Context:

Extensive searches through various archives, online and in person, yield the same results as it relates to keywords “body-writing, women, Louisiana, water” in any combination. There is a lack of published work on the topic. Even less so in the form of poetry and lesser still from the perspective of a Black woman. In fact, much of what sits at the tops of the archives are academic papers on the relationship between Blackness, the female body, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. While this is perhaps the most historically integral part of my heritage, what else is there to say about who we are and what we became after we survived? Especially in a such a hostile and watery place like Louisiana. To think that the same waves crashing on the shores meant to heal the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927) recycled themselves and captured the last wishes of enslaved West Africans as they plunged themselves into the Atlantic. Indeed it is all our water.

As for our bodies, much can be said about what of it we give up to Louisiana water. Legends of hurricanes spontaneoulsy striking on the day of funerals like that of local traiteur Julia Brown ring an auspicious bell along the coastline. Grief is steeped in our brackish waters. Take Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). How deeply romantic grief pulls Edna beyond the lapping shore. Or our latest idol of Mami Wata now sentry where the statue Robert E. Lee once stood. A proud yet painful reclamation of water’s Voudou spirit meant to pay homage to the religions of the enslaved.

The product of keywoard searches “women”, “Louisiana”, “water” predominantly being in relation to racial injustice is deeply demoralizing. Journal after journal detailing the lack of writing on Louisiana women and their waters indicates an academic negligence to the topic and its demographic. Even in death there is little mention of the bodily sacrifice to the sea. Are there no Black Ophelias?

By contrast there is much to say about hydrofeminism removed from a sense of place. All over the world there are case studies to be poeticized about the communities of women bound to water. Bonnie Tsui (2021) writes about the ama pearl divers of Japan adapting to have lower heartrates than the average woman and notorious open-water swimmers like Lynne Cox having the ability to heat up the water around them due to their body fat percentages. Anatomical marvels yes, but there is something special about these stories. We are inexplicably bound in our spirit to swim.

Natural observations in modern writing evoke Romanticism. However the scientific specificity in eco-writing sets a particularly visceral and intimate tone with seemingly removed topics. Tom Rawlings (1993) masters this particularly well in The Names of the Sea-Trout in how he couples his icthyological familiarity with redolent memories. Bert J. Hubinger (2003) accomplishes something similar in Sea Drums and Other Poems however his position mostly highlights his photographic eye and at times lacks the gut of say Tishani Doshi. In Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, Doshi (2018) utilizes loose form to organize her beliefs. Her Jungian sestina juxtaposes the heaviness of philosophy while poems like “What the Sea Brought In” feel like emotional purges that are cathartic and therefor necessary when contending with violence imposed on women.

Astrida Neimanis (2012) has much to theorize on the intrinsic nature of womanhood as a watery experience. Like Diaz, she relates the very concept of corporeality to aqueousness. “To drink a glass of water is to ingest the ghosts of bodies that haunt that water.” However this sentiment is severed from the idea of hydromancy as a cultural link. Diaz writes about water as if it is an appendage. This concept is similar to how Joan Didion (1979) examines the holism of aqua-infrastructure in her “At the Dam” and “Holy Water” essays. But what Diaz is getting at is a more instinctual lifeline. Not of dependency, but of vitality, as if a river is an organ. In many ways I feel similarly about the bayou. That I carry it with me. Perhaps in such a way as the Aha Makav, carrying it in the middle of the body but aware of it seeping out in tears. What is it to be a body of water “in the constitutional, the geneaological, and the geographical sense,” (Neimanis, 2012) under the additional microscope of Blackness? How does one interpret their body as a watery landscape when they are unable to perceive their body totally? With little to read on this particular intersection, I see no other choice than to interrogate it myself.

Creative Objectives and Methodology:

In Life Without Air, Daisy Lafarge (2020) fixates on the interiors of air, the ecology of it, and disects our understanding of air as it relates to organism. She writes about air quality having emotions. How can science be spoken of in romantic terms? Am I writing about my own ecology or ecology as it relates to me? Bonnie Tsui (2021) disects the nature of swimming in Why We Swim with such specific intensity that the very science of swimming sounds poetic. However she takes time to deliberately speak of her place in the narrative of all the non-fiction to assert the intimacy of the topic. I have historically written so acutely about the topic that it is possibly hard to assertain my position between the micro and macro.

I intend to write this collection around autobiographic record, blending themes of eco-criticism, and incorporating auto-ethnographic research. Underscoring this writing of the self will be ecological study done with the help of various archives, critical readings, site visits, and interviews.

My priority in writing will be to answer the question: What is at the intersection of the swamp and the dysmorphic body? Utilizing my knowledge of ichthyology and telmatology, I will be able to discuss my experience with the disordered living that comes with being afflicted with dysmorphia, the Black experience, and my sense of ethnogeography.

In terms of genre I will be experimenting with a combination of form and freeverse in order to lend structure to the collection. While sonnets have always been a resourceful tradition in my work, more flexible themes will do well to juxtapose the required linguistic precision in writing reseach based poetry. I intend to lean more into allegory, dirge, a variety of swamp eclogue, ekphrasis, hymn, palinode, and new age forms like Jericho Brown’s (2020) “duplex”.

Synopsis:

I have established that womanhood is a watery experience. From the amniotic fluid we are nourished in before birth, to the humors keeping our eyes shapely enough to review our likeness for survival, to the necessary ritual of our skincare, to our tears. Particularly my experience of womanhood is an aqueous one: the realization that my love of swimming may be because there are no boundaries of the body in water, feeling like you are one with the air simply because of the way humidity penetrates the skin, and what I thought was an unrelated fixation on Benthesikyme, Nommos, and the Namazu.

There is an inseparable bond between my relationship with my body, my heritage, and the hydrous landscape of Louisiana. Through poetry and comparative literature study I will get to the root of what this intersection means. Perhaps more importantly, I think I can find myself at the crossroads.

Thematically, the sections of the critical work can fall into the following: marshland and its metaphors, hydrofeminism in my personal philosophy, holistic anatomy, and interrogating ‘ecology’ versus ‘environment’. What kind of alchemy can be harnessed in this place?

Louisiana is affectionately referred to as “God’s Country” by outdoorsmen for its surreal natural beauty. Additionally the longevity of Catholicism in the state has fostered a gothic representation of its ground. Voodoo and Hoodoo exalt spiritualism even in seemingly secular spaces, influencing even the least religious in an inherent clairvoyance. This often comes up as Southern Gothic literature with writers like Flannery O’Connor and more contemporarily Jericho Brown harnessing its aesthetics. Existing so inwardly in a land of God begs what your humanity must mean. What kind of interdisciplinary knowledge can be gleaned from studying the floating cathedral in the middle of the bayou, countless rivers named after saints, and rituals practiced around rain?

Ethics:

The woman as a intersectional topic of body autonomy and water invites much discourse. The essentialist view of the female body diminishes it to a harbor of reprosexual and emotional fluids (menstration, tears, and such). In “Hydrofeminism”, Neimanis (2012) debates the multifaceted connotations of water and the female body’s relationship. She says, “The last century of (primarily Western) feminist thought has cultivated the view that to reduce a woman to her (reproductive) biology is problematic, first, because of the troubling symbolic meanings—passive, empty vessel, hysterical, contaminating—that persistently imbue this biology.” However she then elaborates her own position on the topic: “why should this history predetermine any appeal to biological matter as necessarily antifeminist or reductionist? The desire of water to morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempt at capture. Is not “woman” similarly uncontainable? […] If the fluids of otherwise gendered bodies were acknowledged rather than effaced, how might such attentiveness amplify the creative—and even ethical and political—potential of these bodies? […] aqueous body-writing might invite all bodies to attend to the water that facilitates their existence…” With this I find that it is necessary for me to clarify that the poetry of my research is primarily meant to examine my own experience, only becoming a relatable topic in a close but secondary concern. That is to say that writing it is a matter of my own feelings and publishing it is a matter of commradery.

Reflexively, this deeply personal perspective contributes to interdisciplinary research regarding representation in environmental study. Wesminster research groups like Homelands,the Centre for Social Justice Research, and the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media pose rewarding opportunities to take studied topics and marry them in an artistically accessible composition. My intention to interrogate my intersectionality fills a particular gap in between heritage research, mental health testimony, cultural ecology, womanist study, and artistic development. My time as the first intern at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture was all about contending with bridging historical gaps in ethnographic study. While this was fulfilling work and integral to my career, I did not anticipate how this knowledge might translate to cultural study abroad. I have noticed a key angle of humanitarian study that is being left out, which ostensibly means those like me are being left out of humanties. I am compelled to speak up for us.

Biographical Note:

For many years now I have been writing about my own obsession with fish and the aquatic as it relates to my own psychology. I have examined my dysmorphia through the plight of Satan eurystomus, pre-devonian lobe-finned fish, and the like. I’ve dissected the life cycle of the piscine from evolution to food source. However, I’ve always had trouble with writing about my hometown of New Orleans, Louisiana outside of its natural landscape. It is home to eccentrics and leisure-lovers, modern cowboys and gulf pirates, barflies and hermits. I know them all.

However most essential to me is the aquascape. The city is 52% water, notably similar to our bodies’ 57%. Thus there is a powerful kinship between myself and the waters of home. I used to say that in order to love the city I have to love it from afar. These days I think that this sentiment is more true of the land rather than the whole geography. Reading Joan Didion’s essays on the California she knew reminds me that the quiet, intimate approach can illuminate so much about the city’s many facets and, with luck, help me contextualize myself.

Growing up I was not exactly proud to be from New Orleans. Nor was I eager to stay. In my teenage years I wrote many non-fiction pieces rebelling against the long-standing local adage, “You always come back to New Orleans”. It felt like a curse. I said that hearing someone say it "sounded like they were conjuring up my future. It became combative despite being accompanied by a full-toothed grin. As if they were saying it to shield themselves from the shock that someone may be blessed enough to call this place home and still leave it. […] We know the city has a way of getting into your bones. But sometimes it feels like it’s not magic and that the choice was made for us: between government powers segregating neighborhoods to families telling their kids that they can’t survive if they go too far to people not having access to anything but what’s at their fingertips.” (Blanchard, 2022) However by the time I had settled into life in London, I started to miss small things like the smell of water. But I could never bring myself to go back home for long periods of time and be happy let alone live there. I figured it was easier to love New Orleans from afar because while I carry the pride of being from such a down-trodden and misunderstood place, I don’t see myself moving back. Tangentially, I learned that the mark of my poetic voice was stained with the “isms” of Black folks that I inherited over generations of perseverance. So even though I am no longer there, writing about where I’m from has become a way of living in it.

This is my water.

On Autoethnography

As autoethnography and biography are the titular methodologies, taking adequate time to observe the seasonal changes of the bayou is paramount to the collection’s success. This is not only to garner inspiration from the source but to convene with local experts on the ecology and culture  of Louisiana. This will take place periodically through the late summer and fall to maximize study of seasonal change while avoiding peak tourism that doesn’t pertain to my research. I also plan to delve into archival resources at local universities to supplement my study. Some of this can be done remotely, including general sources of telmatology found in the UK’s libraries. All the while I intend to periodically submit my work for competitions such as the Laurel and Ginkgo Prizes as well as any appropriate literary magazines before prioritizing finalization of the project in the third year.

Ideally while I’m home I will also be able to host workshops with my alma mater to encourage young students in their own creative writing practice as well as share my international experience with the community of writers that raised me.

Why Westminster

I have spoken of my strong regard for interdisciplinary study and collaboration with my fellow academics. Coincidentally, at the time of application, I have become aware of the University of Westminster’s initiative to launch a new Bachelor’s on Culture, Environmentalism and Social Change. The connection between these subjects is where my research will squarely sit, while providing the students on the course with an opportunity to study how the arts shape social action and vice versa. My time at the university and the Smithsonian were the most essential to developing my professional sense of self. While I have continued to keep in contact with my Smithsonian peers independently, the University of Westminster’s own partnership with the museum inspires me to incorporate the best of both institutions in my future career. NMAAHC helped shape me into the woman who discovered how her heritage informed her desired audience and community. Westminster grounded me as an international academic capable of demonstrating the full spectrum of my education in my art. This collection is an invaluable chance for homecoming.Citation

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