The ocean is the largest body in our environment and consciousness; it is intrinsically linked with our existence as a life-giving essence to be explored and traversed. In the chapter The Ship of the book “In the Wake: On blackness and Being” by author Christina Sharpe she addresses the infinite fluidity of the ocean that is continually recycling organic and constructed matter, eventually breaking this matter back down to its original composition. The ocean is the most perfect example of our conceptualization of the life cycle, a infinite session of birth, life, and rebirth which inherent the ocean. This is a beautiful aspect of the ocean, it being a divine natural body that radiates all the possibilities of our existence. Upon a close inspection of a portion of Sharpe’s The Ship, she writes about the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an incident that occurred in that captured slaves, on this voyage, we’re thrown off the ship to make room for other cargo; in other words forcibly required to commit their own murder by drowning. These Black bodies lingered in the sea after death, sinking down to the oceans mysterious floor. I imagine the eerie quiet that must follow after being submerged in the ocean, and the quietness accompanied with the sinking of these Black bodies in the water-filtered light. The imagery is horrid and uncomfortable, such is the nature of pictures of Black and African-American death, yet demands attention. Sharpe pays this attention in “In the Wake” with a passage of The Ship that illuminates the decomposition of material bodies in the ocean; how organisms eating organisms, decomposing, and being reborn again mean that the atoms of the original bodies never leave the ocean (Sharpe 40). These Black bodies that have been lost in the ocean do not cease to exist, but become the ocean; an omnipresent reminder of the depth and breadth of our subjugation of the Black soul. It leads me to wonder about the atrocities of our history which have taken place on the sea, can we ever escape the sins committed as long as the ocean is still here? This is theoretical purely because without the ocean we would not exist. Almost like if America did not traffic thousands of slaves through the trans-Atlantic trade to build the colonies of our civilization, America would not exist.

-MaraJean Hagen-Spath