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.