A Critical Foreword and Author’s Notes:

This piece was originally published as a final project submission for SCA-UA 380: Cross/ Currents Lab: Ocean as Myth and Method. It is a mini-collection of poetry and flash fiction, separated into four acts. It was inspired by Nadia Huggins’ Circa no Future series, particularly one shot, in which the subject appears like a bronze statue—arms flung wide, glistening against the sun. This image struck me as a counterpoint to the effigy of Edward Colston, a bronze statue of a colonial-era slave trader which was flung into the Bristol Harbor by activists in June of 2020 (McGreevy). In Huggins’ series, a young Black boy is enshrined, statuesque, against the salt and sea of Saint Vincent & the Grenadines. In 2020 Bristol, a white slave trader’s image is toppled into the waves with rage. My series explores Colston’s fate if his statue was never fished out of the harbor. The title, as well as the closing words of the collection, come from the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved African who survived the Middle Passage and subsequently published his memoirs. The piece is designed to place colonial victors in direct confrontation with their victims: the enslaved.

My series condemns Colston to a Prometheus-like fate, drowning continually in various sections of the deep. His metal body becomes fodder for clusters of oysters, shrimp, and algae; he settles at the bottom of the straits of Beringia; his head bumps against the interior of the infamous Runit Dome. Colston is buffeted by the cross-currents of colonialism, environmental ruin, biodiversity, and capitalism, each melding and mixing in the ocean’s waters. Like the figures in Huggins photography, my work explores the liminal—the blurring that occurs when salt, sea, and light dominate perspective. Critically, I borrow from Melody Jue’s notion of water-asmilieu. As she advocates in “Thinking Through Seawater,” the sea is one of the many milieus in which the scholar (and, indeed, consciousness) operates (2). Dominated by different qualities of pressure, light, salinity, and a world of organic creatures, a submerged orientation is entirely different from a terrestrial one (10). What happens to the colonial legacy when we soak it? What might shrimp—with their many-color-seeing eyes—think of Colston’s bronze head (Jue 10)? In Part II, I incorporate this perspective in an intentionally illegible dingbat font. It is translated in a footnote. Further, given that Hi’ilei Julia Hobart advocates that “[art] ask us to bear witness to sinking, shifting, and melting worlds,” I seek to thrust the agents of the colonial project, and their enshrined simulcra into the waters which their violence have fed. Why shouldn’t Colston— a colonial slave trader—be fated to drown in the storm surge swallowing up the Lower East

Side, the Marshall Islands, or Jamaica? After all, Grayson Chong reminds us that “[w]aste is a remainder, a remnant of history, a ruin, and might be understood as an unintended archive” (9). What happens if, or when, the vestiges of the colonial project are cast off this society as refuse? What will that refuse see or hear, and what will the ocean—perhaps the ultimate archive—make of it?

Further, I hope my piece raises questions of how punitive justice, as opposed to restorative justice, forces a remnant of violence to persist. One frustration I confronted while writing this piece was the need to keep Colston’s body and mind in tactic, if only for the purposes of further torture. This approach elided an abolitionist one that could have gotten rid of him altogether. It did not allow for a focus on the rejuvenation and joy of once-colonized peoples. In order for revenge against colonial figures to persist, the colonial figure must remain also. I do not mistrust or seek to disparage a rightful rage; however, I would like to put pressure on the narrative mode I chose—that of eternal punishment. Finally, I extend my deepest thanks to Professor Laura Torres-Rodriguez, who encouraged me to submit to Esferas and served as a wonderful mentor. I would also like to thank each of my Cross/Currents instructors, who were endlessly encouraging and top-tier educators. Without their critical foundation, this miniature work would never have sprung into being. Thank you to Professors Luis Francia and Jordana Mendelson, as well as Lee Xie.

Bibliography

Chong, Grayson. “Hurricanes and Headpieces: Storytelling from the Ruins and Remains in Caribbean History and Culture.” Comparative Media Arts Journal, 2021. Web.

Hobart, Julia Hi’lei. “Atomic Histories and Elemental Futures Across Indigenous Waters.” Media + Environment, vol. 3, no. 1, 2021. Web.

Huggins, Nadia. Circa no Future. 2011. Web.

Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater, Duke University Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web.

McGreevy, Nora. “Toppled Statue of British Slave Trader Goes on View at Bristol Museum.”

7 June 2021, Smithsonian Magazine. Web.