untold History

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There is bond between humanity and nature that is unfortunately unable to be told by either side. It either leads to biased opinions or beliefs from humans, or just information that is simply not able to be processed by humans. Despite this lack of information, there is a way that humanity can connect with all forms of life that have existed since the early formation of the planet, and that is the Ocean. In Derek Walcott’s poem The Sea is History, it tells about significant moments in time as well as scripture and how it is all tied with the environment through the sands, the tides, and the marine life. Now while history as we know it is respected and continues to be so, there is without a doubt history that was undocumented; a perspective from the people that did not have the privilege of writing down information nor accounts from their point of view leading to certain events being forgotten or lost in time.

Connections between the imagery of ships, artifacts, and events in the bible referenced by Walcott are made to showcase the undisclosed chronicles of the people that were traded and shipped overseas to places against their will,

“as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages” (Line 20-24).

While history can be altered and is subject to change over time with more and more information being revealed by historians, there is no denying that there is truly no way of certifying past events truthfully, but this very statement then leads to the question of what is considered factual history and what is not? If one were to answer this from a colonialist point-of-view, there would be no denying that documented historical accounts are sacrosanct leaving very little room for other perspectives (i.e. opposing views). If this is the universal rule in regards to history, then where does that leave the history that was never written down, the history that was erased, and the information that was not believed to be true? The medium between what is believed to be true and what is believed to be fabrication is the environment and as mentioned by Walcott, “The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History” (Line 3-4). To the countless number of people that have been forgotten in time, to the honorable and the broken, there is no other representation of their troubles and background, other than the environment and whether or not some may not consider it, the history is there in the waters, and it can’t be erased.

The Sea Records

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In the poem, “The sea is history” by Derek Walcott as the title says is about how the ocean carries a rich history. Specifically of the slave trade, of those who were carried over the sea to a new land by force. Of those who did not make it. From the very first few lines, Walcott empathizes the identity of those people. Those who suffered making it across and from those who couldn’t.

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

This first passages in a way speaks more on their culture and identity than any historical account could. Setting the tone of the poem that this isn’t simply a tragedy because slavery was awful. Or even why it happened. It laments the true tragedy that the culture, identity, and memory of those who suffered during the slave trade have been ignored in historical accounts. In the way people learning/reading about them only see it was tragic. Not of who they were. As written in these lines below.

and that was Lamentations—
that was just Lamentations,
it was not History

What these lines mean is the historical accounts are focused not on the slaves themselves. Which is why in the poem’s beginning lines Walcott wrote how the sea recorded their true history. Keeping it in locked for those who wish to dig deeper.

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.

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. 

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.