Haunted Memory, Haunted Waters

Guest post by Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa. Rémy-Paulin is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He can be reached on Twitter @remypaulint or by email r.twahirwa@lse.ac.uk.

In an analysis recently published by The Guardian, we learnt that around 2,000 people have died trying to enter Europe in the last year as a result of pushbacks at sea. But beyond the illegal, immoral, and cruel nature of these pushbacks, this news exposes the necropolitical nature of modern states in their ability to subject the lives of those who are not considered ‘human’ to the power of death. This is revealed in the memory of water.

In her important contribution on black suffering and black lives, Christina Sharpe looks at the afterlives of colonialism and slavery in the ways that they still haunt African Americans today. She recalls the tragic story of the Zong, a slave ship that was the centre of a court case (Gregson v. Gilbert) involving the death of 132 African slaves thrown into the sea during the Middle Passage. Surprisingly, Gregson v. Gilbert was not about the ‘throwing overboard of goods’ but litigation over insurance claims. For the court, it was not the murder of the 132 African slaves, but a case of loss of property and ‘goods’.  

Later, Sharpe asks herself what became of the 132 people thrown in the sea. Her colleague, Anne Gardulski, tells her that the bodies were most likely eaten by fish and other organisms which will then be eaten by other organisms. The time that a substance enters the sea and leaves it, Gardulski explains, is called ‘residence time.’ Human blood has a residence time of 260 million years. Therefore, it is likely that the flesh, bones, organs and muscles not only of the 132 passengers that were thrown overboard from the Zong, but also the estimated two million Africans who died during the crossing of the Middle Passage are still with us today. The water has a memory.

What I want to highlight through focusing on Sharpe’s book is that the question she is asking about the Zong is also relevant today with the numerous cases of migrants dying or missing at sea: what happens to their bodies? Where do they go? Is there someone or a community, somewhere, missing a friend or a relative that is now in the belly of a shark, as in J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship or in Mati Diop’s Atlantics? I want to suggest here to consider how the remains of asylum seekers in the Mediterranean relate to those of African slaves who are still haunting us. Moreover, by connecting these histories of forced migrations – the Atlantic slave trade being one of the first of its kind – and marine deaths, we realise that the slave and the ‘migrant’ captured in the wake of the slave ship or the rubber dinghy is not any body, but the racialised black body.

The shipwrecks in the Mediterranean and of the slave trade are not two distinct stories. On the contrary, they are interrelated, one running into the other, like two rivers coming together before flowing into the sea. The water has a memory. Its salty taste may not only be the history of the rain and mineral ions, but also one of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, and their legacies today in the forms of the remains of those who were forced to move yesterday and today. The water has a memory, one must not forget.

These deaths at sea – and the astonishing silence and detachment surrounding the loss of 2,000 lives – are as much manifestations of the hierarchy of human lives as they are of the ordering of human worth and dignity that places some bodies below others. The ‘Black Mediterranean’ – that is to conceptualise the Mediterranean Sea/region as a historical space of the violence against Black bodies– is not merely the history of migrations. It is the colonial history of water, of how (former) colonial countries have been using water to expand their power outside of Europe, by controlling the mobility of populations from the Global South.

When we look coldly at the current situation and the enforcement of policies and laws aimed at restricting the right to asylum, notably Home Secretary Priti Patel’s New Plan for Immigration and Nationality and Borders Bill, we can understand that what is at stake is not so much the (il)legality of certain international migration, but rather the right to life of specific populations historically excluded from Eurocentric categories of the human. What we are witnessing now is the expansion of borders/lines that is encircling and tying up human lives in the Global South and transforming them into wounded beings, denying them life. It is the consolidation of a world fractured by borders/lines in which death and life, past and present, is merging in the daily life of the people on the move.

The death of millions of slaves and now of ‘migrants’ was and is about the categorisation of human beings into those who are valued by the capitalist system and those who are not. The water has a memory. And it will continue to haunt us.

Haunted by these marine ghosts, we, as scholars working on migration, are forced to recognise that borders are no longer a simple object of study like any other. We have to call into question the policies of confining the living world, its fragmentation, and the creation of death spaces as in the case of the Black Mediterranean. Only then a new road of thought will emerge out of the shadow of the modern state: abolition.

Thus, the abolitionist perspective, that is already central to the work of thinkers like Harsha Walia, Nandita Sharma and others, seems to me to be the real avenue to explore in order to outwit the prophecies proclaiming the emergence of prison-worlds as the rule of our time. Maybe it is through engagement in a borderless future that we can honour and remember, in some way, the lives of those who are still with us in water-form.

The author wishes to thank Rebecca Morrish for their help in editing this piece.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style) 

Twahirwa, R-P. (2021). Haunted Memory, Haunted Waters. Available at: https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2021/09/haunted-memory [date]