In Derek Walcott’s poem, “The Sea Is History”, one statement that stood out to me was: “The sea is History.” This short statement explains the deepness of the challenge to conventional perspectives of history and encourages readers to continuously rethink what composes history. This statement puts forth Walcott’s larger argument that real Caribbean history does not exist in official monuments or texts, but lies beneath the ocean, as the depths of the ocean represent buried memories that resist colonial suppression and seek reclamation.

At its most basic meaning, “The sea is history,” suggests the sea to be a vibrant archive, a store of pasts, saturated with the memories, stories, and traumas of people in the Caribbean. This statement invites consideration of the writings of history in any sense of monumentalism, written records, and even grand narratives that the poem suggests are either absent or erased from the Caribbean experience. Walcott’s positioning makes the sea more than a natural landscape and draws our attention to the sea as an agent of archiving memory through history. The sea is home to the bones of enslaved ancestors as Walcott notes, “soldered by coral,” that reference history that is physically and metaphorically submerged, under colonial amnesia.

The statement further signals that history is fluid and not just found in a book-it is changing and therefore, should be studied as we do water for its depth. The fluidity of the sea and its hanging tides and depths also resonates with the endless, fragile return to claim identity and histories in the Caribbean. The assertion also invokes thoughts that undermine simple/accepted stories of history through implying that history should be studied below the surface, and consequences of proximity to loss, silence and fragmentation (often the narratives that govern postcolonial memory) can be accepted if not embraced.

In addition, Walcott, through his juxtaposition of sea and history, attempts to link the Caribbean experience with other human experiences. The sea–the actual spatial/geographic site of the transatlantic slave trade–connects many histories of individual and collective exile, suffering, and triumph to experiences similar with, and within, a global context. The sea is a site of trauma; yet it is also a site of resurrection of restored, reclaimed stories that have been willfully erased and forgotten. The sea seemingly encapsulates both trauma and restoration. The sea has both a traumatic and redemptive significance, bestowed with theological and cultural significance, and most especially with respect to the connections made to the belief that, like the sea, history is both grave and womb of life.

In short, “The sea is history,” is a succinct statement that asserts a claim for history to be re-conceived as a contested living organism that exists within a collective remembrance beyond an existence that is simply written. It asserts and acknowledges some of the histories that have fallen out of the collective Caribbean consciousness and have contributed to Caribbean identity, and it also provides a strong engagement and relationship to Caribbean historiography that honors the past and provides a space for Caribbean people to engage with history now.