“Everybody else was just ‘man’ or ‘woman’.” “That one little adjective, ‘small’, was the most description of anybody on the list,” Sussman says. On, at 3am, in hazy visibility but with a fresh breeze blowing (the logs callously note the weather alongside the number of deaths from the day before), this boy is recorded as having died of “flux”, an ambiguous medical condition that may have been dysentery. Using ship logbooks that document the approximate locations where Africans were cast into the Atlantic, the Duke project followed one person, identified on the slave ship The Good Hope only as “small boy”. “It poses a particular problem when what you’re trying to commemorate are people who were deliberately lost.”Īnother idea is to trace the story of an individual, as Sussman did with a team of humanities scholars at Duke University. “The whole point of putting bodies into the sea was that nobody would find them,” says Charlotte Sussman, professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina. Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that no such memorial exists, given that the bodies all vanished. And while this Afrofuturist water race is fictional (and there is no known record of pregnant women being cast to sea from slave ships), Drexciya has helped inspire a new movement that is very real indeed: namely, proposals to create an ocean memorial to the victims of slavery.Īmazingly, despite the number of victims – the infamous “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic is the final resting place for at least 1.8 million people from Africa who died on slave ships and were thrown overboard – there is no international memorial to the role of sea crossings in the horrors of the slave trade. What all the Drexciyan tales have in common is an attempt to deal with the trauma of slavery by imagining an alternative narrative. If you've been on the hunt for the perfect sea-inspired ink and need a few more inspiration pieces to add to your Pinterest board, here are 15 ocean tattoo ideas that'll make you feel like an actual mermaid.The legend of Drexciya has since been adopted by other artists – such as in a novel, also called The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, and in Abdul Qadim Haqq and Dai Sato’s graphic novel, The Book of Drexciya. From marine-based animals like an octopus or sea otter to symbols like seashells, there's more than one way to get a water-themed tattoo. But if you're looking for an ocean tattoo that's a bit different, know that you don't have to go with a literal art piece. One of the most popular trends in ink right now is the micro tattoo, and you can opt for an ocean-inspired design within that category - think small, single-line waves. For those who love the beach or an adventure on the water, an ocean tattoo could be the way to go. These are great spots to find ideas, but if you already have an inkling (no pun intended) of what you want, it's time to narrow things down. When it comes to finding inspiration for tattoos, it's easy to spend hours upon hours scrolling through Instagram and Pinterest boards to figure out your next (or your very first) bit of body art.
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