A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: blue humanities

The Sea Remembers, the River Haunts: Fluid Archives in Contemporary Hispanic Fiction

Sargassum off the Dominican Republic coast; Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2020; Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Contemporary crises have made water into a medium through which ecological, political, and social conflicts can be understood. Droughts, pollution, rising sea levels and increasing inequalities in access are just a few of the reasons why water occupies such a central place in environmental politics and ecological imaginaries. Across the Hispanic world, these environmental transformations acquire different meanings according to local ecological, historical, and cultural contexts. While some are linked to pollution and biodiversity loss, others foreground questions of memory, territorial violence, or the relationships between humans and more-than-human worlds.

It is crucial to highlight that, although water has always been a central motif in art, culture, and literature, contemporary ecological concerns have given these representations a new resonance. Across these literary and artistic imaginaries, water is often a force of agency that connects human and more-than-human bodies across memories, histories, myths, affects, and forms of grief. This relational understanding of water resonates with Astrida Neimanis’s proposition that “we are bodies of water”.^[1] According to this cultural theorist, our watery embodiment is characterized by a “constant process of intake, transformation, and exchange,”^[2] which suggests that bodies cannot be understood as autonomous or exclusively human entities. Rather, water highlights the porous connections that link human and more-than-human bodies, environments, and ecosystems through ongoing processes of relation and transformation. This approach understands water not only as a material force that maintains the physical links between bodies, territories, and environments, but also as a medium through which memories, histories, affects, and ecological traces circulate across time and space. From this perspective, oceans, rivers, and aquatic bodies appear as fluid archives, which can be understood as dynamic and living spaces where colonial, ecological, and emotional traces are preserved, reactivated, and continuously transformed.

Different manifestations of such aquatic archives can be found across contemporary Hispanic literature and artistic production. Examples include Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2018), originally published as La mucama de Omicunlé (2015), Selva Almada’s Not a River (2024), originally published as No es un río (2020), and the aquatic imaginaries and siren-like figures present in Irene Solà’s literary and artistic creations. Although these works emerge from distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts—the Caribbean in Indiana’s case, the Argentine littoral in Almada’s, and the Catalan landscape in Solà’s—they share a common concern with water as a place of memory and relation. In each of these aforementioned works, oceans, rivers, and aquatic beings become active agents through which colonial, ecological, and affective histories are preserved, transmitted, and continually reshaped across interconnected human and more-than-human worlds.

In Rita Indiana’s polyphonic novel Tentacle, the ocean, water, and aquatic beings occupy the core of the narrative. This centrality is inextricably tied to the insularity of the Dominican Republic, in which water is not just a geographical point but a force that determines space, time and action. Through the novel’s time travels and multiple temporal layers, different aquatic configurations reflect the specific problems associated with water in each historical period. In the seventeenth century, the buccaneers move along the coasts of Hispaniola, and their presence is based on maritime commerce in the ocean. In the twenty-first century, Playa Bo becomes the site of fundraising initiatives aimed at preserving marine life, while events such as the tsunami, the disappearance of marine species, and the contamination of the Atlantic Ocean emphasize the ecological vulnerability of the Caribbean Sea. Finally, the marine anemone is a key figure not only in ontological and epistemological fluidity but also in relationality between human and more-than-human bodies. Water therefore does not play a merely decorative role in the novel. It determines actions, shapes the lives of the characters, and becomes a central character itself: a fluid presence that preserves, transmits, and transforms memories, histories, and epistemologies across time.

The novel’s non-linear structure, characterized by multiple temporalities and time travel, resonates with Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of tidalectics, which understands Caribbean history as a continuous process of excavation through the movements of the sea. Rather than disappearing, memories and lived experiences circulate across time and space, remaining inscribed in the ocean.[3] From this perspective, Tentacle suggests that contemporary forms of violence constitute a prolongation of those initiated during colonization. The violence associated with evangelization and the transatlantic slave trade extends into the present through new forms of neocolonial domination, political corruption, and environmental exploitation. As discussed in the introduction, environmental degradation has become one of the major challenges of the contemporary world, and in Indiana’s novel, this is reflected in the ecological catastrophe caused by the contamination of the Atlantic Ocean, which spreads across marine ecosystems as a consequence of the corrupt decisions of the Dominican government.

Nevertheless, the novel also imagines forms of resistance to these hegemonic structures through the figure of Olokun, the Yoruba deity associated with the depths, mysteries, and transformative power of the ocean. By recovering an Afro-Caribbean spiritual tradition, Olokun reconnects the colonial present with ancestral knowledge that had been marginalized by colonial domination. Together with the sea anemone, this figure further emphasizes the agentive role of the sea, as it is depicted not only as an archive of colonial violence but also as a space of transformation and renewal. Through the initiation of Acilde, one of the novel’s central characters, as Omo Olokun, contact with both Olokun and the anemone grants access to new forms of perception, temporal mobility, and ultimately the possibility of altering the course of history. As the priest explains to Acilde: “Eric te inició y ya sabes que eres el Omo Olokun: el que sabe lo que hay en el fondo del mar (…). Salva el mar…”[4] [“Eric initiated you and now you know that you are Omo Olokun: the one who knows what lies at the bottom of the sea (…). Save the sea…”; the author’s translation]. This encounter not only illustrates the transformative power of the ocean but also brings back the watery relationality discussed earlier. In Stacy Alaimo’s terms, it exemplifies transcorporeality: the material interpenetration of human and more-than-human bodies,[5] through which the sea becomes an active participant in the constitution and transformation of embodied existence. The ocean is then not only a repository of memory but also a means for imagining alternative futures.

Elderly fisherman on the Paraná River near Villa Constitución; Davidsilvax3; Source: Wikimedia Commons.

While Rita Indiana situates these fluid archives in the Caribbean Sea, Selva Almada relocates them to the river landscapes of Argentina, where water similarly becomes a living repository of memory, violence, and more-than-human relations. In Not a River, the river functions again as another character whose agency shapes the lives, emotions, and experiences of those who approach it. Whereas Indiana points to the repetition of colonial and neocolonial violence, Almada explores violence against the river by exposing the extractivist logic through which nature is treated as a mere resource. This dynamic is already visible in the opening scene, in which a group of men go fishing. Instead of a harmonious relationship with nature, the episode shows a gratuitous act of domination: the fish is shot with a gun, left to rot and eventually thrown back into the river without ever being eaten. Far from being a simple hunting episode, this scene depicts violence that is no longer connected to subsistence, exposing a relationship with the river based on exploitation rather than coexistence. By doing so, the river becomes a contested territory and, as Almada herself explains, it is represented as a body violated by masculine forms of domination and extractivist violence.^[6]

Here again, Neimanis’s notion of bodies of water provides a useful framework for understanding Almada’s representation of the river as a living body rather than a passive landscape. Such a perspective destabilizes the idea of autonomous and self-contained bodies, emphasizing instead their relational and more-than-human constitution.^[7] This relational understanding reaches one of its most powerful expressions in the passage where the narrator insists that “it’s not a river. It’s this river” and, similarly, “it wasn’t a ray. It was that ray.”^[8] By rejecting generic categories in favor of singular beings, Almada refuses to reduce the river and its inhabitants to abstract natural resources. Instead, every body acquires its own material presence, history, and agency. The title Not a River therefore acquires a deeper ontological meaning: the novel is not about “the river” as a single, universal entity but about a living body which cannot be divorced from the memories, feelings and more-than-human relationships that are present in it. Consequently, violence against the river affects not only nature but also the human communities that depend on it, highlighting the close relationship between human and more-than-human life.

It is worth noting that this understanding of interconnectedness and relationality is further reinforced through the fate of one of the novel’s protagonists, Eusebio, who dies in the river. His death, however, does not imply his complete disappearance since his spirit continues to haunt the narrative, suggesting that the past constantly resurfaces and illustrating how the river itself functions as a fluid archive. This particular relationship between death, water, and haunting also reinforces Brathwaite’s tidalectic logic discussed earlier. Once again, the past refuses to disappear and repeatedly resurfaces in the present, underscoring the cyclical circulation of memory, grief, and violence rather than their progression according to linear chronology. Following this logic, the river becomes more than the site of death. Rather than functioning merely as a setting of loss, it emerges as a material space in which past and present constantly overlap, preventing death from marking a definitive ending. Because Eusebio’s presence never completely disappears, those who remain continue to experience him as part of the river. The past therefore never becomes fully detached from the present. In this sense, the river functions as a fluid archive, not because it simply stores memories, but because it keeps them in circulation and returns them to the world of the living.

As the previous examples have shown, water functions as an archive of colonial and affective violence in both Rita Indiana’s and Selva Almada’s novels. Irene Solà, however, offers a different perspective by turning towards aquatic female figures whose fluid bodies preserve marginalized forms of knowledge, memory, and expression. In her acclaimed novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2022)originally published as Canto jo i la muntanya balla (2019), the polyphony of voices, the coexistence of multiple temporalities, and the constant blurring of boundaries between reality and the supernatural create a profoundly relational narrative. Among the novel’s most compelling liminal figures are the dones d’aigua (“women of water”), mythical female beings from the Catalan tradition associated with rivers and springs. Neither fully human nor entirely supernatural, they break down rigid ontological categories and expand the novel’s polyphony beyond the human. Oscillating between myth, history, and imagination, their presence remains uncertain: some characters claim to have seen them, while others dismiss them as mere legends. They thus exist in the unstable space between memory and oblivion, a tension that is powerfully expressed when one of the characters admits: “Ya no me acuerdo del recuerdo de las mujeres de agua.”^[9] [“I no longer remember the memory of the women of water”;the author’s translation]. What is being lost, therefore, is not only the mythical figures themselves but also the collective memory through which they have been transmitted across generations. Nevertheless, despite this apparent process of oblivion, Solà restores narrative agency to the dones d’aigua by allowing them to speak. In doing so, she transforms them into fluid archives through which marginalized voices, submerged histories, and alternative epistemologies continue to circulate despite the threat of disappearance.

Pyrenees Mountain Stream; Robot8A; Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The reflection on aquatic female figures continues in Sirena, the performance created by Irene Solà and performance artist Laia Estruch in 2021, where the relationship between water, voice, and agency occupies a central role. Like the dones d’aigua, sirens have long been represented through patriarchal imaginaries as seductive, dangerous, eroticized, or monstrous beings whose voices were mediated by male narratives rather than belonging to themselves. Drawing on multiple literary traditions—from Homer’s destructive sirens to Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who sacrifices her voice in exchange for a human body—the performance reclaims these hybrid aquatic figures as speaking subjects capable of narrating their own stories. According to Solà and Estruch, the performance investigates the possibilities of the voice travelling within and beyond a body of water, transforming water into a medium through which the voice circulates, resonates, and acquires agency.^[10] In this sense, voice itself becomes a form of watery embodiment, allowing these fluid bodies to be read once again through Neimanis’s notion of bodies of water, while simultaneously recalling Haraway’s chthonic and boundary-crossing bodies that destabilize distinctions between human and more-than-human, body and voice, nature and culture.^[11] A common thread running through the work of Neimanis and Haraway is the rejection of the logics of autonomy and individualism in favour of relational modes of existence. Both emphasize that beings emerge through their relationships with other bodies, ecosystems, and environments. In this sense, water is not simply a setting but an active agent that, on the one hand, shapes the bodies of these aquatic figures and, on the other, endows them with a voice. The sirens’ voices therefore do not simply cross the boundaries between human and more-than-human or nature and culture; they inhabit these liminal spaces, making them sites where forgotten histories can resurface. Another significant aspect is that rather than functioning merely as mythical creatures, these aquatic bodies become fluid archives of forgotten voices, recovering stories, memories, and forms of knowledge that hegemonic patriarchal discourses have historically silenced.

This analysis demonstrates that fluid archives do not constitute a single or homogeneous category. Rather, they emerge through multiple aquatic configurations that preserve and reactivate different forms of memory across interconnected human and more-than-human bodies. In Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, the sea functions as an archive of colonial memory, exposing the continuity of colonial violence within contemporary ecological crises. In Selva Almada’s Not a River, the river becomes a haunted archive where grief, absence, and unresolved violence continually resurface. Finally, Irene Solà’s literary and performative creations transform aquatic female figures into archives of silenced voices, recovering forms of knowledge and agency historically marginalized by patriarchal narratives.

Taken together, these works reveal that water is never merely a setting or a metaphor. Oceans, rivers, and aquatic bodies emerge as active material forces that preserve, transmit, and transform memories, affects, and histories while also reshaping the relationships between bodies, territories, and environments. Rather than proposing a nostalgic return to nature, these authors invite us to rethink ecological crises through relational forms of coexistence, reminding us that environmental violence, colonial histories, and social inequalities are inseparable processes circulating through the same fluid worlds.

Finally, these fluid archives encourage us to reconsider that water does not simply preserve what has been forgotten; it continuously dissolves the boundaries through which we have traditionally understood memory, bodies, and the more-than-human world. To read water as a fluid archive is therefore not only to rethink memory, but also to recognize an ethical responsibility towards the living worlds whose histories continue to circulate through it. Such an ethical perspective ultimately calls not only for protecting water as an external resource, but also for the recognition that violence against water is inseparable from violence against the interconnected worlds it sustains. It consequently offers a way of understanding water as a relational space of memory, coexistence, and shared responsibility through which alternative forms of knowledge and resistance continue to emerge and circulate.

^[1] Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, Bloomsbury, 2017, 3.

^[2] Ibid.16.

^[3] Kamau Brathwaite, Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey, Rhinebeck, NY, We Press, 1999, 34.

^[4] Rita Indiana, La mucama de Omicunlé, Cáseres, Editorial Periférica, 2015, 133.

^[5] Stacy Alaimo, Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 33.

^[6] María Malusardi, “El río, ese cuerpo avasallado por el machismo. Entrevista a Selva Almada,” Era Verde, April 26, 2022, https://eraverde.com.ar/el-rio-ese-cuerpo-avasallado-por-el-machismo/ (accessed June 25, 2026).

^[7] Neimanis, Bodies of Water, 17.

^[8] Selva Almada, Not a River, Edinburgh, Charco Press, 2024, 76-77.

^[9] Irene Solà, Canto yo y la montaña baila, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2019, 232.

^[10] Palau de la Música Catalana, “Laia Estruch i Irene Solà presenten al Palau de la Música Catalana Sirena, una performance que explora el poder i la flexibilitat de la veu dins l’aigua,” https://www.palaumusica.cat/ca/laia-estruch-i-irene-sola-presenten-al-palau-de-la-musica-catalana-sirena-una-performance-que-explora-el-poder-i-la-flexibilitat-de-la-veu-dins-l-aigua_942290 September 14, 2021, (accessed June 28, 2026).

^[11] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chtulucene, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2026, 19.

Bibliography

ALAIMO, Stacy, Bodies of Water. Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic.

ALMADA, Selva, Not a River, Edinburg, Charco Press, 2024.

BRATHWAITE, Kamau, Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey, Rhinebeck, NY, We Press, 1999.

HARAWAY, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chtulucene, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2026.

INDIANA, Rita, La mucama de Omicunlé, Cáseres, Editorial Periférica, 2015.

MALUSARDI, María, “El río, ese cuerpo avasallado por el machismo. Entrevista a Selva Almada.” Era Verde. April 26, 2020. Accessed June 25, 2026. https://eraverde.com.ar/el-rio-ese-cuerpo-avasallado-por-el-machismo/.

NEIMANIS, Astrida, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London, Bloomsbury, 2017.

Palau de la Música Catalana. “Laia Estruch i Irene Solà presenten al Palau de la Música Catalana Sirena, una performance que explora el poder i la flexibilitat de la veu dins l’aigua.” September 14, 2021. Accessed June 28, 2026. https://www.palaumusica.cat/ca/laia-estruch-i-irene-sola-presenten-al-palau-de-la-musica-catalana-sirena-una-performance-que-explora-el-poder-i-la-flexibilitat-de-la-veu-dins-l-aigua_942290.

SOLÀ Irene, Canto yo y la montaña baila, Barcelona, Anagrama, 2019.

Bio

Katarzyna SOBONIAK is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the Université de La Réunion (France). Her research is grounded in ecofeminist and decolonial perspectives and focuses on representations of ecological crises in contemporary Hispanic literature. Her interests center on the analysis of the relationships between body, nature, and power in works by women writers from Spain and Latin America.

July 21, 2026
The Hydrogothic

Featured image: Photo taken from a plane over Erbil, Iraq in August 2025.

Water has always been a powerful motif in literary and cultural history, but a critical framework of engagement with it as a non-human agent is a relatively recent phenomenon. I come from a region whose very name—Mesopotamia—is defined by two fluvial bodies, along which one of the earliest recorded human civilizations emerged. The growing water crisis in the world has affected Iraq dramatically—alarming footage from the summer of 2025 shows individuals walking across the bed of the Tigris. But being introduced to the field of Blue Humanities in Jena, Germany, opened a new intellectual avenue for me. This “cultural turn to the sea,” as John R. Gillis writes in Humanities, activates the mode of “thinking with water” (Oppermann 2023: 4), allowing for a critical engagement with “today’s ecocatastrophic times” (Mentz 2024: 1), and an exploration of how literary texts, and art more broadly, can meaningfully respond to contemporary ecological concerns.

This focused lens on water surfaced with the publication of Steve Mentz’s article “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies: The Sea, Maritime Culture, and Early Modern English Literature” (2009) and later more comprehensively in his book An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2024). Likewise, Serpil Oppermann’s Blue Humanities (2023) encourages us to understand water as a being with agency. Oppermann views waterscapes as sites of unlimited symbolic dimensions and cultural meanings. Employing a “cognitive wet paradigm” (Oppermann 2023: 12), waterscapes, then, can be analyzed through a lens which grants them agency, viewed as ecological systems, cultural spaces, sites of colonial history, engines of globalization, and dynamic environments deeply entangled with human and nonhuman life. On the other hand, remaining unaware, indifferent, and unwilling to rethink this human–water relationship risks perpetuating anthropocentric assumptions and further distancing humans from their entanglement with water, thereby reinforcing the illusion that water exists merely as passive.

Seen in this context, doom by water is not a myth from ancient history; it shadows the future of human life itself. In contrast to optimistic water discourses like that of American Transcendentalism, for instance, such as the views of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emeron, the framework I introduce redirects positive narratives toward darker, more unsettling dimensions. I merge multiple theoretical approaches—the Blue Humanities, the Gothic, the Ecogothic, and the Nautical Gothic—in order to develop a critical framework I call the Hydrogothic. This framework explores water and adjacent fluids in Gothic modes, arguing that it is water that produces the Gothic effect.

The Gothic and Water

It would be a valid question to ask, why the Gothic? As a mode and genre, the Gothic is used as a tool to “write about all sorts of taboos and transgressions” (Hillard 2009: 690), and people get relieved that the dark events do not take place in real life—a false belief because the Gothic reveals real darkness that does happen. Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes emphasize that the Gothic is the genre that functions as a critical mode through which the “oppressed and forgotten” (Wester and Reyes 2019: 1) are brought into focus. And in fact, the term ‘Gothic,’ is more a mode than a genre. Tom J. Hillard remarks that it “describ[es] certain aspects of the texts, rather than a discrete category into which these works unerringly fit” (Hillard 2009: 689).

Throughout history, from the term’s first application to describe Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) in Britain, to its migration across the Atlantic Ocean, the Gothic has demonstrated its remarkable adaptability to shifting historical periods, geographical landscapes, and cultural anxieties. In an American context, specifically, it often expressed cultural fears surrounding the wilderness, westward expansion, the legacies of slavery, and the Civil War. Twentieth-century Gothic shifted its focus to grapple with industrialization, as reflected in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in which industrial modernity is depicted as an ecological and economic force that transforms land into a site of extraction and renders human life precarious; the First and Second World Wars, as seen in works such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), portraying warfare as a mechanized system of control and exhaustion that reduces human beings’ value; and the Vietnam War, written by authors such as Tim O’Brian who draws on his own experience as a soldier. A key example is his In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which explores trauma, memory, and uncertainty in the aftermath of war. In the twenty-first century, the Gothic continues to adapt, addressing environmental crises, climate change and ecological degradation. The Gothic, like water, resists containment, and slips across human-made borders. As William Hughes remarks: “[the Gothic] has kept it up with times, passing almost effortlessly from romanticism to modernism to postmodernism, and adapting to feminist literature, to queer literature, and even science fiction. It really seems as if nothing can stop it…and why should it stop?” (Hughes 2013: xi).

As matter of fact, the Gothic has long foregrounded water as an active entity, or at the very least an indispensable element without which the Gothic imagination can scarcely be complete. A case in point is the flood story. In Antiquity, The Epic of Gilgamesh describes a deluge that obliterates humanity and leaves the world drowned and lifeless. In The Bible, before water is positioned as life-giving, the first lines of the Old Testament already describe water in a Gothic mode, declaring that “darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Gen. 1: 2).

In the United States, one of the first novels produced in the New World, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), is not a Gothic text by classification, yet it nevertheless deploys unsettling water imagery. One instance occurs when a lover in despair throws himself into the river, with the narrator describing the site of his death as “a watery tomb” (Brown 1969: 79). Similarly, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Vision of the Fountain” depicts a crystal spring, also referred to as “the haunted spring” (Hawthorne 1882: 244), which brings the illusion of a nymph-like girl to the narrator.

The Hydrogothic: Defining a New Framework

Over the years, several theoretical frameworks have emerged to examine the intersections between nature and the Gothic. In what follows, I briefly outline two relevant and widely discussed approaches upon which I base my term, the Hydrogothic. In 2013, Andrew Smith and William Hughes coined the eponymous term in their edited collection The EcoGothic (2013). This is a sub-genre that explores human fears and anxieties about the natural world, often featuring haunted, decaying, or threatening landscapes to reveal the destructive and precarious relationship between humans and nature. However, while the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world are deconstructed and questioned through the Ecogothic, the term only narrowly touches on water.

The other term which links nature, and water more specifically, and the Gothic is Emily Elder’s Nautical Gothic. Alder constructs a “lens [that] focuses on how the sea is represented in Gothic literature” (Alder 2017. 1; italics mine). However, Alder’s Nautical Gothic lens is limited. The term ‘nautical’ restricts the analytical lens to narratives of the sea alone, excluding other forms of water such as swamps, rivers, blood, to name a few. In order to extend the focus beyond the sea—an expansion from the nautical to the elemental—it becomes fitting to introduce the lens of the Hydrogothic.

. . . the Hydrogothic foregrounds water as an agentive element which causes the Gothic effect, and not vice versa. It encompasses all water bodies and forms. It is not only elemental water in its liquid, vaporous, and frozen forms, but also the broader category of fluid substances that are ubiquitous in Gothic narratives, such as blood, poison, venom, tears, marsh, liquor, ink, sap, seepage, ichor, wine, brandy, and coffee. It also extends to the linguistic residues of fluidity embedded in Gothic discourse: verbs and metaphors of flowing, streaming, seeping, or flooding.

Over the course of approximately half a decade, additional terms have become evident in discussions of water linked to the Gothic. These include Frederick S. Frank’s “aqua-Gothic” (1976) and Coral Ann Howells’ “Maritime Gothic” (2004). Frank’s term refers to the exploration of transcendentalism through the aqua-Gothic (Frank 1976: 85), grounding his concept in Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström.” This, however, proves untenable, as Poe’s sea writings, and that particular story, do quite the opposite: they dismantle transcendental aspiration and put them in their place. Finally, Howells’ term refers to a regional variant of the Gothic that is shaped by its relationship to the sea and coastal environments, especially within a Canadian context (Howells 2004: xviii).

Unlike these limited previous terms, the Hydrogothic foregrounds water as an agentive element which causes the Gothic effect, and not vice versa. It encompasses all water bodies and forms. It is not only elemental water in its liquid, vaporous, and frozen forms, but also the broader category of fluid substances that are ubiquitous in Gothic narratives, such as blood, poison, venom, tears, marsh, liquor, ink, sap, seepage, ichor, wine, brandy, and coffee. It also extends to the linguistic residues of fluidity embedded in Gothic discourse: verbs and metaphors of flowing, streaming, seeping, or flooding. Also, idiomatic expressions like ‘in hot water,’ ‘dead in the water,’ ‘to come hell or high water,’ to name just a few.

Why the term ‘hydro’ instead of, say, ‘aqua’ or ‘blue’? Not only does it refer to the Greek word “water” (Salowey 2021: 72) and the immortal microorganism Hydra (Khokhlov 2014: 153), it also signals the Greek marsh-born monster: Hydra of Lerna. Lerna is a region located on a narrow point between mountains and the sea on the eastern coast of Peloponnesus in Greece. The entrance to the underworld is said to be situated through Alcyonian Lake nearby. Whoever attempts to cross its seemingly-calm waters will be swallowed. Possessing a myriad of “snake heads” (Salowey 2021: 73) and poisonous blood coursing through her body, the Hydra has a famous regenerative ability: if a head is cut off, more would “grow back in place of the one” (ibid. 74). Its final head, immortal, was allegedly buried by Heracles under a rock—and legend persists that it still exists somewhere in Greece. The refusal of death is a prominent Gothic trope, one with which the legend of the Hydra closely aligns. Diffusing the framework with non-aqueous Gothic liquid, Heracles dips his arrows in the Hydra’s venom as her “vapors wriggle […] through the waters of the marsh away from the corpse” (R. Waterfield and K. Waterfield 2012: 146).

The Hydra’s symbolic potential exceeds water as a pure substance as it no longer refers to merely H₂O. Alluding to death and immortality, it denotes decay, contamination, and persistence—liquid matter that cannot be contained or resolved. The Hydra then embodies a wet ontology in which liquidity is agentive and threatening, capable of sustaining life only by entwining it with unease and malaise. Likewise, the Hydrogothic functions as a medium of transformation: it destabilizes boundaries between human and nonhuman, body and landscape, life and death. It insists on liquid’s agency, its capacity to unsettle anthropocentric knowledge systems, and its power to induce Gothic horror precisely through its interconnectedness and unpredictability.

In this respect, I argue that the Hydrogothic anticipates contemporary ecological thought about planetary change, revealing how Gothic narratives long recognized the impossibility of human mastery over the wet matter. Through the Hydrogothic, water’s numerous aggregates become the medium through which human fragility is exposed, and it enables close examination of its ambiguous and foreboding qualities as a non-human agent of uncertainty, disruption, and destabilization of anthropocentric epistemologies. The Hydrogothic imagines a world in which the nonhuman entity relentlessly resurfaces, reclaims, and reconfigures, where humans realize their fragility. If plants, organisms that wilt and die without water, are able to decenter human-centered ego as suggested by Dawn Keetley (Keetley 2017: 1), then how much more water itself?

The Substantiation of the Hydrogothic in Edgar Allan Poe

I define and substantiate the Hydrogothic by applying it to Edgar Allan Poe specifically for a few reasons. First, in my opinion, he is a highly suitable American author to elucidate present water anxieties, one whose work remains catalytic and influential across the globe. Second, Poe is the author who “gave a face to American Gothic” (Keetley and Sivils 2018: 98), and is considered to be the “Father of the American Gothic” (Pagan 2019). Third, despite being “one of the inventors of the sea Gothic” (Crow 2009: 38) where water “saturates the pages of [his] texts” (Keetley and Sivils 2018: 98), his oeuvre is often overlooked in the Blue Humanities conversations, even though his work predates the environmental and water-focused literature that contemporary scholarship tends to emphasize.

When considering Poe’s oeuvre, there are numerous texts wherein water manifests as an agent in Gothic contexts. One of the first texts that comes to mind is “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Frequently analyzed, say, for its artistic strategy, motifs of duplication, or its engagement with phrenological discourse, the tale’s central elemental component—the tarn—has received remarkably little critical attention, despite bookending the entire narrative from its opening to its tragic conclusion. From the story’s opening, the narrative is saturated with aquatic foreboding—almost like doomsday by water. The phrase “the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (Poe 2011: 195) give clouds agency from the start and evokes a sense of imminent inundation, as if the sky itself threatens to collapse with water.

Before even entering the house, and as the narrator looks down within this moraine-encircled body of water, it produces a powerful effect on him which he phrases as “a shudder more thrilling than before” (Poe 2011: 196). This highlights that before any event takes place, Poe centers the tarn as an agentic water body that induces disturbance within the human subject. In the same manner, the Hydrogothic has already claimed the Usher house and the people living in it, Roderick Usher and Lady Madeline, as the adjacent tarn’s rancid air slowly consumes them and the architecture. While Roderick Usher is steadily claimed by the water body that even his hair begins to float, the atmosphere inside is thick and a fissure runs down its exterior, Lady Madeline is marked by blood. In fact, she is connected with wine imagery: another Hydrogothic element. Wine bears a visual and symbolic resemblance to blood, and Lady Madeline—blood-covered and entombed beneath the house—becomes a figure of fermented excess, sealed away only to return eventually with catastrophic force.

Therefore, the Hydrogothic reconfigures water from a passive backdrop into an active, agentic force that demands a reconsideration of human responsibility within ecological systems.

As the story develops, every water-related force assumes a more radical agency. For instance, a tempest rises as the narrator reads a romance to the narrator. Eventually, the storm, the tarn, and the moon—all water-related entities—coalesce into collapsing and volatile agentic network that, through the mediating force of the tarn, dismantles the Usher estate. Although static and seemingly insignificant, the tarn functions like an ontological solvent, gradually destabilizing the house before vocally devouring the house and the last of the family’s bloodline.

Therefore, the Hydrogothic reconfigures water from a passive backdrop into an active, agentic force that demands a reconsideration of human responsibility within ecological systems. It disrupts anthropocentric hierarchies that position humans as external observers of nature, and at the same time, it insists on relationality: humans are always already immersed within aqueous systems that shape, sustain, and ultimately exceed them. In this sense, the Hydrogothic contributes to an ethical reorientation toward more-than-human worlds by rendering visible the consequences of ecological disregard—whether in the form of flooding, drought, contamination, or submersion—as expressions of a dynamic and responsive environment. This lens underscores the necessity of thinking with water in its darker tropes, encouraging an attentiveness to its eerie, unsettling, and Gothic manifestations.

References

Alder, Emily. “Through Oceans Darkly: Sea Literature and the Nautical Gothic.” Gothic Studies, 19: 2, (2017), 1–11.

Bible, The. “Genesis.” Holy Bible: Pure Cambridge Edition. Australia: Waking Lion Press, 2016, 1–42.

Brown, William Hill. The Power of Sympathy. 1789. Edited by William S. Kable. Ohio, USA: Ohio State University Press, 1969.

Crow, Charles L. American Gothic. Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2009.

Frank, Frederick S. “The Aqua-Gothic Voyage of ‘a Descent into the Maelstorm.’ Transcendental Quarterly 29: 1, (1976), 85–92.

Gillis, John R. ‘The Blue Humanities.’ The National Endowment for the Humanities, 2013. Online at: www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/mayjune/feature/the-blue-humanities (accessed 10 May 2026).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, with Introductory Notes by George Parsons Lathrop. Cambridge, UK: The Riverside Press, 1887.

Hillard, Tom J. ““Deep into That Darkness Peering”: An Essay on Gothic Nature.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16: 4, 2009, 685–695.

Howells, Coral Ann. Where Are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, 2004.

Hughes, William. Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Maryland, USA: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

Keetley, Dawn. “Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; Or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?” Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, edited by Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 1–31.

Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils. Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. New York, USA: Routledge, 2018.

Khokhlov, A.N. “On the Immortal Hydra. Again.” Moscow University Biological Sciences Bulletin 69: 4, (2014), 153–157.

Mentz, Steve. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. New York, USA: Taylor & Francis, 2023.

Oppermann, Serpil. Blue Humanities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Pagan, Amanda. “Where to Start with Edgar Allan Poe.” The New York Public Library, 2019. Online at: www.nypl.org/blog/2019/01/18/where-start-edgar-allan-poe (accessed 11 May 2026).

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Edgar Allan Poe: Collected Works, edited by Adrienne J. Odasso. San Diego, USA: Canterbury Classics, 2011, 195–207.

Salowey, Christina. “Labor II: The Lernean Hydra.” The Oxford Handbook of Heracles, edited by Daniel Ogden. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021, 71–85.

Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. EcoGothic. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. 2001. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1764.

Waterfield, Robin, and Kathryn Waterfield. The Greek Myths: Stories of the Greek Gods and Heroes Vividly Retold. New York, USA: Quercus Publishing, 2012.

Wester, Maisha, and Xavier Aldana Reyes. Twenty-First-Century Gothic. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2019.

About the Author

Jarjis Jarjis is a Master’s student at the department of English and American Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. He is also a Research Assistant at the chair of North American Literature under Prof. Dr. Caroline Rosenthal. Recently, he submitted his Master’s thesis entitled “Hydrogothic: Edgar Allan Poe through a Blue Humanities Lens,” and received perfect marks for it. Coming from Iraq, one of the most water-stressed countries in the world, where water scarcity continues to intensify, and now living in close proximity to the Saale River in Germany, Jarjis has developed a deeply personal and intellectual relationship with water. Beyond his Master’s thesis, Jarjis seeks to make scholarly and artistic contributions to the field of Blue Humanities.

June 5, 2026
Eco-Aesthetics: A Framework of Watery Bodies and Fog-Scapes in Art

Water, Bodies, and Environment Aesthetics

Water, besides being a central element of the environmental crisis, plays a profoundly symbolic and political role within contemporary societies. It is at the heart of numerous social struggles, embodying the demands of environmentalists, trade unions, and workers who oppose its privatization. The defense of water as a common and public good serves as a bulwark against the risk of amplifying social inequalities, especially in times of environmental crisis, when equitable access to water becomes a matter of justice and collective survival. In this context, water takes on the value of a symbol of resistance and solidarity, evoking movements fighting for environmental and social justice, for vital resources, and for the protection of the most vulnerable communities.

However, the importance of water as a political and philosophical element is not limited to its social and political value; it is also a necessary presence within our bodies, permeating them, nourishing them, and defining their very essence. According to hydrofeminist perspectives and recent eco-aesthetic reflections, water is the original fluid matter from which we are composed, a substance that connects us to the natural world and at the same time reminds us of our vulnerability and our capacity to be part of a larger, more boundless whole. In this sense, water is not merely a physical substance, or corporeal “substance”, but becomes an element of identity, capable of shaping the way we perceive ourselves and our relationships with the environment. Its presence, both in the social and biological dimensions, pushes us to rethink artistic, curatorial, and philosophical practices, inviting us to recognize its transformative power in the construction of new, more inclusive and fluid imaginaries, capable of embracing the plurality of identities and experiences. The possibility of being “bodies made of water” allows the bodies themselves to assume a non-fixed, but continually changing, status. It is precisely this fluidity that the performing arts, land art, and philosophical aesthetics in general should also refer to, in order to cast our gaze toward new theoretical and practical horizons.

A fundamental reference for creating a new horizon for environmental philosophy (especially for the aesthetics of landscape and environment) can be found in the words of the scholar Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, when—in the book The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water (2024)—she writes about the importance of water as an element and the new Hydrocene paradigm:

Water is a central figure of the current climate crisis: through sea-level risings, acidified oceans, extreme droughts and floods, polluted waterways and a lack of drinking water, the planet faces more and more extreme climate chaos dominated by water-related problems. Simultaneously a new wave of artistic water work has begun reconfiguring imagination where nature and culture inescapably meet and mingle; art is going into the blue. These works offer a model that considers the contemporary context of the climate crisis in ecoaesthetics. With the curatorial theory of the Hydrocene, this tide of artistic practices is shared and celebrated, and by thinking through the curatorial, recognised as a potential means of planetary caretaking.¹

The scholar repeatedly describes, for the first time, an aesthetic paradigm (comprising artworks, curatorial techniques, performing arts, and eco-aesthetics) linked to the climate crisis and environmental issues, with a focus on water. Once again, in her book The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water, she writes:

The Hydrocene is a wet ontological shift in eco-aesthetics which redefines our approach to water, transcending anthropocentric, neo-colonial and environmentally destructive ways of relating to water. By engaging hydrofeminist, care-based and planetary thinking, The Hydrocene learns from the knowledge and agency of water itself within the tide of art going into the blue. The Hydrocene articulates and embodies the distinctive ways contemporary artists relate and engage with water, offering valuable lessons towards climate action.²

The concept of the “Hydrocene” introduces new ways of making art, curating art, and decolonizing certain forms and narratives of art. In fact, it’s not the first time in the history of art and aesthetics that the question of how to address the climate crisis and how to represent socio-environmental concerns through art has been raised. One such approach is so-called land art, an artistic practice that centers on the nature-human dichotomy, seeking to artistically represent ecological and environmental challenges. There are even critical scholars like Crawford and Baker who affirm other intentions of doing environmental and land art. For example, Donald Crawford maintains that many environmental artworks are aesthetic affronts to nature by “forcibly assert[ing] their artifactuality over against nature” (Crawford 1983, 57)³, and Elisabeth Baker maintains that earthworks, as stages of an artistic pilgrimage, indirectly exercise a “preservational effect” on the territory even though they are not forms of “ecological art” (Baker 1983, 83).⁴The fact remains that land art can be considered as a first effort, even theorized in the aesthetics of landscape and the environment, to conceive of art concerns that could be considered more ethical than aesthetic. Land art and environmental art focus the “aesthetic attention” on the climate, but in which ways? Through what theoretical paradigms and philosophical categories?

I think art can be a valid medium through which to discuss current issues, including climate, environmental, and gender. To do so, however, it’s not enough to philosophically position oneself within the Anthropocene paradigm and argue that humanity’s impact on the environment is devastating, attempting to challenge the nature/culture dichotomy. This is insufficient for an aesthetic theory of the environment that seeks to address environmental discourse in all its facets. Indeed, placing oneself within the neologism of the Anthropocene means reiterating a series of problems and cultural biases that are believed to be overcome but are in reality ever-present. The concept of the Anthropocene doesn’t help us move beyond the nature/culture category, it doesn’t encourage us to listen to different, alternative theories, it doesn’t create dialogues with different cultures, it doesn’t consider other types of relationships that the environment creates and that are created with the environment itself. For these reasons, we will analyze public works of art such as the fog-scapes of Fujiko Nakaya and Janet Laurence, which express aesthetic and environmental issues through the fog. Therefore, to validate aesthetic discourse, we need to broaden the conceptual field and observe other ways of experiencing the environment, the identities that form within it, and the possibility of perceiving it in its multiplicity, contamination, and fluidity.

The Hydrocene and the Reshaping of Eco-aesthetics

One way to do justice both to aesthetics as an artistic practice and as a philosophical field that deals with art, the environment, and landscape, and to the plurality of identities, ways of being, and ways of being in the world, is provided by the concept of the Hydrocene. The book The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water, written by scholar Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, is an initial introduction to environmental aesthetic discourse that breaks with anthropocentric and exceptionalist narratives and instead engages with the philosophical paradigm of hydrofeminism, ecology, and alternatives. Through the concept of the Hydrocene—which does not concern the geographical era as such but describes a conceptual path alternative to dominant narratives—we can investigate the performing arts, a new “environmental art”, and philosophical aesthetics starting from porous and fluid, aqueous bodies.

Constable’s Cloud Studies

If land art has always been based on a terrestrial matrix, probably now is the time to change and create a type of art that also works with other elements of the planet, such as air, water, fog, and everything that remains outside the exclusive aesthetic intervention on landscape. We could first begin by rethinking the term land art, which at this point no longer seems to be an appropriate term to express aesthetic practices involving all the atmospheric elements of the environment. To describe this kind of art that takes into consideration other elements than the land, we can use the term “environmental art”. If we think of the natural environment, we quickly understand that it is made up of “land”, but the environment we observe and perceive is not only made up of this terrestrial element.

Already in the 19th century, John Constable, a landscape artist, claimed that the sky and atmospheric phenomena were also an important part of nature, which needed to be studied scientifically and represented. On these premises, he created a cycle of works of art called Cloud Studies (1821-1822) that focused on the scientific recording of meteorological phenomena. He painted the clouds, and on the back of his canvas, he wrote down the date, the day, and data regarding the wind and the temperature.

(J. Constable, Clouds Studies (Stormy Sunset), 1821-1822)

From that 19th-century artistic experience, we can already understand the desire to broaden the horizons of the concept of environment, starting from the various natural elements that are often overlooked. In that case, the air takes on an important aesthetic status, and with it the rain and various atmospheric events. Today, we have various artistic practices that use water in all its forms: fog, ice, and liquid—elements of the environment (natural and urban) that require a new connotation, gathered under the name of eco-aesthetic practices.⁵

These are important experiments concerning fog and clouds. Both are aquatic environments that prompt deeper reflection on both nature and our embodied experience within it. This is represented by some recent installations by artists who seek to use fog and clouds as part of a broader aquatic paradigm that highlights not only the corporeal experience of them but also a climatic perspective on the toxicity of fog. The artist Fujiko Nakaya herself fostered an aesthetic experience of fog through the first exhibition of fog sculptures (or cloud sculptures) at the Osaka Expo (Japan) in 1970.

Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog Sculptures

F. Nakaya, Fog sculptures n. 08025, 1998, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao)

By manipulating shapeless materials like water or smoke, and various vaporous elements like clouds, the artist suggests the possibility of transforming these hyperobjects⁶(that is, realities like clouds that, by their very nature, surpass the capacity for rational knowledge and require a different approach). In this way, through the manipulation of these shapeless objects (fog, water, etc.), the artist manages to create an altered and unconventional experience of the environment. Representing fog and clouds means representing, through art, pollution, toxicity, and their inequalities, reinforced through the hydrological cycle, and highlights a reading of the urgency of the natural-cultural water crisis through completely transformed microclimates. Thinking and immersing oneself in fog and clouds means focusing on the various ways of transformation of water.

There are many artists (e.g., Emily Parsons-Lord, Olafur Eliasson, and Janet Laurence) who interact and dialogue with water: they interact with vaporous bodies of water in order to create embodied aesthetic experiences. In their artistic expressions, the fog reorients ideas and perceptions. A possible review of the artists is provided by the book Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art, written by Janine Randerson, in which the author explores a series of meteorological art projects from the 1960s to the present, drawing on sources ranging from dynamical, technological, and physical systems to indigenous cosmology.

Janet Laurence: Fog-Scapes as a Way to Care for the Environment

Another environmental artist who uses fog as an artistic material and as a means to create certain aesthetic experiences is the Australian artist Janet Laurence. Within the Australian art context, Laurence has contributed significantly to the development of eco-aesthetics. An example of this is her famous installation called In The Shadow (2000). This work was commissioned by the Olympic Park, part of Homebush Bay in Sydney, and installed along a stretch of stream crossed by three bridges. In the Shadow responds to the transformation of the site from a contaminated industrial area to a new “green” area.

(J. Laurence, In the Shadow, 2000, Sydney. http://www.janetlaurence.com/in-the-shadow/)

The following public artwork aimed to restore natural vegetation to Sydney’s Olympic Park, on Homebush Bay. In addition to extensive planting of native plants, the work included the installation of twenty-one vertical sensors to monitor the chemical composition of the river water. By encouraging the growth of native plants in a suburban area of Sydney, “In the Shadow, oxygenates an otherwise rather sterile area” (Felicity Fenner, Art & Australia, p. 64). According to the scholar Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris:

Laurence’s work is configured as a nebulous “anti-monument” in that it does not limit itself to satisfying an anthropocentric experience or gaze: the work, on the contrary, regulates and develops a microclimate within the Homebush stream, integrating itself with the local ecology.⁷

Through the hydro-artistic method of nebulization, the artist not only conveys a fundamental message—that is, the possibility of going beyond the boundaries of the Anthropocene—but this work also reveals its power to regenerate the environment itself. The artist cares for the damaged environment of Homebush. Her installation is located inside the stream, and precisely because of this positioning, the artwork takes shape and embodies the fog. In this regard, Bronwyn wrote:

Over time, as the trees grew, the stream became a place of aquatic regeneration. Through the hydro-artistic method of misting, Laurence directs the audience toward the possibility that art can act as a healing and regenerative force in damaged ecosystems.⁸

This is an example of what I think of eco-aesthetics: working with art and the environment to care for the environment itself, both from a practical and theoretical point of view. Working with art and the environment to heal the environment itself, both practically and theoretically. The theoretical importance of this curatorial hydro-artistic practice lies in its ability to rewrite concepts of philosophy and aesthetics in terms of a broad, inclusive, and undisciplined theory, dismantling old oppositions (nature/culture, inside/outside, etc.) and providing the possibility of acting by resisting categorizations.

Head in the Clouds: Conclusion

“Having head in the clouds” is an everyday expression not to be underestimated. It suggests the possibility of being elsewhere, of being other, of thinking with the clouds. Being in the clouds is a state of dialogue between the elements and the body itself; it also means incarnating oneself in the clouds, surrounded by water in all its forms. Water represents the element through which we manifest ourselves as dynamic and interconnected entities, and constitutes the vital substance of our composition. «Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and gestational milieu. All of this enfolded in, seeping from, sustaining and saturating, our bodies of water. “There are tides in the body,” writes Virginia Woolf.⁹

It is precisely on this entity that we can begin to construct an aesthetic paradigm with a completely alternative development: a conception of art and the environment that is neither anthropocentric nor phallocentric, but rather watery, destructive, and disorienting. In conclusion, accepting water as fluid and vaporous, that is, not rigidly defined, both in form and meaning, means going beyond the existing categories on which Western thought and culture are built. Breaking with these consolidated paradigms means opening up to new possibilities; for example, we can build alternative methods of doing art by taking care of the environment and its problems.

References

[1] Bailey-Charteris, Bronwyn, The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water, Routledge Environmental Humanities (eds), 2024, p. 78.

[2] Bailey-Charteris, p. 8.

[3] Crawford, Donald W., “Nature and Art: Some Dialectical Relationships,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 1 (1983): 57.

[4] Baker, Elizabeth C., “Artworks on the Land,” in Art in the Land: A Critical Anthology of Environmental Art, ed. Alan Sonfist (New York: Dutton, 1983), 83.

[5] I refer to what scholar Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris writes in the aforementioned book The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water about aesthetics and its combination with ecology… pp. 6-7.

[6] Morton, T., Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

[7] Bailey-Charteris, The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water, p. 242.

[8] Bailey-Charteris, p. 242.

[9] A. Neimanis, Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water, in Undutiful Daughters… Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012, p. 87.

April 7, 2026
The Power of Sea Water as an Element of Healing and Connectedness in Caribbean and Diasporic Narratives

Cementerio Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Photograph by Madyanis Santiago Díaz

The boundless dimension that characterizes the element of water, as well as the sea itself, cannot be captured in simple terms, but various scholars, authors, and theorists have tried to describe its essence. Whether it is through a tale of travel, war, the conquest of new lands, death, birth and rebirth, or ancestry, the sea is often present as an integral part of a literary work, especially in the Caribbean. And although the historical past can bring pain and suffering, there is also the possibility of moving to new places and experiences while preserving memories of the sea. In “‘I Have Seen the Sea’: Caribbean Aquatic Poetics in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch,” Leighan Renaud states that water “has been a site of exploration and theorisation for numerous Caribbean thinkers” (1). Dionne Brand describes the sea as overwhelming, as “bigger than feeling’” (1). Because there is an archive of oral histories and stories that circulate around the Caribbean collective like ocean waves, they reach the coast and are retrieved until an author finds or captures them and delivers a compelling version. Three novels by Caribbean authors in which infinite reverence for the sea is expressed are Daughters of the Stone (2009) by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, The Mermaid of Black Conch (2022) by Monique Roffey, and Village Weavers (2024) by Myriam J.A. Chancy. Therefore, this paper aims to identify how the sea is represented in Caribbean fiction, particularly as an element of connectedness, ancestral linkage, and a “device” for tracking memory.

In relation to the immensity of water, it is within this vastness that healing occurs. In this context, healing arises from water’s capacity to enable connection. This connection bridges places that seem distant and divided by the ocean, yet water flows and swirls between them, closing the gaps. To begin with a more scientific approach to the aspects of healing through water, in “The Healing Sea: A Sustainable Coastal Ocean Resource: Thalassotherapy” by Roger H. Charlier and Marie-Claire P. Chaineux, the term thalassotherapy is defined as “a medical approach based on the systematic use of seawater, sea products, shore climate” (3). Thus, healing by saltwater can be identified or traced in the works of Caribbean authors (such as the three selected) whose experiences are unalterably surrounded by this element and who, in one way or another, always return to the sea. Accordingly, the authors of this article take this theme a step further:

…the use of seawater for therapeutic aims was known in what are contemporary Egypt, France, Italy, and Greece as far back as 3000 BC. Nor was thalassotherapy a stranger in the medical arsenal of classical times. Its knowledge and practice were spread by Celts, Gauls, and especially Romans (Buchet, 1985). Bath, in England (Aquae Sulis in Roman times), got its name from the Romans’ custom. Greeks put considerable faith in the healing power of the sea. Greek poet Euripides (480–460 BC) wrote “The sea restores man’s health.” Greek philosopher Plato (428–437) held that “The sea washes all man’s ailments.” (9)

The fact that this kind of alternative medicine practice can be defined by a specific term, which can be traced back to its origins, indicates the historical importance of water as a healing element—whether by human instinct, the uncanny feeling of recognition it provides or by discovery and exploration. Water is given the effect of cleansing and renewal, which are attributes that are observed from the element in its natural state.

Critical and literary analyses of the aforementioned novels include an examination of: (a) the ocean as both metaphor and body, which can be perceived as a healing and traumatic space; (b) aquatic connections, emphasizing the importance of bodies of water in the literature such as streams, rivers, among others; and (c) hybridities, including archipelagic connections between the texts and the bodies of water they represent. As part of the study, it is important to identify that these texts or narratives become sites of encounter, not containment, and are as fluid as water.

Through Puerto Rican Generations

It is precisely this fluidity and contact with the ever-present water that allows novels like Daughters of Stone by the Afro-Puerto Rican author, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, and its well-designed web of characters to flourish and nurture their connection to African soil, from the Middle Passage to their new reality in Puerto Rico. In this novel, five generations of women of African descent are woven together to reveal their journey from an enslaved ancestor to a modern-day Afro-Puerto Rican scholar and writer who chooses to become the keeper of her family’s legacy. This constant wandering is characteristic of diasporas, but it is a wandering shared between leaving and returning, suffering and healing, that occurs mostly through their history of forced migration. Nevertheless, the author succeeds in preserving these central female personalities across five generations with great talent and skill in her novel.

One of the predominant aspects of the storyline is the connection to Oshun, who is culturally referred to as an African mother and goddess. Since Oshun is the goddess of water, this means the contact with the character’s origins is still present through the passage of time and the changes of space, no matter how far they have traveled from their motherland. Llanos mentions: “Mother Oshun, goddess of the river, patron of women, of motherhood, of fertility, had come to her in that dream, leaving strange images, sharp, piercing Fela’s brain—the river flowing backward, the skies opening and crying down on the flaming forest, sparks alighting the village, …” (10-11). These images link the goddess to birth and new beginnings, but also to death and possibly rebirth, since Fela dies while giving birth to her daughter Mati next to a flowing river. The author could have crafted a different scene and access to nature on this occasion, but she instinctively chose flowing water to shower the mother and new life, as a kind of welcoming to the world from their ancestors. Here, water serves as the first bath and “baptism” before Mati takes her first views and experiences of life, while at the same time, her mother’s soul departs from her exhausted body. This image draws attention back to the power of water as an element, since Oshun is basically depicted sitting on a bed of fresh water, opposite and in communion with Yemayá, the goddess of the ocean.

The soothing mosaic pieces of familiar stories are thus placed together by the first character, Fela, in a matrilineal line that includes five women who are linked by blood, beyond time, place, and circumstance. The stone that Fela carries with her is part of this symbolical, spiritual, and emotional connection to her West African homeland. As with water, when her ancestress Fela first arrived at the shores of the island by sea, it was this vast element that provided access to her lineage. Therefore, the striking differences between the settings and the practices when she arrives in Puerto Rico are not appealing to her, in other words, it is an unknown territory. As the novel evolves, so do the characters. There is Mati—spiritually inclined from an early age; she showed signs of being a healer and was very connected to nature. Interestingly, she also had a connection to water, and the goddess Oshun: “The Lady Oshun spoke about a long-ago village, about Mati’s mother, Fela, and father, Imo, and her grandfather, the keeper of tales. She spoke about the drummers and dancers and the gods and goddesses that ruled life. She told Mati about the ancestors who would always be waiting” (Llanos 67).

However, because of the connections drawn from a motherland to the receiving country, Carisa, the last daughter born in the novel, embodies the shifting nature of the mixed and evolving generations because she is the child of Elena, who decides to move to the United States and begins the family’s diasporic journey. This move allows Carisa access to quality higher education and literacy, leading her to become a writer and the keeper of their legacy in the future. Later, Carisa crosses the ocean to the African continent and begins her ancestral research in Nigeria. She opens the door to a generation that exists between possibilities. In addition, the aspect of connectedness and access to memory and ancestral knowledge (beyond time and space) is also attributed to water here, as the goddess of water makes this access possible.

Parallel to this, Carisa does not have a positive experience growing up and expressing her Puerto Rican and African ancestry, symbolized by the sacred stone her ancestors had carried to her. Llanos writes: “I opened one finger at a time to add to the mystery. The students snaked their necks to see what I was holding. Then there it was, the black stone in my hand. ‘Oh, come on!’ ‘Big deal, it’s just a rock.’” (246). All this is also made possible by the presence of the sea. Fela, the first in the bloodline, was part of the enslaved past of the Middle Passage, and she had brought this stone with her in her body, marking an unbreakable link to Africa that she subsequently left to her newborn daughter after she died from childbirth by the flowing water. Like her predecessors, Carisa finds herself between two spaces: the space of her Puerto Rican identity and the space of her life in New York along with the clash of cultures and people’s perceptions. In this case, the simple stone she holds brings her confidence and symbolizes a whole legacy of female power carried down through the women of her family.

Playa Flamenco, Culebra (Puerto Rico), Photograph by Madyanis Santiago Díaz

The Unnatural and the Human Come Together

In the second novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, the Trinidadian-born British author, unmistakably opens her book with a kind of prayer to her ancestors, addressed to the deep waters, which sets the tone for the novel and the enigmatic character of Aycayia. The world of this mermaid is intertwined with the human world. She has been exiled from the Black Conch area and has roamed the oceans for years, maintaining her unnatural mermaid state, but is rescued by a man who becomes key to her return to humanity. That comeback is threatened by others who do not understand her or her circumstances. The author begins her acknowledgements with the following words: “for the Goddess, the muse, the legends of the deep you are, to me” (1) for the reader to continue with the mermaid’s journey. This figure is not described as ordinary because, apart from being non-human, with manly features and size, and “fished” from the water, she is also magnetic. This is because she is unknown, different from everyone around her: “The men stared. Everyone felt it, the sadness of her existence, a woman who’d been alone in the sea. Had she jumped from a boat? Had her mother mated with a fish? Every man could feel his heart pounding hard in his chest, with fear and a sense of wonderment, at this half and half” (Roffey 29). Most of the male characters in the novel are impressed by Aycayia, her top and bottom halves, and crave to find out her secrets. The author masterfully links this magnetism to the mermaid’s being with so much depth that it frightens people, since it can reflect their own souls, just like the sea. Yet some want to dive into evil and harmful ways, as colonizers and oppressors would in a newly plundered land. But she only gets close to one of them, David, and that is the romance at the heart of the story, as this unifies the sea and land.

In this designed world, the sea is indeed history, as Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” (1979) portrays, for it represents all the possibilities that lie within it, connections to the past and the present, and all the extensions that the sea simultaneously has to other realities and places. Roffey wrote:

She was spitting up seawater, it seemed to be flowing out of her from deep in her gullet. Water seeped from her gills. She was a fish out of water, and yet she wasn’t going to expire like an ordinary fish. She was taking in big fast gulps of air like a thirsty child, trying to stay alive. Her hair was moving, spreading itself across the deck. Numerous pilot fish were dying off around her. She already looked smaller than when she was in the sea. (Roffey 30)

The power that lies within this mermaid is enhanced by the element of seawater, by her connection to it—with the saltwater scent that she still carries when she sheds her tail and grows back a pair of legs—which is said to be part of a curse that keeps her in the water. Even though Aycayia was human in her past, precisely because of her current state (as mermaid) she knows much about the hidden sea world that lies beneath the surface. Thus, she confidently says, “I have seen the sea,”—denoting the experience of lifetimes, for the sea is boundless and considered limitless, and the mermaid has seen it. Aycayia, as a mermaid, can move through the immeasurable waters of the oceans to different points of the world, and therefore she carries a lot of knowledge within her. She is the link between the sea and land, but also past and future, as well as the known and the unknown.

Within Connections That Transcend Place and Time

Connectedness thrives in Village Weavers by Chancy, who is a Haitian-Canadian-American author, when the relationship between the characters Sissi (Simone) and Gertie (Gertrude) transforms and evolves across time, space, and the elements. This novel traces the relationship between two girls from childhood into adulthood, exploring the challenges of a close relationship shaped by life struggles and a family secret that changes its dynamics. In it, water is mentioned repeatedly—as an almost magical element that interweaves memories and time. In other words, their connection is challenged and at the same time maintained in one way or another by water. There is even a moment when Gertie refers to Sissy as her “Simbi”—a Haitian water spirit that appears frequently in the novel. This becomes even clearer when the birds (village weavers) are described as having a deep connection to water, as follows: “It is true that the male birds’ black-hooded heads extend to their chests like the kerchiefs the women wear to shelter themselves, knotted behind their necks, above the shoulders, while the female birds, all of yellow, make her think of Ochún, the maternal sea [sic] goddess” (Chancy 42). The mention of the goddess Oshun (in the corresponding language variation) in this context, and from a Haitian perspective, opens a dimension that suggests how the author has carefully made water an essential element in her designed world.

Correspondingly, there is the moment when Gertie dreams of flying away like a bird, and plunges into this melancholic, introspective attitude, with “a humming that comes from the water, a lullaby that lulls children to sleep” (Chancy 23), and her eyes search for the birds until she sees the sea. The blackbirds are synonymous with childhood, with simpler times, that is, with memories. Chancy wrote: “She knows them, feels a familiarity that reminds her of childhood. Soon, they swoop together over rivers, following the movement out toward the ocean. But as the city flanked by the sea comes into view, Gertie falters. The other birds fall away, back toward the interior of the island” (23). The birds, who remind her of her childhood, are divided into those that fly out to sea and those that stay on the island—hauntingly representing the people who migrate and remain connected by love and memories.

Caribbean Waters Linked In Theory

In the field of theoretical works that assist the boundless dimension of the sea, but from an academic, non-fictional perspective that supports the sense of connectedness of this body of water, there are also Poetics of Relation (1990) by Edouard Glissant, The Repeating Island (1992), Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Poetics of Space (1958) by Gaston Bachelard and Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (2003) by Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun. Glissant reveals the persistent and pervasive connection to African ancestry that has permeated the waters of history since the Middle Passage, as in the three novels. Benitez-Rojo invites readers to circulate around the archipelagic tapestry of islands, which are connected not only by water but also by shared experiences, cultures, and peoples. Bachelard describes a space beyond the physical, one that opens to the creator or explorer and is intimate, allowing for a connection to oneself, the spiritual dimension of the person, and, in some cases, ancestral bonds. Klein and Mackenthun gathered various perspectives on the ocean, highlighting its unifying agency through a diverse range of literary works, which also support this research. Freud’s interpretation of the oceanic concept, which extends even beyond the uncanny to the eternal, reveals an unknown aspect of the sea that contains and connects all aspects of life, reflected in the depth and unexplored essence of the ocean.

In contrast to what the ocean offers in terms of connectedness and continuity, in the first part of his book Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud explains “oceanic” (the nightmarish term that was borrowed from his friend Rolland in an exchange of letters with him) as “a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality,” (2). In other words, this well-known thinker of the early twentieth century emphasizes this term by highlighting the word “ocean” to denote its vastness, as used to define something that is considered infinite, but in his words, is uncertain. This is the nature of the sea in the selected literature that sets the tone for the Caribbean waters that are constantly present in the memories, stories, births, deaths and almost every breath of the characters as well as the authors’ thoughts who venture into this reflective fiction.

The relations that Glissant traces in his book “The Open Boat” reflect this transpiring space in which the enslaved ancestors were practically and unthinkably related to one another because they were in the same “belly of the boat” (as Glissant exposes), in the same womb that carried them to the forced destination, right down to Glissant’s coined term “rhizomatic” roots that grew as a result. In the context of these intertwined reflections of fiction writers and theoretical thinkers, in the article “Notes on The Caribbean Essay from an Archipelagic Perspective (Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez Rojo),” Florencia Bonfiglio highlights that there is “the production of an essay ‘in a certain kind of way’ that the writers share: an ‘archipelagic’ kind of way in which the recurrence of aquatic metaphor s—a legacy from founders of Caribbeanness like Aimé Césaire—allow writers to inscribe a regional (decolonizing) imprint in postmodern thought” (147). As Glissant emphasizes in his work, this points to a relationship between them as writers or weavers of the Caribbean, which Bonfiglio additionally refers to as a display of cooperation that brings them “together with the imagination of the Caribbean as a ‘common place’” (158).

Likewise, in reference to Gaston Bachelard, Bonfiglio argues that: “If water, and especially the sea, according to Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination, is a melancholic element par excellence which incites memory and remembrance, recalling in the Caribbean can in turn lead to re-membering (re-assembling) the archipelagic fragments” (166). This coincides with the statements of other theorists about a space that can transcend its physical form, as in the case of the sea of liquid and flowing “re-membering.” In Poetics of Space, specifically in chapter eight “Intimate Immensity,” Bachelard establishes the presence of a space that has no boundaries and reveals an intimate aspect like that of the sea since, in most cases where it is mentioned, the character is in deep reflection on life. He illustrates this as follows:

“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world that is immense. Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet daydreaming” (184).

In relation to the sea, there is no need to be motionless, because there is movement in the waves, through boats, people walking on the beach, swimming, etc. This motionlessness is more of a necessary inner and individual meditative or contemplative state.

Just as the meditative state of the mind in solitude and immobility opens a space in which the intimate develops, Bachelard also theorizes that “…it is through their ‘immensity’ that these two kinds of space—the space of intimacy and world space—blend. When human solitude deepens, then the two immensities touch and become identical” (203). This is part of what happens in life with the personal and social dimensions of an individual. Nature is a space that, due to the possibility of relaxation and openness, also enables reflection and connection to the intimate. And one of the manifestations of nature is water, to return to the element of the sea, which can open access to the intimate or inner space that is healing and liberating.

For Benítez-Rojo, there is an intertwined continuation of everything in The Repeating Island, specifically the islands of the Caribbean, which are part of a “meta-archipelago” that inevitably shares a connection transcending place and time. The reality of the “Caribbean basin,” as he calls the region, makes it easy for Caribbeanness to be reproduced not only on the islands themselves but also outside the region through diasporas that carry these characteristics beyond the shores. As the word suggests, if the subject is an island, there is water and the sea that surrounds it:

In this (today’s) rereading, I propose, for example, to start with something concrete and easily demonstrated, a geographical fact: that the Antilles are an island bridge connecting, in “another way,” North and South America. This geographical accident gives the entire area, including its continental foci, the character of an archipelago, that is, a discontinuous conjunction (of what?): unstable condensations, turbulences, whirlpools, clumps of bubbles, frayed seaweed, sunken galleons, crashing breakers, flying fish, seagull squawks, downpours, nighttime phosphorescences, eddies and pools, uncertain voyages of signification; in short, a field of observation quite in tune with the objectives of Chaos. (Benítez-Rojo 19)

For Benítez-Rojo, the island that repeats itself does so in so many aspects that the island eventually disappears in its reproducibility. This relation is also true for some Caribbean music, as he mentions: “The copper, black, and yellow rhythms, if quite different from one another, have something in common: they belong to the Peoples of the Sea” (26). He refers to the Peoples of the Seas as those who marked the repeating islands with their cultures of union and preserved the ancestral knowledge brought to them from the African continent.

Similarly, in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, the editors assembled a collection of articles that examine the ocean as more than a vast body of water that serves as source for transportation, food, or separation of parts of the land. In the introduction “The Sea is History,” Walcott emerges as the voice that sets the tone for the book. The editors render tribute to him mentioning that his “poetic metaphor works to restore the sea to the dynamics of the historical process, energizing it for the project of re-imagining, re-writing, and re-membering the past as a complex and polysemic dialogue, a meeting place of different cultures rather than solely the battleground of antagonistic forces” (Klein and Mackenthun 1-2). And as part of this research, a key phrase comes from these lines: “meeting place,” that is, the sea as the link or meeting ground between different peoples who must use or meet by the sea in one way or another.

However, the Caribbean Sea or Caribbean waters also elicit references to slavery, oppression, and colonization. As Klein and Mackenthun argue, the sea “has been a site of loss, dispersal, and enforced migration but also of new forms of solidarity and affective kinship, a paradigm of modern capitalism but also of its creative reinterpretation, a figure of death but also of life (2). Yet it is also due to the ocean itself that we go beyond this fact, for water is constantly moving, flowing, and purifying. The process of healing involves a similar movement, a cyclical swirl of renewed water, away from the presumptuous spirit of conquest or taking possession of the greatest space for the sake of power, especially when the element that made it all possible in the first place holds the power, in this case the sea.

Ultimately, water is essentially as vital as the air people breathe, and this is reflected in literature, not only in poetry and non-fiction, but also in works of fiction. In the Caribbean, particularly in Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Trinidad and Tobago (based on the chosen novels), a region that is surrounded by salt water but also has a great abundance of fresh water, the importance of the sea is emphasized. The healing aspect of water is that it can often wash away pain but also induces acknowledgment or recognition and the process of addressing that pain by bringing it to the surface. In fact, pain and trauma must be recognized because only then can they be released and overcome. In novels such as Daughters of the Stone, The Mermaid of Black Conch,and Village Weavers, healing takes place through connectedness, relationships, love, and support; through connections that transcend time and space in the narratives (similar to the sea), even when the presence and growth of resistance to this notion beyond borders and separation naturally permeates the idea of what the sea might represent. An important reflection on the significance of the sea, prompted by the reading and analyses of these novels and the theoretical discussions that surround them, reveals a vast collection of connections, memories, and possibilities. Returning to Bonfiglio’s article, where she cites the works of prominent Caribbean writers, theorists, and thinkers, the sea and the waters of the Caribbean take center stage in the narratives. There is an aquatic bond present in many Caribbean literary works, reflecting an undeniable interconnectedness. This is also evident in the region’s hybrid nature, with hybridity appearing in many forms—cultural, racial, and even in its shared waters.

Tierras Nuevas Poniente, Manatí (Puerto Rico), Photograph by Madyanis Santiago Díaz

Madyanis Santiago Díaz was born in Puerto Rico and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Literatures and Languages of the Caribbean in English at the University of Puerto Rico. She writes primarily fiction that evokes a sense of recognition, to honor the heritage and spirituality of Caribbean ancestors. Her works have appeared in Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture, Latino Book Review, Wicazo Sa Review, The Puerto Rico Review, La Torre (UPR), The Caribbean Writer (TCW), Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies, The Art of Belonging: Migration, Citizenship and the Caribbean (UNESCO, OBMICA, CARICOM, UWI) and others.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston, and Maria Jolas. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Beacon P, 1994.

Benítez Rojo, Antonio, and James E. Maraniss. The Repeating Island the Caribbean and the

Postmodern Perspective Antonio Benítez-Rojo. Transl. by James Maraniss. Duke UP, 2006.

Bonfiglio, Florencia. “Notes On the Caribbean Essay from An Archipelagic Perspective (Kamau

Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez Rojo).” Caribbean Studies, vol. 43,

no. 1, 2015, pp. 147–73.

Brand, Dionne. At the Full and Change of the Moon a Novel Dionne Brand. Grove Press, 2002.

Chancy, Myriam J. A. Village Weavers: A Novel. Tin House, 2024.

Charlier, R. and Chaineux, M. “The healing sea: a sustainable coastal ocean resource:

Thalassotherapy.” Journal of Coastal Research, 25(4), 838–856.

Freud, Sigmund. “Chapter I.” Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. U of Michigan P, 2010.

Klein, Bernhard, and Gesa Mackenthun. Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean. Routledge,

2004.

Llanos-Figueroa, Dahlma. Daughters of the Stone. Published by Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, 2019.

Renaud, Leighan. 2025. “‘I Have Seen the Sea’: Caribbean Aquatic Poetics in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch.” Humanities 14: 154.

Roffey, Monique. The Mermaid of Black Conch. Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

March 12, 2026