Black in the Water

Black in the Water

Water is a healing element that has been systematically denied to the black community. Many of us have internalized our separation from water’s healing power; conditioned to believe that we cannot swim. But many of us have resisted this separation and fought like hell to remain connected through the medium of water to ourselves and each other. Black in the Water explores the complex relationships black folks have with water.
Our relationships with water are metaphors. They indicate how we care for ourselves and move freely through the world. Our relationships with water are also metaphors for how the world sees us. Our bodies in water inhabit a space that is both public and private. Water is a space where we can feel our visceral closeness to other bodies and connections to each other.
Distancing ourselves from water makes perfect sense. Self-care is hard, racial barriers are still real, and fears are taught and validated. What other essential elements are we depriving ourselves of? What do we need to heal to feel worthy of basic necessities?
My motivation for exploring this topic springs in part from my background as a wildlife videographer. When working on a Shark Week documentary in South Africa in 2011 I began to think about the connections between sharks and black people’s relationships with water. The metaphor between black folks and sharks has shaped much of the work in Black in the Water.
People can be obsessed with sharks’ power and what they perceive as their potential for violence, but fearfully avoid encountering them in real life. They love consuming images of sharks and of black people for entertainment, but treat both as dangerous predators in their real-world interactions with them. Filming black-tip sharks in South Africa made me see the ways that I had been treated as a shark all my life.
Filming sharks also made me think about my father, who taught me how to swim. He often joked about being a shark when we were in the pool together. My memories of learning to float in the community pool near his house have been another source of inspiration for this project.
I remember my friends sitting on the edge of the shallow pool teasing me about my inability to move into the deep end. One of them threw a toy for me to catch, and it sank to the bottom. When I went under to retrieve it the sensation of my torso rising back up sent electricity through my body. The light was on. I was filled with joy. I could swim.
The world disappears when you are in the water, when you are focused on learning to survive to the other side of the pool. I quickly became a competitive swimmer. I loved how each breath let in the sounds of the cheering crowd at swim meets, before the silence of the exhale when my face returned to the water. Like bisecting two dimensions. Like a lifetime that’s over in seconds.
By 9 I had already been called the ‘N’ word. At my all-white school I got teased about my hair and constantly told what it meant for me to be black. My classmates thought I wasn’t supposed to be able to swim, but what they said didn’t matter when I was gliding through the water. I always wondered where this myth came from; water for me has been a constant companion and a conduit for freedom and healing. Allowing me to cross dimensions to safety whenever necessary. This project is an exploration of the roots of that myth, and the ways that black folks have resisted myths about their relationships to swimming in order to find peace in the water.
In the US today black children are three times more likely to drown than white children. This is due to historical traumas and social inequities that have been passed down from the Jim Crow era, when segregated swimming pools prevented children from learning to swim. I want to explore both these inequities and the ways that water can facilitate transformation. We cannot ignore the violence passed down from the destructive obsession with purity that motivated the draining and poisoning of public pools during the Civil Rights era. We need to heal from this trauma in order to save our lives.
I have always felt an affinity to the water and have needed to wade through the stereotypes about blackness in order to access a generative relationship with this essential element of life. This experience reflects a greater truth about our lives, that we are forced to fight for our own healings everyday.