shadows of the sea

By Gabriella Calabia

Discussed: depictions of human violence

Separated by a century, two paths intersect in a journey of identity, legacy, womanhood, and coming of age in a painful world.

in my dreams my great grandmother and i are one.
our earthly bodies never took a breath together
but for a moment we froze
as she departed the atmosphere and i entered
kissing my slanted eyes she offered me her name,
our name
now our celestial forms find each other again.
she guides me through the village she never came back to
fire licks the clouds 
dust in the barren fields catches the air
her house caved in from an earthquake
she says it was made of the ground and has now returned
spices that only adorned her memory waft through us
many things she doesn’t recognize.
our motherland thrashes under the whip of corruption and greed.
she cannot make baby bones and mutilated child soldiers beautiful,
she was ripped away before the soft rivers turned red and 
now she stumbles over bronze bodies strewn together.
a girl is raped.
relief spreads over her 
when the knife cuts through her throat like butter.
this could have been her, and this would have been me.
betrothal shacked her up and no longer can she understand the cries
what she does not say is that it was one death exchanged for another.
she tells me many did not survive the passage at sea
their lifeless bodies thrown overboard 
i picture all those wronged on land below the waves
their pain washed away and lulled to a peace they did not find on land
i wonder how often she wished to take her place among them,
slowly sinking
the world 
drowned out.

Performance

Process

On a warm summer night, when the ocean mist wafted over the dunes and the pale moonlight hung in the air, this piece demanded to be written. There was no choice but to oblige. So with a quivering heart and shaking hand, “shadows of the sea” was born. In the coming months it would be bent, twisted, flipped, broken and turned inside out, until the original lines scrawled in a journal that night finally came to rest above the dust. In the same breath I held while writing it, I release and share it now with you.