The Seafloor Is Not the Destination
- Megan Alice Thompson
- Jun 23
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 25
Truth, Memory, and the Duty of Black Visual Storytelling
A circle of Black bodies, hands interlocked, standing upright on the floor of the Ocean. Calm. Composed. United in death. Striking as it may be, that image of enslaved African bodies is not telling their truth.
This image depicts Jason deCaires Taylor's, widely celebrated underwater installation. A white British artist known for submerging human-like sculptures into oceans across the globe. His work is acclaimed for its environmental message, creating living reefs with low-carbon materials while inviting audiences to meditate on fragility, climate change, and regeneration.
But when I see his works—especially pieces like Vicissitudes—I feel the tension.
A submerged sculpture in the Grenada Underwater Sculpture Park depicts a circle of life-sized children holding hands. The piece has been interpreted as a tribute to Africans lost during the Middle Passage since its inception in 2007, especially given its location in the Caribbean and its visual resonance with collective Black grief.
But Taylor himself originally distanced the work from that interpretation. His now-removed artist statement clarified:
“It was never my intention to have any connection to the Middle Passage … Although it was not my intention from the outset I am very encouraged how it has resonated differently within various communities and feel it is working as an art piece by questioning our identity, history and stimulating debate.”
The 12 figures are molded from two children and duplicated. Over time, the sea has encrusted them with coral. They shift, decay, and dissolve into the ecosystem, becoming artificial reefs. Life from death. Beauty from erosion.
But here’s the problem: when your canvas is the Atlantic Ocean, the memory of Black death cannot be treated as subtext.
It is not incidental that this sculpture sits in Caribbean waters, where millions of enslaved Africans perished.
It is not neutral to submerge human forms in a chain link (manacle-like) support structure in a sacred and historical tomb.
And it is not without consequence when an artwork gains cultural capital from an interpretation it was not rooted in.
The Danger of Misrepresentation
Taylor’s work represents a troubling trend: the aestheticization of suffering by those outside the community most affected by the trauma.
Even when the artist does not intend to speak about the Middle Passage, the symbolism is too potent to ignore. Even when the figures are not meant to represent Black bodies, the sea remembers what happened there. And even when beauty emerges, it does so alongside the risk of erasure.
This is what happens when the symbolic replaces the specific. When storytelling happens at a distance.
The Atlantic is not only ecological, it is ancestral. It is not just a medium for coral and current. It is a graveyard full of memory, especially Black memory, that cannot afford to be misrepresented.
Grounding in Sharpe and Hartman: Truth at All Costs
Christina Sharpe's book, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, urges us to remain within the rupture—to feel the weight of a past that continues to live in the present. She writes:
“In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.”
Sharpe calls this wake work: the ongoing labor of acknowledging death and survival together, without softening it into something easier to hold. She reminds us that we are not post-slavery. We are living in its afterlife.
To disengage from that truth in our storytelling is to disengage from responsibility. To flatten history for symbolic resonance is to choose comfort over clarity.
Saidiya Hartman, in Venus in Two Acts, complicates remembrance through her concept of opacity—the right to resist over-interpretation, to respect the limits of what can be known, and to avoid violating the very lives we seek to honor.
To paraphrase Hartman’s insights: The violence of the archive resides not only in omissions and errors but in the stories we cannot tell and the lives we cannot retrieve.
Hartman’s framework doesn’t excuse silence; it calls for careful, ethical speech. It reminds us that some histories, especially those of enslaved women and children, do not survive the archive intact. Still, we remain accountable to them.
Together, Sharpe and Hartman call us to tell the truth even if it fragmented. Even if it hurts. Even if we do not know everything.
Especially when the images are beautiful and story is told from the outside.
Memory Work as Ancestral Practice
So what, then, does it mean to honor the dead truthfully?
It means engaging in memory work. The emotional, cultural, and spiritual labor of remembering those who were never given a funeral or a grave. Whose names were erased and bodies discarded.
It means refusing to let history become a metaphor.
It means listening for our ancestors in water, in ritual, in story, and in silence.
One powerful example of this kind of memory work is the art of Kwame Akoto-Bamfo, a Ghanaian sculptor whose works draw from nsodie, an Akan funerary tradition. His Nkyinkyim Installation features hundreds of sculpted Black figures—each unique, each marked by suffering, each a vessel of remembrance.
His underwater memorials are not aesthetic monuments. They are ancestral altars. He explains:
“I wanted to draw upon Akan belief in commemoration and remembrance after death in order to honor the young, old, men and women... who died in the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage and did not get that chance.”
Akoto-Bamfo’s work does not generalize. It localizes. It culturalizes. It speaks from within the community, not about it.
“Museums are places of conservation, education, and about protecting something sacred. We need to assign those same values to our oceans.”
— Kwame Akoto-Bamfo
This is what memory work demands: Truth. Precision. Reverence. Not curated stillness. Not myth.
We Remember to Become
Our ancestors were not a tableau. They were people.
They leapt. They fought. They wept. And in doing so, they became more than victims.
They became the reason we exist.
We owe them more than staged grief. We owe them clarity.
And when the myths get loud, when the beauty becomes too easy, we return to the water.
Not to drown. But to remember.
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