By the Water
On Water
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory–what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” – Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”
I’ve been attracted to water as a concept that is iterative, healing and maternal since reading the essay “The Site of Memory” by Toni Morrison, and particularly this excerpt, during my first year in college when a professor’s syllabus included mostly books by Morrison and her generation of Black women writers. I was 18 years old and considered myself a young poet without much of a life plan, but enchanted by words of the greats such as the above.
Around 2008, I started writing the song that became “By the Water”, which wasn’t released until 2016. Musically, I was exploring the Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye catalogues of 7 and 9 chords, and personally, I was experiencing a failed relationship that felt like a grief flooding me open. I had a ritual then of frequenting the Hudson River, staring out at the tides and processing my feelings. The song took another 8 years to release because it took that amount of time and luck to be surrounded by these exceptional musicians who helped to play what I heard in my heart. The album cover came from a photo of the Mississippi River at dusk I took when I first visited New Orleans that year. Circuitously, Morrison was referencing the Mississippi in “The Site of Memory.” A song, like this one, is a place where rivers meet.
Around the world, indigenous peoples chant how “water is life” and land and water protectors remind us what is elementally important. As the temperature of the ocean waters rise and pollutants such as microplastics toxify the core of this planet’s source of life, how urgent it is to continue to listen to water and let it be the liberatory mechanism it was intended to be. It will flood us open, and whether that happens tenderly or brutally, will define us whole.
Photo by Judith Rae
Taiyo Na • he/they • Lenapehoking (New York, NY)
Taiyo Na is a writer of poems, songs, stories and curricula who lives on unceded Lenape land (Queens, NY) and whose writing has appeared in Kweli Journal, Poets House and in the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books).
