The sea and her memories

how does the sea remember me. every time. - Nayyirah Waheed

The sea... The word conjures up images of relaxation and cleansing. Nayyirah Waheed's poem seems little more than the perfect Instagram photo caption. But after reading and analysing "Water" by Koleka Putuma your viewpoint of those words might change. Waheed's poem can thus be read in conversation with that of Putuma's and considering they are both womxn of colour the themes and what the poems speak to, overlap.

In her poem "Water" Putuma relates what the sea means to her as a queer womxn of colour. The speaker in the poem starts by telling how fun it was to go to the sea when she was a child "to giggle, to splash in our black tights/ and Shoprite plastic bags wrapped around our new weaves". The speaker continues to tell how black people are often mocked for the way they wipe the water from their face when they exit the water. This is indicative of the young child in the first part growing more conscious.

Now the speaker starts to relate the significance the sea has for her. She relates that the reeds and water "remember" her because it "remembers" her ancestors crossed it against their will because of the slave trade. It was her ancestors tears that turned the water salty she states. 

The sea is also seen as a deeply spiritual place: 

we have come to be baptized here.

We have come to stir the other world here.

We have come to cleanse ourselves here.

We have come to connect our living to the dead here. 

 Furthermore, the colonizers (the causers of the wounds that she must heal from) also arrived via the ocean.

The speaker then transitions to describing the violence practiced by the colonizers through colonization and later, apartheid. These violences include taking land from native persons and in modern days using black bodies and black cultures to benefit them financially (think of tourism). Genocide is also mentioned, including during colonization and modern day brutality.

The end of the poem implores the perpetrators to speak to the victims of the violences (black, queer, female bodies) in an act to remember and heal.

And go for a swim after that.

Hope that this time, the gravity of the memories of the sea will make me understand.