Category Archives: Week 12: The Ocean as Archive

Week 12: The Water Will Carry Us Home

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The film “The Water Will Carry Us Home”, starts off with Gabrielle Tesfaye in her element– writing, burning incense, embracing her cultural attributes etc. The first minute and a half of the film evokes feelings of healing and harmony through depicting Tesfaye’s performance of what seems to be her natural routine. Her cultural preservation offers a sense of comfort to immigrants/refugees who have endured historical or present traumas as a result of Colonialism, Imperialism, war, and/or slavery. Her performance offers hope that indigenous cultural practices are not extinct in the face of colonialism and/or immigration from one continent/country to another. 

In the next segment of the film (after the first 1.30s), Tesfaye exhibits a paper-made short film illustrating the shipment process of captured individuals being shipped off to another country as slaves. In the beginning, the water is presented with fish swimming in the ocean and very calming music is playing in the background. A ship emerges and the music becomes slightly more abrupt. Once the individuals are captured, some have fallen into the sea– including pregnant women. This part of the film shows how destructive humans are not only to the environment but to each other. We have a lifelong history of not only disrupting the environment but also of distructing each other by territorial, cultural, and religious invasion.  Further into the film, we see the women that fell into the ocean become mermaids and birth sea-children. This part was powerful because it illustrates the courage that transcended from a devastating event in time. This part of the film also demonstrates how beyond devastation and attempts of destroying nature, life transcends and continues to flourish. Nature cannot be destroyed because it adapts and evolves. Tesfaye is an embodiment of this lesson. The film ends the same way it started– with Tesfaye interacting with nature, her natural routine, as she listens to the ocean’s sands and the music it plays. 

The Water Will Carry us Home

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In her short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home” Tesfaye has the audience consider the ocean as an archive and a place that holds history for descendants of the African Diaspora. Furthermore she also emphasizes the need to reach back to old rituals and traditions to find connection back to ancestors. The film opens with a couple of depictions of African deities. Amongst these is the Egyptian goddess Isis and there are all sorts of offerings being shown to us. The song seems to be a chant she is using to connect to old gods. The visual medium then moves from being live action to stop motion animation. This signals the moving into a spiritual domain where resides a god, whom i believe to be Papa Legba. This is a god known by different names across different African religions. This god is often considered to be a god that stands at crossroads and holds the keys to the past and the future. One historical fact that we ought to consider is that in these passages people from the same groups were often separated and placed amongst other people that did not have the same common language. This was done out of a need to cut communication amongst these stolen people to limit the possibility of an uprising against the ships crew. That many displaced people were still able to form connections with each other through gods that they all believed in is an act of resistance against the attempt of erasure. Through this god we are shown this origin myth. I consider it to be an origin myth because the nature of the trans-atlantic slave trade made it so that descendants of this diaspora have no exact knowledge of where they come from, from what tribes or culture and so it creates this disconnect with the past. This story then serves to memorialize those who lost their lives in this middle passage. To imagine their spirits as being saved through transformation so that they could find their way home. The narrative does compel one to examine the history that the ocean carries for so many people today. in this narrative it is particularly for descendants of enslaved peoples but let us not forget that the history of is thought to originate in the ocean as well. The shot of Tesfaye holding conch shell headset to her ears and the cable on the sand imply that the way to learn and go back to one’s roots is by listening to the stories the ocean holds. Perhaps in listening to the past we can come to know our future.

Week 12

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After reading the poem and watching the video for this weeks work, I found the poem to be quite interesting. Walcotts poem about “The Sea is History” have very intriguing language and imagery. I am currently taking a creative writing class, and we have just moved into our poetry unit to this sparked my interest. Not only is Walcotts poem hinting to the history of the oceans and its cultures, it seems to be discussing the changing the ocean has undergone. From natural changes and human caused changes, and how its affected the oceans history. There is a section that I believe it referring to Oil wells and men in the ocean. The poem is reflecting on the damage and harm humans have inflicted on the ocean, referring to the oil wells as well as the digging and exploration humans have done in the sea. The interactions humans have had with the oceans, are not depicted as harmless ones, but as harmful one. The poem says “Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors, who sank without tombs,brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,then the foaming, rabid maw..” This seems to be referring to not only the harm humans have done to the ocean but what has been dumped into it. This whole poem is about different interactions with the Ocean. Hurricanes and natural changes, oil digging, debris form humans being dumped and leaving thins behind. I believe this poem is not only describes the damage the ocean has undergone but how these changes has affected its history. The religious aspects and vocabulary mentioned gave this poem more of an ominous meaning towards the end. “that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation..” Is Walcott saying faith guided this history? Or why did faith not stop these things form happening? God? I am not religious myself, but the religious vocabulary in this poem seems as though Walcott believes that religion is important to the history of the ocean. I found this aspect interesting and also confusing, because is he saying the ocean has its own religious value or is human influence why?

Week 12: How Our Ingrained Beliefs Shape our Perspectives

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The Ocean, formerly deemed to be an empty abyss by rampant eurocentrism, is a realm of vast possibilities. It is unfamiliar space to the terracentric human world, and, in our neglect to explore, was gravely misunderstood. The Ocean was regarded by Eurocentric ideals as hell, a harbinger of death and chaos, but Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water will carry us home” addresses this historically impressed belief as a misinterpretation. She depicts in her film the stark contrast between negative Eurocentric assertions about the Ocean and the beliefs silenced by the cultures they oppressed. In depicting the Ocean as a refuge, a place where spirits are given new birth, Tesfaye asks us to reevaluate our core beliefs, and decide whether or not they are true to ourselves, or impressed on us by a greater societal injustice.

The depiction of the violent European colonizers, abductors of African people, attempting to murder their victims serves as a representation of the Eurocentric belief of the Ocean being just as violent and deadly as they are. The slave traders threw their victims over the side of the boat, believing they would die by the Ocean’s hand, sinking to the bottom of the void. However, this short film contests this impression, and offers us the vision of the Ocean as a realm of benevolence. Instead of the Ocean drowning the victims and dragging their bodies to the bottom of the sea, Orishas come to save the spirits—turning them into mermaids.

The author states in her description of the film, “Upon crashing in the waves, a phenomena happens when the presence of Yoruba Orishas dwelling in the water saves these spirits.”. To my knowledge, Yoruba religion regards Orishas as spirits born from the spirit world sent to guide humanity and teach them how to live a fulfilling, gracious life on Earth. These Orisha bless the spirits endangered by oppressors with new life as part of the sea. These people were no long able to survive on land; the abducted persons home on land was forever tainted by the villainous institution of slavery. In this story, The Ocean itself becomes a new, safe home thanks to the Orisha’s protection. Their bodies are rebirthed into forms that can survive underwater, so that they may raise their children and live a free existence. In this way, the title “The Ocean will carry us home” is not referencing their past home on land, but a new home within the water.

The Orisha’s intervention contests the Eurocentric paradigm that the Ocean is an unkind, dangerous void. In this story, the Ocean is an expansive entity carrying endless possibilities, including housing spirits meant to bless humans with grace. The Ocean can even serve as a home. In this way, the film asks us to deconstruct the perspectives by which we judge the world around us—who instilled in us these ideas we hold as truth? The only way for us to protect ourselves from the folly of accepting skewed, archaic ideas, pedaled by oppressors is to explore the histories of other cultures and research beyond the paradigm by which we are taught. It is our responsibility to broaden our mindsets and step into the evolved people we could be if we led our discoveries with compassion and the hunger for understanding.

Week 12: The Sea Remembers

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One thing I found really interesting in Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History” is the notion he introduces that, as humanity developed and began spreading its territory on land, the sea remains this immovable force that is ever present throughout all these eras of turbulence. It seems to act primarily as an observer, only stepping in to swallow that which gets lost in it. One line from the poem that got me to read and reread it a couple of times over reads as such,

“Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,” (Walcott, lines 26-29)

These lines gave me chills.

It paints the picture of the ocean being used as a macabre means of waste disposal. We’ve seen the ocean (or any body of water, at that) being used as a means of body disposal in countless movies, TV shows, books, etc. – like the old Mobster term “sleeping with the fishes”. The act of throwing a body in water to sweep it under the rug and leave it somewhere where it won’t be traced is a familiar yet sinister practice to us surface beings. The poem does a good job of reminding us that discarding something in the ocean doesn’t erase it from existence. The ocean remembers. It holds onto our waste like a ledger mapping the geological reaches of our control and depravity. The next bit about the barbecued cattle and the comparison between rib bones and palm leaves just filled my head with images of shapes along the coast, dripping with seafoam and obscured by a marine layer. The poem is a very good read.

The Water Will Carry us Home

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In the stop motion animation ‘The Water Will Carry us Home,’ the water serves as a tool to help transform the spirits of enslaved Africans in the Middle Passage into mermaids, and helps to transport them back by setting them on a path to find freedom within the ocean. The ocean in the context of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage is interesting because the concepts of ownership, specifically the ownership of human bodies, are terrestrial-based; you can’t physically own anything in the ocean. 

In the beginning of the stop motion animation, enslaved Africans are lined up and bound, their bodies confined in a way that maximizes the ship’s space instead of prioritizing the comfort of the people within it. The ship acts as a vessel for land and terrestrial based concepts as it carries out the act of enslavement by stealing people away from their homeland and taking them a new world where they would face terrible conditions. On the boat, the enslaved Africans cannot move but as mermaids, the spirits are able to move freely within the water as they are not chained or constricted. In the title of this animation, water and transportation are once again linked through the phrase ‘carry us home’. The water and the Yoruba Orisha associated with it help to guide the mermaids back to their homeland after being violently taken from it. 

The Water Will Carry Us Home

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The stop-motion film, The Water Will Carry Us Home, showed me how the ocean is looked at and appreciated differently by different cultures. The film shows us how there is a long history of black mermaids which is not talked about often in modern culture. As mentioned in the description, the film tells the story of stolen Africans being thrown off a ship whilst sailing through the Middle Passage. They were then saved by the presence of Yoruba Orishas dwelling in the water. This shows how the ocean is not just a scary unknown place throughout history but also a saving grace for some cultures. While the stolen passengers might have been scared when they fell into the water, it was the creatures who resided in it who saved them. This led to an appreciation of the ocean for this culture that is still apparent today, as seen in the ending scene of the film. People are able to connect with the water in their own ways and have a strong appreciation for what it does. This brings me to the idea that each individual person is capable of creating their own relationship with the ocean. With the current climate crisis it is easy to take a step back and assume that “professionals” will handle healing our environment. If each individual person in this world can build a relationship and appreciation for the ocean, we can heal our environment faster as well as discover more about the unknown waters. When we as people take a step back and realize that the ocean is not so scary we can end the boundary that we have created between it.

Week 12: Animism and Ancestral Worship

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Something that struck me about the portrayal of Omambala is how caring and maternal she and the mermaids she creates are. In a lot of folklore surrounding mermaids and water spirits, these spirits tend to be flighty and capricious, erring on the side of malicious towards humans. You wouldn’t trust these spirits to protect you or your watercraft and you’re probably more likely to believe that they’d drown you if they fell in.

With Omambala, her powers are used to transform the pregnant women tossed overboard from the slave ship into mermaids with the ability to swim and survive in their water, even extending that transformation to their unborn children. She manipulates the weather to stop the slave ships from sailing to their destinations. She watches over the slaves stored at the bottom of the ship when the weather is not enough to stop the traders. This portrayal of an ancestral water spirit reflects not just animistic but ancestral worship, as well. Water as the source of all life makes the ocean everyone’s ancestor. Ancestral worship involves the belief that our ancestors watch over and take care of us.

This class taught us to view the ocean not just as a lifeless road for ships or a blacktop for watersports, but as a living being with a history of its own. This stop-motion animation short invites us to not only see the ocean as a living being but as a family member or a common ancestor that connects and takes care of us all.

Hybridity of The Water Will Carry Us Home

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The short film, The Water Will Carry Us Home, had an interesting combination of two mediums: modern film making and stop animation. This mixture of mediums made me think about the hybridity of mermaids that we have touched on quite a few times this semester, but I don’t think this was in the intention of the filmmakers. Rather, I think the combination of these two mediums allowed the filmmakers to tell a story, while also connecting it to real people and modern times. The film begins with shots of women lighting candles, with many shots focused on small details of their bodies and what they are wearing–such as the henna on their hands, the stretched ear lobes, the tattoos, the smoke from the candles. These small details slow down the film and force the audience to pay attention to these details, rather than a big picture. For instance, the henna on the hands with the eyes, which is later also seen on the boat in the stop animation portion of the film. If the shots had been wider and not focused on these details, the audience may have missed the eye on the woman’s hand. This symbol being in both parts connects these two mediums. By having modern film making sandwiching the stop animation, it first allows us to relate to something in the beginning (this looks familiar) and then brings us back to reality at the end (this is part of someone’s culture, this is a story told by these people). There is also hybridity within the stop animation. Although most parts are hand drawn and slowly moved, there are also historic documents embedded in the video that reveal the horrors of the slave ships that moved people to the United States. This is important because it shows the history behind this story. In addition, at the end, there is another woman who creates headphones out of shells and a piece of wire. This creation is a way to listen to the ocean, and is another hybrid part of this film as it combines something man made with something of nature, of the ocean. This hybrid element of this film shows the ability of man and nature to coexist, intertwined with each other, and unable to separate. 

Week 12: Omambala: The Water Spirit

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The stop motion video titled The Water will Carry us Home was very pleasant to watch; out of all of the literature we have read and videos we have watched this one felt the most familiar in terms of what I’m used to seeing when speaking about mermaids or folktales. The video featured a water spirit Omambala and the quote that, “the water spirit Omambala brought us here. The water spirit Omambala will carry us home.” We are then shown the story of Omambala and how she came to save black slaves that were traveling on a ship to be sold off. There were slaves thrown overboard, mainly pregnant women, for an unknown reason. They were then saved by Omambala and turned into mermaids and their babies were born from clam shells.

After watching the video I still had questions so I googled who Omambala was and found the term Orisha which means Devine spirit in Yoruba religion. After learning that the video made a lot of sense as we essentially viewed the origin story of their main religious figure. Yoruba is one of the largest ethic groups in Nigeria. Now as far as why water or a water spirit became the focal point of their religion I am still unsure of. This video also sort of reminded me of Avatar and their relationship with the Eywa, the “All-Mother”. The Eywa is essentially the entire consciousness of Pandora, it is Pandora. This is why the Na’vi people are so interconnected with their environment as they respect their land and treat it with honor as they are harvesting a good relationship with the Eywa. Although the Na’vi people are fictional and blue, I do believe there are some clear connections with them and the Yorubian people as they both worship a spirit of nature, understanding the value of environment and how we as people are interconnected to it. It shows how the land and water all carry history of people, the environment, and how we have interacted with each other throughout time. The water and land will be here when we are not, just as it was before humans, and it will be able to tell the tales of our time.