What Water Holds

Abstract

This work blends prose with verse in an attempt to understand ancestry. I’m trying to excavate the historical archives that exist within my own body by excavating the historical archives embedded in the spaces of New Orleans and the water of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. This work is mourning multiple aftermaths as I reflect on my family’s displacement after Hurricane Katrina, my ancestor, Little Judy’s enslavement and my grandfather’s death. This work is an effort of undoing and an effort of re-doing. It uses water as a point of access to my personal and collective histories. These histories manifest in this work as prose and verse that weave together and call back to each other. This work does not follow the traditional format of a nonfiction piece. Instead, it fuses verse and prose together to investigate the states of being each space and archive is discovered and laid to rest in. My grandfather died the year before last. And Katrina was seventeen years ago. And Little Judy was enslaved over two hundred years ago. And.