Tag Archives: lixia

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.

Reading Response week 4

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Whilst doing this week’s reading, my attention was mostly concentrated on the stories of “Sedna” and “The Tuna of Lake Vaihiria”. This was particularly because of our class discussions of the christian misogyny that transformed the role of the mermaid. It is immediately noticeable, in both of these stories that women were held in a different regard across non Christian cultures. For example in “The Tuna of Lake Vaihiria” The authors of the text explain that in these stories the character of Hina is often represented as a woman of “High rank, and sometimes semidivine”. This is in stark contrast with schribner’s text which mentions in chapter 1 “churchmen adopted these pagan creatures in an effort to depreciate the feminine.”

I noticed that both of these narratives have to do with women and marriage. Hina runs away in order to avoid being forced to marry a monster and Sedna can only be made made to wed under conditions that she finds suitable. Already we see that women in Inuit and Pacific islander cultures are able to exert their autonomy without being condemned to be sinful monsters. Both Hina and Sedna contribute to the prosperity of their people, one by bringing about the coconut and the latter by providing Inuit people with their main food sources. Sedna becomes a deity and the Inuit people strive to honor and maintain a good relationship with her so that they can continue to enjoy the bounty of the sea.

Through these stories I noticed the connection that exists between women and the environment. Both of these characters are life-givers of sorts, to their people. It is interesting that even now a days we consider nature to be female in nature hence the term “Mother Earth”. In these stories both women exert disobedience of some sort. Hina runs away and refuses to marry the Eel and Sedna refuses to marry unless it is in her own terms. The Christian church, I imagine would focus on these acts of disobedience and punish them by turning them into sea monsters but both women in these stories are rewarded with respect by their people.