Submerged Narratives: Memorializing Enslavement in Eve Sandler’s Mami Wata Crossing

Abstract

In Harlem-based artist Eve Sandler’s installation Mami Wata Crossing (2008), text, image, object, and film converge to form an intimate memorial to enslaved ancestors and also honors transatlantic water spirits called Mami Wata. Sandler engages maternal lineages by mobilizing practices honoring water spirits—often characterized as migratory maternal figures—as a lens through which to reconfigure memories of the slave trade and narratives of women’s labor. As a presentation of Black women’s narratives of diasporic belonging within the United States, the installation emerges as an alternative archive of materials that allows for the experiential activation of family histories and Afro-Atlantic ritual practices as lived realities. The installation expands the purview of a slave memorial by combining media whose impermanence challenges the purpose of monumental public art within understandings of Black women’s histories. Sandler seeks diasporic cultural connection by ritually performing historical haunting. In this article, I propose a rethinking of ways that public institutions make room for visual representation of African American women’s histories by reconnecting these histories to Afro-Atlantic ritual practices. I argue that, by activating inherited objects as a sacred material history, Sandler memorializes gendered experiences of enslavement and nonlinear, submerged narratives through the recurrent visual form of the Afro-Atlantic altar. In Sandler’s work, the submerged narrative indicates a historical remix made visible, the remnant contents of family albums, homes, and bits of agrarian landscapes lashed together as a signal buoy for that which remains out of sight.