In this short film, directed by Gabriella Tesfaye, she illustrates a terrifying truth about the ocean’s history, yet still manages to tell a beautiful, almost comforting story. We all learned about the Middle Passage in high school or middle school history classes, but I fear we were shielded from the gruesome details and horrifying tactics used to transport the victims. I never before thought of the Middle Passage as “Ocean History” necessarily. I saw it as a history of how slaves were transported from one land mass to another. This stop motion film illuminated the fact that the Ocean itself can very much be a holder of history.

These poor pregnant women depicted in the film were thrown overboard and drowned in the sea. That is just one of those truly heartbreaking truths. They now rest (hopefully peacefully) on the ocean floor. They had to endure a horrible, watery death that could never be justified. Tesfaye’s film tells an alternative death story for these women, honoring the Water Spirit, “Omambala”. The ocean has inspired religious practices and gods/goddesses since the beginning of time. Ancient peoples knew the water to have much more history than modern people may ever be able to comprehend. The telling of this story from the perspective of the sea, the true historical setting of the Middle Passage, may be exactly how we need to view it. How many slave bodies does the sea floor hold? Do their souls still reside there? Just how much History was thrown overboard to be forgotten forever? The sea holds secrets that humans wish to rid their minds of, a dumping place of sorts, where all can be cast away, and essentially washed away from reality. When you think of the Ocean as a graveyard, you think of every story, every mishap, or murder that led those bodies there. If the ocean could talk, if it had a civilization to write the stories and illustrate the tragedies, would we have more respect for it? I think it would allow us to know the human race in a whole new light.