“It Wasn’t a Story That Could Be Told”: The Ocean and Narrative Form
Note: For our third issue, we asked our contributors to provide audio elements to accompany their work. Roche chose “The Deep" by clipping., which you can find embedded at the bottom of this page.
Plumwood, Val. “Ecofeminist Analysis and the Culture of Ecological Denial.” 2017.
Practices of co-authoring and re-authoring unseat static understandings of narrative telos, posing a challenge to the linear structures underpinning the colonial attitudes that contribute to the foundation of Western modes of storytelling. As seen in Craig Santos Perez’s two iterations of his poem, “Praise Song for Oceania,” and the “artistic game of telephone” between Drexciya, clipping., and Rivers Solomon that led to The Deep, these creative projects are defined by their mutability – a susceptibility to fluctuation that is amplified by the fluidity of their shared subject matter: the ocean. Taking water as subject, these narratives allow story to be swept under the visible surface plane and into the deep, where the imposition of linear narrative structure is overridden and subsumed by the circular movement of the ocean’s persevering tides. This paper examines how the continuity of water and the flow of the hydraulic cycle offer an alternative model of time and of narrative; for the ocean’s fluidity—its power to erase, to birth, to dislocate, to relocate, to wipe away sequence and order, to dissolve boundaries, to nurse and heal—renders a distinct temporality that resists traditional Western notions of storytelling which have a stranglehold on a forward-facing linear telos. The teleology of traditional narrative structures—which frame the function of a story’s movement as “progress” towards an end—hew closely to the ideological mainstay of colonialism that prizes “progress” as “the progressive overcoming or control of” a “‘barbarian’ non-human or semi-human sphere” (Plumwood 104). That kind of storying is incommensurable with the ocean, and the ocean eludes that teleological perspective; the ocean knows nothing of endings; it knows nothing of that kind of temporal confinement.
The shifting and collaborative storying challenges the teleologies of both narrative itself and the act of narrativizing because these practices untether the artistic materials—language, landscape, feelings, moments, events— from the framework of a basic linear temporal scale. For these reasons, the differences between Perez’s printed version of “Praise Song for Oceania,” which was printed in Habitat Threshold in 2020, and the poem-film, which was released in 2017, shouldn’t be framed as improvements or as progress. Nor should the novella The Deep be understood this way in relation to clipping.’s song and Drexciya’s myth. When does the story or poem end? You can no longer really say. While often applied to the sea’s influence on “cultural practices,” “embodied practices,” and “literary tropes,” I employ Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics’’ here to view both the structural elements of narrative, as well as the concept of narrative itself. “Invoking” the tidalectic in a cultural context “opposes closure and fixed points of arrival” while “performing a going out and a returning movement without an imposed resolution,” and the same happens when using tidalectics to think through narrative structure (Amideo 5). Because Brathwaithe coined “tide-electics” in reference to “his own poetics,” it is fitting to start by examining the ocean’s impact on poetic form—a form already accepted as anti-narrative—and how this works to obscure and erase boundaries of separation posed by genre and medium, eventually shaping narratives within novelistic structures. I argue that in the cases of “Praise Song for Oceania” and The Deep, like the ocean itself, the bounds of these narratives are to be unknown; the narratives are not only endless, but materially dimensionless, or rather, undefinably multidimensional; they shuttle past the entrapment of medium and material, and as a result of this, the ocean’s function as subject and storyteller reimagines authorship as a caring practice of ongoing kinship.
Taryn Noonan, 2024.
Many critics have written about how authors employ the sea as a literary trope and metaphor to think through cyclicality, but I want to expand that thread of analysis beyond the supposed borders of narrative by interrogating how the ocean as subject dissolves those very boundaries. In Craig Santos Perez’s print version of the poem, “Praise Song for Oceania,” a series of lamentations addressed to the ocean, Perez refers to the sea as “our most powerful metaphor,” but also as “our endless saga” (Perez 72). It has a “capacity to remember,” as well as “a library of drowned stories / museum of lost treasures” and a “vast archive of desire” (Perez 67). Here, the ocean is both storytelling tool – “metaphor” – and story itself – “endless saga.” Moreover, this “endless saga” both contains and is contained within a multiplicity of narratives: “library” and “museum” and “archive.” Both part and whole, both narrative and form, the ocean forces “our comfortable categories of thought”—in regard to identifying narrative—to “erode,” as Astrida Neimanis argues of water and corporeality (Neimanis 85).
Perez’s work not only erodes those categorical boundaries imposed by literary terminology, but itself embodies the inbetweenness and transitional space—on a level of medium and narrative—that Neimanis, in a bodily context, calls “ecotone” (Neimanis 93). Described as an “eco-poem-film” on Perez’s website, in 2017, Perez collaborated with filmmaker Justyn Ah Chong to create a film version of “Praise Song” (“Praise…”). Perez’s poem guides the film’s coastal and oceanic visuals through voice over, but also has been published across multiple publications in 2018, in addition to his 2020 collection titled Habitat Threshold. When reading along while watching the film, one quickly recognizes what seems to be a split—the spoken poem and the written poem are different. For example, in the latter portion of the written poem, Perez writes: “praise our common heritage / praise our pathway and promise to each other / praise our most powerful metaphor / praise your vision of belonging” (Perez 72). The next stanza begins with: “praise our endless saga / praise your blue planet / our world ocean” (Perez 72). In the film version, the corresponding lines are delivered as follows, “praise our common heritage, our endless saga, our most powerful metaphor / praise your vision of belonging / praise your horizon of care” (“Praise…” ). Like the ocean itself, the poem, through Perez’s practice of re-authoring, becomes an “endless saga” with both the “capacity for renewal” and the “capacity to endure” (Perez 72, 66). For this reason, Perez’s work exemplifies a literary version of what Neimanis describes as the “liminal ecotone” because it has a “material fecundity that rejects an ontological separation between ‘thing’ and ‘transition,’ between ‘body’ and ‘vector’” (Neimanis 93). Through Perez’s continued work, the sea rejects the ontological separation of “subject” and “form,” and his practice of re-authoring and co-authoring furthers this kind of rejection to the separation between “final product” and “writing process.”
What’s important here is to consider Perez’s changes as changes, to examine the implications of the decision to reconfigure stanzas and flip verses around, and to do so not by asking what the alterations might suggest about the respective works individually, but by asking what the decision to change suggests about ongoingness and finality. In applying the concept of ecotone to poetry and to literary narrative in a multi-scalar way, we begin to see how the ocean upsets the definitions and conventions of traditional narrative and the linear telos that underlies such narratives. How narrative has been conceived, categorized, understood, adhered to and subverted is almost solely (if not, most importantly) determined by accepting this linear teleology – a temporality where distinctions are sought out, distinctions which are located and occur at boundaries where one thing ends and another begins. For this reason, our understanding of narrative excludes the creative process from being considered part of the creative project; when the process ends, the project emerges, and where the project ends, the narrative ends. This forces us to reconsider the larger scale temporal implications of “form” and “art,” which allows us to ask to think about what happens to “endings” as boundaries when the ocean foregrounds constant transition rather than stagnancy, when prioritizing “becoming” rather than what becomes of. Thus, literary forms and narratives that flow with water’s implications have the “desire,” as Neimanis describes of water itself “to morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempt at capture” (Neimanis 89).
Each iteration of Perez’s poem, no matter how small the changes may be, should be considered neither final nor improved, for its subject’s simultaneity accepts contradictions of sequence, language, and visual structure. Regarding the multiple interpretations of Drexciya’s myth, clipping. expresses a sentiment fitting for Perez’s work, which posits that “the value is not in any one version of the phrase but in its gradual transformation,” that each iteration should be understood the same “way any two ‘true stories’ about our own world can provide differing, or even incompatible visions of our reality” (Solomon et al. 163, 162). To accept two truths is to recognize that, as Neimanis suggests, “the precise material space-time of differentiation is only a matter of convenience,” and that our “bodies”—and our words and stories—“are thresholds of both past and future” (Neimanis 91). In this sense, clipping.’s perspective on co-authoring can be interpreted as producing an alternative model of temporality based on collective storying; while The Deep was written after clipping’s song, clipping. insists the following: “Rivers [Solomon] has coauthored our song in as profound a way as we have inspired this book” (Solomon 162). This spherical model decenters centering—from where do we begin? Towards what do we go?
Accepting such understandings of authorship frustrates the teleological assumptions that underpin the “conceptions of rationality like those of the dominant market economy that take no account of our ecological relationships” (Plumwood 110). To think about narrative form through tidalectics —and through theoretical frameworks like Neimanis’s that originate in explorations of corporeality and embodiment—means that when we inevitably challenge the pervading visions of linear temporality, we simultaneously challenge the forces that help construct those visions: ongoing denial of our embodiment and its ecological embeddedness. For this reason, the temporal and authorial implications of a tidalectic narrative model alone ask us to abdicate concepts of individualism as being false and impossible, which in turn asks us, as Plumwood writes of partnership ethics, to “[enlarge] our conception of ethics beyond the human as center” (Plumwood 110).
Poppy Livingstone, 2021.
2. Perez, Craig Santos. “Praise Song for Oceania.” Habitat Threshold, 2020.
3. Solomon, Rivers. “The Deep.”
4. Brathwaite, Kamau. “The Arrivants: a new world trilogy: Rights of passage, islands, masks.” Oxford University Press, 1973.
5. Amideo, Emilio. “Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature.” Northwestern UP, 2021.
6. Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.