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.
Interesting point about archives: “The land and the ocean both act as an archive in these instances, preserving the history that has been lost to, ironically, an ocean. ” Can you think more on this? How does this operate, mean, signify? Keep going!
Annie, I really like how you word that Tesfaye’s ultimate goal isn’t “a realistic expectation”. She doesn’t intend to tell the same historical and factual information that’s been repeatedly given to students of all ages; rather, she puts the emotion, the faces behind the difficulty so people can understand their difficulty as more than just some event studied by historians. They’re real people, with intricate and detrimental stories, some of which are never actualized because like you said, they never made it past the sea.
Hi Annie!
I like how you emphasize that Tesfaye shows what stories can be told through her art and the remembrance of the history behind real life for people in the past. I think that not only is it important for artists to make art for new ideas but to also honor history and tragedies so that they are not forgotten. There is so much history that I think a lot of us still don’t know much about and possibly can only be accessed through extensive research, so this makes me connect to the saying “the more you know, the less you know”