![]() Indeed, this claim indexes the Door of No Return and thus gives birth to blackness in the Americas but it also simultaneously marks the sea and the ocean as sites of black death and the birth of the very foundation of capitalism and post-Enlightenment global life. Indeed, the kind of relation between the two births is, as Christina Sharpe has noted in her discussion of Cradle to Grave (C2G), an anti–gun violence program at Temple University Hospital, “a reminder that to be Black is to be continually produced by the wait toward death that the cradle and the grave double as far as Black flesh is concerned.” 1 That cautionary “The sea ain't got no back door” is a reminder that the sea is cradle of both life and death. Yet the birth of blackness that I am grappling with here, while related, is radically different. ![]() ![]() Of course, human birth is itself experienced through waters-where we apply the language of amniotic fluid and water breaking. The aquatic and the saline, then, are not just metaphors for Black people's emergence as a category of persons in the Americas and beyond the aquatic is a kind of foundational birth claim for blackness and thus Black diasporic people. The black aquatic names the claim that blackness itself is birthed in salt water-the Atlantic Ocean as a first instance-and then later becomes a kind of saline embodiment of early modern and late modern new life forms or Black selves. Therefore, if the sea has been death, it has also been birth. The black aquatic pursues the relationship Black people have to bodies of water as foundationally formative of blackness, and it seeks to provide an aesthetic narratology and hauntology of contemporary claims of black subjectivity. The question of the sea, the ocean, the river, the lake, or the creek might be distinct from the question of the swimming pool, but in my way of thinking they conjoin for Black people. I am not interested in either disproving or confirming such ambiguity and ambivalence rather, I am exploring a side of the black aquatic broadly defined-Black peoples’ lived relation in and to bodies of water-as both self-constitutively historical and contemporary. It is a relationship that is not simply held by Black people but one that, as the above example indicates, is also assumed by others to be actually constitutive of black subjectivity. What I am calling the black aquatic is the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship that Black people hold to bodies of water. “The sea ain't got no back door,” a popular statement of caution, was a kind of introduction to both revering and fearing these powerful bodies of water. What was puzzling for me was an understanding, then more intuitive and now more firmly certain, of Black peoples’ intimate relationship to bodies of water both natural and artificial. If Campanis's claim held no water, as the historical and social critique of it at that time determined, what nonetheless remained was Black people's relationship to bodies of water and something called swimming. Indeed, as far as the sea and ocean were concerned, reverence and fear, and sometimes both simultaneously, characterized our relationship to bodies of water, especially the sea. Of course I knew many people who lived near the sea who did not swim, but even with that knowledge, the divorce from bodies of water was never a categorical one. Coming from an island in the Caribbean region, the divorce stuck me as an untenable one. What has always stayed with me was not the debate about access to pools and leisure clubs but the manner in which, in these comments, Black people became divorced from water-seas, oceans, lakes, rivers, and creeks. ![]() In the aftermath of his claims, Campanis's career suffered. Campanis's statement erupted into a public-sphere debate concerned with segregated swimming pools and leisure clubs in the United States and lack of swimming pools in black communities. All these years later, the claim has stayed with me. It was the night that, in the context of elaborating on why there were no Black managers in major league baseball, Al Campanis made the analogy that there were no professional Black swimmers because Black people lacked buoyancy. I still remember watching Nightline in 1987. Turquoise, aquamarine, deep green, deep blue, ink navy, blue-black cerulean water. Water is the first thing in my imagination. . . . All beginning in water, all ending in water.
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