sargassum sky

Here I float on the surface of earth, brown like the continent wide sargassum raft they are talking about on the news. For now, I too am full of air. Ecologist Patricia Edridge of Seaweed Generation says she has replaced her climate anxiety with sargassum anxiety and resort owners in the Caribbean, Florida and Mexico say that this prolific seaweed washing up on shore will ruin the beach tourist industry. And so we have something else in common. Brown menaces, visible from outerspace.

Or at least tracked by satellites.

It was satellite imaging that warned the watchers that this year the Atlantic Sargasso Belt is not only broader than broadway, it is wider than the whole United States. And I wonder if instead of living in the gun-crazed fantasy of someone else’s forefathers, a landscape of terror and cops, I could live on a copper raft of algae as algae, breaking off piece of myself to spread us wider, holopelagic, never touching the bottom of the ocean until I die.

Or is my anxiety sargasstic, keeping me on the surface, while what I do every day, this diving deeper, this grounding work what sargassum breathing as one, a billion tiny air bladders strong, would call the good death. The chance to clear the air of carbon and feed the prescient life underneath I had earlier been protecting with my latticed canopy of reach. When sargassum do wash up on shore they become part of the land, crucial to the structure of sand dunes, preventing shoreline erosion, but only if they have a good burial.

Right now, due multiple people made conditions, including rising ocean temperatures and possibly fertilizer runoff into the ocean the amount of sargassum washing up on the shorelines of the Americas is overwhelming the stewards of beachly whiteness. And like any dead body in the open air in the heat of the sun sargassum becomes toxic. It would not be good for your own air bladder, I call mine lungs, or your braid for you to breath in the rot.

Imagine, a species in toxic relationship with planet earth, that’s us, going to the beach to get away from our chloroflourocarbon producing or dependent occupations and being met with masses of dead algae bodies, offering toxicity back in kind. Kind of seems like a message doesn’t it? Karma, a brown philosophy .

Who knows, maybe all the multi-national beauty companies will pivot to seaweed skin products. My cousin Branden says that’s already starting to happen in Mexico. But the impossible to ignore sargassum that meteorologists are tracking like a self-contained hurricane is making me ask myself what in my life needs a journey to the depth, a good burial. Before I can’t take the smell anymore.

Algae are among our very oldest earth ancestors. It would make sense that they would teach us about death. And so we remember how African Antigone always was and how Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) revealed the colonial haunting undergirding European gender relations. When you don’t have a good death or a proper burial there will be a haunting.

It takes intention and a deep surrendering of ego, linearity and everything else colonialism taught us to value to allow our ancestral connections to be what they can be, what I believe they must be, nourishing fertile ground. Otherwise we live yet another zombie apocalypse movie, haunted by centuries of violence, haunting the air we breathe through cycles of harm and reaction, a noxious context that eats away our brains. (And I think all the Jean Rhys scholars would remind us that every new zombie apocalypse TV show and movie reveals the infusion of African and Caribbean stories of undeath into the western cultural imagination. Another haunting.

I am here immersed in a western culture that ignores and is obsessed by death at the same time, but what I know is that my ancestors deserve a good burial within me. A transubstantiation of vulnerability into love. We, the intentional repositories for our ancestors known and unknown can find intergenerational clarity in deep suffering, and powerful commitment and faith in the acts of love and resistance that came before us.

But I know that offering my ancestors a long good death, an honored world building role beyond their lifetimes requires me to let my ego die. To let go of my preoccupation with surface attention so I can go below the surface and contribute to the deep ecology of our home. It challenges me to release my fear of intimacy, all my methods for keeping you at the surface and not letting you in. It reminds me that my fantasies of being self contained with my little air bubble body cannot withstand how profoundly entangled we are. It is scary to let go of pieces of myself, that might grow into whole other lives, but that’s the only way we grow.

What if every step towards embodied liberation is a good death for the person I was before, sinking to the surface, healing the atmosphere and allowing new life to regenerate. Could I be as algae as that? Could we?

Is this what is so scary to transphobic legislators about trusting trans youth and supportive parents to lead their own evolution? Denials of life-saving healthcare to trans people of all ages disrespect all our ancestors, including the algae. They seek to legislate us into ignoring a spiritual truth: embodiment IS change. Change is life-giving. And how dare they project their fear of transformation itself on the scale of the planet and their own souls onto our sacred teachers, our true leaders, our children. June Jordan says, “children are the way life begins again and again.” And life is never the same. And let me be clear, targeting a group of young people who cannot even vote yet in order to harness the fears of a surface obsessed population fearful of change is not leadership. It is cowardice. It is rotten. It pollutes the very air.

What do we do when transformation become impossible to ignore? When the spectrum of being becomes wider than the national imaginary can hold? We go deeper, we love browner, we change the shoreline, we grow.

This writing is how I give you all my air, tubularly braiding our destinies here on the surface of something we barely understand. And why should we? This is BIG, our connection across oceans. Our surrender of pieces of our selves to a future that will float on without us. And our transformative love to be impossible to ignore forever more, to be visible to all witnesses of all species, even the spies watching through satellites. I want the offering of our compassion to all each others evolutions to take up more space in our imaginations than any national nostalgia. I want the brown interconnection of our boldness to change the topography of our possible shorelines. And so here I am offering air until all this good loving empties me out. And I believe you will still be with me when we go deeper than we know we can go, nutritious to the waiting ground as a welcome falling sky.

P.S. I love you and I’m here. Our Black queer and trans-led Black Feminist Film School team is leading a workshop on ancestral remembrance soon. More info here: https://sangodare.podia.com/already-been-done-black-feminist-film-school-ancestral-listening-and-the-color-purple