# “Je te salue Vieil Océan”: Images of the Sea in Three Caribbean Women’s Texts (Jamaica Kincaid’s *At the Bottom of the River*, Grace Nichols’s *I Have Crossed an Ocean* and Olive Senior’s *Hurricane Watch*)

Salomé Montoriol

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/11953

DOI: 10.4000/13ber

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Salomé Montoriol, ""Je te salue Vieil Océan": Images of the Sea in Three Caribbean Women's Texts (Jamaica Kincaid's *At the Bottom of the River*, Grace Nichols's *I Have Crossed an Ocean* and Olive Senior's *Hurricane Watch*)", *Polysèmes* [Online], 31 | 2024, Online since 30 December 2024, connection on 05 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/11953; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13ber

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# "Je te salue Vieil Océan": Images of the Sea in Three Caribbean Women's Texts (Jamaica Kincaid's *At the Bottom of the River*, Grace Nichols's *I Have Crossed an Ocean and Olive Senior's *Hurricane Watch*)

Salomé Montoriol

## EDITOR'S NOTE

Les œuvres visuelles citées et analysées dans l'article figurent dans la bibliographie, où sont donnés des liens permettant de les consulter en ligne.

## Introduction

"Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!"
Charles Baudelaire, "L'homme et la mer"

<footnote n="1">¹ As epitomized by Baudelaire's poem, the topos of the sea in the Western lyrical tradition connotes notions of freedom and escape, it is a metaphorical blank page for poets on which to write down their feelings. In the context of Caribbean literature, however, the sea bears a drastically different meaning. It stands as a limit, overloaded by the weight of History, a constant reminder of the history of slave-trade and colonization and an actual prison to the runaway slaves trying to escape the plantations. And yet water has submerged all traces of this traumatic past:</footnote>
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
(Derek Walcott, "The Sea is History")

2. My thesis draws on Derek Walcott's poem to explore oceanic imagery through Caribbean literature and visual arts through a selection of works mixing poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and installations. In the wake of critical oceanic studies and of the Blue Humanities, the Atlantic Ocean stands a palimpsest saturated with the memories of colonization and slavery—yet it lies at the very heart of vibrant poetic and visual creativities. Through my analysis, I link each literary work to a visual artwork that offers a visual response to the text: a short story by Jamaica Kincaid and a painting from Howardena Pindell's autobiography series (1988); Grace Nichols's poetry anthology *I Have Crossed an Ocean* (2010) and Isaac Julien's film triptych *Paradise Omeros* (2002); Olive Senior's poetry collection *Hurricane Watch* (2022) and Ellen Gallagher's ongoing watercolor series *Watery Ecstati* (2001-to present).

3. Through this dialogue between poetic and pictorial representations of the sea, my research aims to throw light on various illustrations of Gilroy's Black Atlantic and explore how it is both a vault and a space of artistic creation—in keeping with Glissant's *Poetics of Relation*. I first analyze how subjectivity is developed through and thanks to watery imagery in Jamaica Kincaid's *At the Bottom of the River* (1983). Yet, I insist on how the sea is also an image of a split identity, through Grace Nichols's poems collected in *I Have Crossed an Ocean* (2010). Finally, I explore how Olive Senior's collection *Hurricane Watch* (2022) epitomizes the tension between violence and reconstruction at the heart of the image of the sea in Caribbean literature. I chose to incorporate parallels with visual artworks, with one artist echoing each literary work, to explore how literary images of the sea dialogue with pictorial expressions, and how images are an archive particularly apt to make the submerged past resurface.

## Water as a fluid archive (Samuelson 243): Jamaica Kincaid's *At The Bottom of The River* (1983) and Howardena Pindell's *Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts* (1988)

4. In Jamaica Kincaid's coming-of-age story "At the Bottom of the River", after which the collection is entitled, the motif of the river explicitly serves the protagonist's growing self-awareness, as she contemplates her reflection in the water:

> I stood above the land and the sea and looked back at myself as I stood on the bank of the mouth of the river. I saw that my face was round in shape, that my irises took up almost all the space in my eyes, and that my eyes were brown, with yellow-colored and black-colored flecks. (78)

5. The river itself is also personified, as its flowing watercourse is subtly compared to the act of conquering the land: the "stream then hugs closely to the path made, ruthlessly conquering the flat plain" (63); "I can see with my own eyes the sea, its surface smooth and calm; small ripples turn into conquering wavelets" (72). The word "conquer" subtly intersperses the text, while the protagonist's almost metaphysical discovery of her own, inner world strangely resonates with the discovery of the New World: "I looked at
this world as it revealed itself to me—how new, how new—and I longed to go there”
(78). Playing with the association of the river with birth/rebirth (in gospels) and
Narcissus (in Greek mythology), Kincaid adds on a new layer of meaning to the text: the
historical allusion to the colonization of the Americas. In the *Caribbean Discourse*, the
Caribbean Sea is defined by Edouard Glissant as “the estuary of the Americas”:

> What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands. The Caribbean Sea is not an American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas. (Glissant 139)

6 Perhaps then the river in Kincaid’s story is an echo of the Caribbean Sea: just like the course of the river joining the sea, Kincaid’s story is intrinsically connected to History. Grace Nichols warns us: “History is a river / That flow to the sea / Laced with the bone of memory” (103). Water not only acts as a medium facilitating the protagonist’s self-awareness—it also enables her to place herself within History. Water allows the protagonist to emerge from the water as a unified subject within a larger history: “the unity is sub-marine” (Brathwaite 64).

7 In Howardena Pindell's *Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts* (fig. 1), water, memory and History are deeply intertwined. As part of her *Autobiography* series, sparked by a car accident that led to a partial amnesia, the painting stands out of Pindell's mostly abstract body of work. Resorting to an oval-shaped framing meant as a “memory-scape”, the artwork mixes omnitemporal and autobiographical elements. While the central figure strikes us as a reflection of the artist herself, her many arms transform her into a goddess-like figure emerging from the water. Instead of a fluid element, water takes the form of a blue, striped layer spread over the different collaged pieces. It is almost reminiscent of the bars of a prison and yet it serves as a link between all the miscellaneous elements. Through collage, Pindell superimposes different layers of history and makes the repressed parts of US History resurface from national amnesia. Fragments of texts and various images emerge from the blue surface. One deciphers the segregationist motto on the bottom right corner of the painting and an excerpt from a slave code, while a white shape stands out on the bottom left—the attentive viewer recognizes the shape of a slave ship, hauntingly painted in white.

8 In these two artworks, water functions as a “fluid archive” (in the words of Prof. Meg Samuelson) connecting the personal history with History. In keeping with Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”, which theorizes the Atlantic Ocean as a figuratively transhistorical space uniting the black diaspora, Kincaid and Pindell portray water as bringing together the unified self with the ancestors, the family ghosts, the scattered voices of the diaspora, in a metaphorical choir of “black hearts, black people and black cultures”.

1

## The sea as an image of a split identity: Grace Nichols's *I Have Crossed an Ocean* (2010) and Isaac Julien's *Paradise Omeros* (2002)

9 However, the sea is not just a unifying body. The second part of my analysis explores the link between the sea and notions of exile and uprootedness through Grace Nichols'
poetry anthology *I Have Crossed an Ocean* and Isaac Julien's three-screen installation *Paradise Omeros*.

“I have crossed an ocean
I have lost my tongue
from the roots of the old one,
a new one has sprung”
(Grace Nichols)

10 At 27 years old, Nichols left Guyana to settle in England: through her poems, the sea comes to embody the rupture between the poet's former life in Guyana and her new life in England. Instead of a space of fluidity and interconnections, the ocean in her poems is at the heart of a biographical and geographical divide, a mass of water separating the two countries. Nichols draws from her personal story to portray the feeling of displacement of the Windrush generation, who left the Caribbean for the UK in the 1950s. Her poems often play with the sharp contrast between the Caribbean (an idealized past) and England (the present reality). The poem “Island Man” (56) portrays “a Caribbean island man in London who still wakes up to the sound of the sea” and is transported to the Caribbean through his dreams: “Morning / an island man wakes up / to the sound of the blue surf / in his head”. The island man is eventually brought back to London, with the separated stanza that conveys his reluctant return to “Another London day”:

the steady breaking and wombing
muffling muffling
his crumpled pillow waves
island man heaves himself
Another London day

11 The repetitions seem to translate the character's slow awakening, while the image of the “pillow waves” softly introduces a rupture with the dreams of “emerald sea”, as the everyday object of the pillow quietens the “steady breaking and wombing” of the waves. In fact, Nichols's portrayal of the Windrush generation reactivate the imagery of exile and uprootedness of the transatlantic crossing: “I have lost my tongue / From the roots of the old one / A new one has sprung.” The image of the ocean serves to express how she is torn between the Caribbean and England: “Yes, divided to de ocean / Divided to de bone / Wherever I hang my knickers - that's my home” (Nichols, “Wherever I Hang,” *I Have Crossed An Ocean* 80). Yet the crossing grants the poet a new form of lyrical expression—one that “springs from the roots of the old one” throughout the collection, interspersing standard English with Creole words.

12 The rhizomatic identity of the Caribbean is reflected in the visual fragmentation of M. NourbeSe Philip's *Zong!* (2008) poems (fig. 2). In keeping with Pindell's collage technique, *Zong!* displays words visually scattered on the page as Philip mixes words and onomatopoeias—hoping to revive the voices of the drowned slaves, mingled with those of the Europeans on the ship. Matthew Reynolds points out “the mixture of different languages; different tongues”: Yoruba, Spanish, Latin, Shona, Portuguese, West African patois, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, French, Dutch and Arabic. This allows the disappeared tongues to reemerge from the sea: “the sea, by allowing Philip to mourn—to be attentive to the wake—and by allowing the lost to resurface and speak, provides possibilities for renewal”. The image of the sea looms over the poem through the recurring apparitions of the term “wat” on the page, which resonates with the Jamaican word for “water”:
Guttural meditation on water—the source of desperate desire, deprivation, sustenance, and death. The protracted syllables in the word ‘water’ also suggest the question ‘what’ (or “wat” in Jamaican). What legal logic could justify these murders? What ancestral guilt could justify such a punishment? (97)

13 In "‘The Sea is History’: on temporal accumulation", Ian Baucom explains that "the labor of resuscitation remains perpetually unfinished and unending rather than preliminary" (332). What remains is an "open wound", as the wounds that these bodies opened in the Atlantic remain open. "This is, not was," Philip insists. Wat(er) is thus a question left unanswered.

14 With the three-screen installation *Paradise Omeros* (fig. 3), Isaac Julien hopes to lead an “inquiry of creoleness”. In an interview with David A. Bailey, he explains: “What I was trying to articulate in those works was the syntax of the language in relationship to ideas around *créolité*, and how this could translate into artistic and cinematic forms”. Partly set in contemporary Saint Lucia and in 1960s London, the film plays with discontinuity by intercutting shots of the turquoise sea, the tropical plants and beaches in the Caribbean with shots of bleak urban London.

15 Creole, as the language of hybridity, becomes an aesthetic through the multiplicity of screens and references. The film tackles the theme of displacement and hybridity through the mixing not only of landscapes, but also languages—English is spoken alongside French Creole. Through this fragmentary aesthetic, the play between the three screens, and the way it goes back and forth between the Caribbean and England, the film illustrates the tension between fragmentation and unity at the core of creolization and the notion of diaspora: “the disparate and the diasporization of the unified — a gathering in scattering” (Baucom 329).

Between “shell” shocks and reconstruction: Olive Senior’s *Hurricane Watch* (2022) and Ellen Gallagher’s *Watery Ecstatic* series (2001-present)

16 In my third and final part, I delve into Olive Senior’s poetry anthology *Hurricane Watch* and Ellen Gallagher’s ongoing watercolor series, *Watery Ecstatic*, to examine how both artists reinterpret the traumatic space of the sea by infusing it with playful inventiveness through calligrams, puns and Afrofuturistic fantasies.

Come:
study me. Take my chambered shell apart.
Brace yourself in the whirlwinds
coiled at my heart.
(Olive Senior, “Gastropoda”, Shell)

17 It is with this invitation to “take [the] chambered shell apart” that Jamaican Poet Laureate Olive Senior opens *Hurricane Watch*. As unsettling as these lines are, with a mollusc addressing the reader, the apparent frivolity of the gastropod hides a meta-poetic invitation to go beyond the deceptive simplicity, unfold the poem and find its true meaning at the core of it. By “shelling” the poems (in other words, taking them out of their natural enclosing cover) the reader discovers that they are haunted by historical allusions. This is especially the case in the *Shell Shock* section, whose very title reads as a pun between the WWI soldiers’ post-traumatic stress disorders and the traumatic past of the Caribbean. The image of the shell itself embodies a tension
between past and present, remains and rebirth, with the “growth rings” inside the shell testify to the passing of time²—it often serves as a gateway to the broader History of the Caribbean. It is epitomized in the egg-shaped calligram, “Hatch”, which opens the *Shell* section of the anthology:

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Olive Senior, “Hatch”.

18 Written in the shape of a broken egg, with an opening at the bottom of the round shape, the poem is put in motion as we scan the text from left to right and top to bottom—swinging “from one end to the other” until there goes a “crack” (on the right), “jumping back” (to the left) and eventually “breaking” the “crumbling walls” of the shell. Although this liminary poem first reads as a metaphorical “hatch” through which we are “swept” into the collection, the other meaning of hatch as an “opening in the deck of a ship”.³ Could the poem be read as an allusion to the little hatch of the slave ship, a cry or emancipation from the hold of the ship?

19 Senior's poems address History and postcolonial matters “from below,” from the point of view of the seemingly unimportant: the shell, the peppercorn and the lump of sugar are all given a voice⁴. In the poem “Shell Blow”, a conch encourages the readers to “pick up” its shell, look more closely at its whorls and listen to the shocks of History: “What if one day you accidentally / picked up the right shell – such as I; placed it / to your ear, pressed – by chance – the right / knob, there would pour / the real thing, a blast-out, everybody’s / history: *areito, canto histórico*, a full / genealogy of this beach, this island people”. The Walcottian metaphor of the sea as History is revisited, mediated through the shell as the conch urges today’s island people to “pass on” the indigenous people’s story:

> that is how History stay. Say you bound to
> re-live it on and on. Unless you can find
a way to shell it out; pass it on.

PASS IT ON!

20 In her *Watery Ecstatic* series, Ellen Gallagher imagines an underwater world which resonates with Olive Senior's constant intertwining of the human and the non-human. By revisiting the fantastic world of Drexciya, Ellen Gallagher turns Walcott's "empty" vault into a posthuman realm vibrant with life. Imagined by an electronic band from Detroit, Drexciya, this subaquatic kingdom populates the Atlantic Ocean by the "water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of pregnant America-bound African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo" (Eshun). Indeed, Eshun's account of the origins of Drexciya powerfully resonates with Gallagher's watercolor of a whale (fig. 4). At first, the central figure of the whale and the choice of watercolor painting convey a light tone, while by looking more closely one deciphers small human-like faces below the whale. In a distant echo to Turner's *Slave ship* (fig. 5), Gallagher replaces the human limbs of the slaves thrown overboard with the fish-like heads. The latter resemble a shoal of fishes with the mouths emitting a stream of bubbles connecting them to the whale—are these figures drowning or scuba diving? With the same art of substitution, Turner's ship is visually evoked by the innocent-looking, watercolor whale.

21 Gallagher's posthuman world seems to revisit E. Kamau Brathwaite's idea of "underwater unity" (interpreted by Édouard Glissant as the mingled corpses of the slaves paving the ocean's depths) by transforming the sea's abysses into a world teeming with life. In fact, both Senior and Gallagher transform the traumatic space of the sea into one conducive to literary and artistic invention. Instead of a realistic representation of nature, both artists use wonder and fantasy to reinvest the sea with a new mythology—whether it be Senior's speaking shells or Gallagher's Afrofuturistic visions of humanoid aquatic creatures. Both artists draw on ancestral imagery (voodoo, Taíno and Mayan mythology in Senior's case) as well as modern myths (the Afrofuturistic fiction of Drexciya in Gallagher's case) to re-establish the mythological relation with the sea, and more generally the environment that pre-existed colonization. The sea thus recovers spiritual importance, after the balance between the world of man and nature was disrupted by the arrival of Western settlers ("recovering the land through imagination", Said 77). As a result, artists and poets are rethinking fantastical underwater worlds as a place of resistance to Western discourses of conquest and domination. The ocean is home to imaginary worlds that break with the dominant rational discourse, enabling us to invent an alternative history to a tragic one.

## Conclusion

22 My thesis takes its place in a critical revival of oceanic studies and the "blue humanities" (as evidenced by the publication Steve Mentz's *An Introduction to the Blue Humanities* in 2023) by proposing to highlight the importance of the image of the sea—and its ambivalence—in the Caribbean, so central because of its History. By examining the tension between the ocean as a tomb and the sea as a place of creation for Caribbean artists and writers, my research shows how the sea comes to embody paradoxical movements of forgetting and remembering history, of unifying and disseminating the voices of Afro Descendants. These contradictory movements of the
Atlantic Ocean, which both divides and unifies the African diaspora and cultural
heritage, reflect the paradoxes of creolization itself since creolization follows this dual
movement of the gathering and dispersal of peoples, languages and cultures, a unifying
fragmentation (Baucom 332). Unlike the land which is static the sea is characterized by
mobility and migration, embodies movement, and constantly connects places in what
Glissant calls a “mise en relation”. Poet Edward K. Brathwaite’s image of the
“tidalectics” defined as “a model invoking the continuous movement and rhythm of the
ocean” (DeLoughrey 21) helps us understand the apparent paradox of creolization
assembling and “diasporizing”, the movements of waves on the beach.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Visual works analysed

Figure 1. Howardena Pindell. *Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts* (1988, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 118 x 71 in, Wadsworth Atheneum Collection. Boulevard Arts, https://www.blvrd.com/spotlight/spotlight-howardena-pindell-autobiography-waterancestorsmiddle-passagefamily-ghosts (last accessed December 13, 2024)

Figure 2. M. NourbeSe Philip. "Zong" #1. *Duke Performances Black Atlantic Series*, https://sites.duke.edu/blackatlantic/2014/02/11/m-nourbese-philips-zong-and-why-we-should-read-it/ (last accessed December 13, 2024)

Figure 3. Isaac Julien. *Paradise Omeros* (2002, three-channel video projection, with sound, 20 min., 29 sec). *Bohen Foundation*, https://bohen.org/project/isaac-julien-installation (last accessed December 13, 2024)

Figure 4. Ellen Gallagher. *Watery Ecstatic* (2004, watercolor, ink, oil, plasticine, pencil and cut paper on paper, 26 x 40 3/4 in). http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz10-20-4.asp (last accessed December 13, 2024)

Figure 5. Joseph Mallord William Turner. *The Slave ship* (1840, oil on canvas, 91 x 123 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship#/media/File:Slave-ship.jpg (last accessed December 13, 2024)

Literary corpus

Kincaid, Jamaica. *At the Bottom of the River*. New York: Ferrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983.

Nichols, Grace. *I Have Crossed an Ocean*. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 2010.

Senior, Olive. *Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems*. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2022.

Other references cited

Baucom, Ian. ""The Sea is History": On Temporal Accumulation," *Specters of the Atlantic*. Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 2005.
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. *Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean*. Mona, Jamaica: Savacou Publications, 1974.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. *Routes and Roots. Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, Honolulu, U of Hawai'i P, 2007*;

Eshun, Kodwo. "Further considerations on Afrofuturism". *The New Centennial Review* 3.2 (2003): 287-302.

Gilroy, Paul. *Black Atlantic and Double Consciousness*. London: Verso, 1993.

Glissant, Édouard. *Caribbean Discourse*. Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville : UP of Virginia, "Caraf Books", 1989.

Kellaway, Kate. "*Hurricane Watch* by Olive Senior—a champion of inclusion", *The Guardian*, 18 Jan. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/18/hurricane-watch-by-olive-senior-review-a-champion-of-inclusion (last accessed December 13, 2024).

Senior, Olive. *Hurricane Watch: New and Collected Poems*. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2022.

Mentz, Steve. *An Introduction to the Blue Humanities*. New York/Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge, 2023

Said, Edward. *Culture and Imperialism*. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Samuelson, Meg. "Oceanic Histories and Protean Poetics: The Surge of the Sea in Zoë Wicomb's Fiction." *Journal of Southern African Studies*, 36.3 (2010): 543-557.

## NOTES

1. In his article "W.E.B Dubois: An Interpretation", Cornel West describes: "the metaphorical association of black hearts, black people, and black culture with water (the sea or river) runs deep in black artistic expression".

2. Olive Senior, "Shell Blow": "Every whorl a book of life, / a text, a motion picture, a recording" (37).

3. "Hatch, N. (2.a)" *Merriam-Webster*, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hatch (last accessed May 2023).

4. "Olive Senior—the name itself nudging towards becoming a poem—has an inclusive attitude towards her work and never disdains humble things. She will give full, equal and affectionate attention to mango trees, magpies and even to a Christmas pudding as well as to global and racial injustice and environmental issues" (Kellaway).

## ABSTRACTS

Summary of the Master's dissertation which was the joint winner of the best MA dissertation prize of SAIT (Société Angliciste: Arts, Images, Textes), to which the journal *Polysèmes* is affiliated.
Résumé du mémoire de master lauréat ex-aequo du prix de la SAIT (Société Angliciste : Arts, Images, Textes), société savante à laquelle est adossée la revue *Polysèmes*.

## AUTHORS

### SALOMÉ MONTORIOL

Salomé Montoriol est doctorante en première année au département de French Literature, Thought and Culture à NYU. Ses recherches portent sur les littératures francophones contemporaines et les arts visuels.