What Water Teaches Us
LIKE THE PROTAGONIST of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s new cli-fi novella Lost Ark Dreaming, I, too, have a recurring dream of being overtaken by rising waters. In Yekini’s dream, the biblical story of the ark and the flood mixes with the rising waters overtaking Lagos, Nigeria. Yekini clutches a basket with a baby in it, refusing […]
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LIKE THE PROTAGONIST of Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s new cli-fi novella Lost Ark Dreaming, I, too, have a recurring dream of being overtaken by rising waters. In Yekini’s dream, the biblical story of the ark and the flood mixes with the rising waters overtaking Lagos, Nigeria. Yekini clutches a basket with a baby in it, refusing to surrender it or flee. By the time she realizes what she has chosen, the waves have come, and she cannot escape them. But the basket in her hands is now empty.
In my dream, I make the opposite choice. At first, I try to outrun the rising waters, fleeing to higher ground. But running is futile. Gathering courage, I hold tightly to whatever structure happens to be around me and turn to face the advancing wave. Right before the waters engulf me, realization hits: the wave is a transformative force that will eventually overtake me. The process will be less painful if I accept it. I hold my breath as the wave washes over me.
There is something both Yekini and I are learning about water in our dreams. There is something that water is trying to teach us: sometimes the wave bringing destruction cannot be escaped; sometimes accepting transformation is the means to mitigate damage.
But this is not the approach undergirding Okungbowa’s fictional Fingers, the five skyscraping towers arising from a private island off the coast of near-future Lagos, nor the real world construction that inspired them. On a panel about “African urbanism and the future of civilization,” Okungbowa described how the Fingers reflect the thinking behind the Eko Pearl Towers in Eko Atlantic City, luxury living on the edge of the rising sea. Unlike the shoreline slum communities that have long lived in relation to the ocean—communities that have taken to building floatable structures, enabling them to change as the sea level does—the towers instead try to fortify themselves against the water, erecting a wall as if that were enough to stop the transformative power of the sea.
Maame, Yekini’s grandmother, reminds readers throughout the book that water “no get enemy. Not because water like everybody and everybody like water, no. But because if water decide to mean you, nobody fit fight am.” Water teaches us: a wall is not enough to stop the ocean if it decides to fight back.
Lost Ark Dreaming begins 54 years after the catastrophic flood that restarted the clock, in the lone remaining tower since the others have succumbed to the strength of the sea. Named the Pinnacle, this tower is separated into levels: the Uppers, the Midders, and the Lowers, with the lower levels lying underwater. Yekini, a midder descended from lowers who lucked their way up, works for the Commission for the Protection of the Fingers and is sent to investigate a strange leak in the Lowers—water piercing through the structures meant to keep it at bay.
Water teaches us: sometimes structures stand in the way of relations we need. Yekini has never been to the Lowers and has no contact with anyone who lives there. Yet she feels a compulsion to go on this mission:
What Yekini didn’t say was that somewhere within her, something even stronger than her own will, antsier than her own nerves, was pushing, pushing, pushing. Showing up in her dreams. It was not by choice that she’d wanted to get out of that chair. It was a force to which she had no choice but to succumb.
Yekini feels a force like a wave pushing her through the division maintained by the Pinnacle’s structured hierarchies.
Such divisions cannot hold when one thinks liquidly. In their research, Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke reflect on the ways that the Eurocentric methodologies they learned in US graduate schools are unable to capture how organizing works in the African contexts they come from and study. Cruz and Sodeke offer the concept of liquid organizing as a means of understanding how Africans operate on the margins, engaging in fluid relations that emerge from contextual factors and deep interconnections with one another, rather than being defined top-down by roles within a system and their attendant duties.
Liquid organizing provides a lens for understanding what rapidly unfolds once Yekini descends into the Lowers to meet engineer Tuoyo, with mid-level administrator Ngozi in tow. These three come together across seemingly solid social barriers to challenge the very structure of the tower itself—and the hierarchies it’s based on. In an interlude, Okungbowa poetically describes the hierarchical divisions between “those who Have and those who Did Not Have”—as well as their consequences. As the narrator puts it, “this, friend, is the way the world always ends, has always ended since we have watched it together: with those who Have choosing demise—always demise—for everything but themselves.”
Like Yekini’s push to descend in the first place, the more the three main characters begin to think liquidly, to listen to what water is trying to teach them, the less willing they are to accept this solid division. As the water encroaches on level nine, pools about their ankles, they realize the murderous lengths to which the uppers are willing to go to ignore inconvenient truths—and, thus, that the whole structure is built on lies.
One of those lies is that it’s possible to maintain such solid divisions. Near the end of her 2020 book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “As the oceans rise, what will we learn?” Water teaches us: we are inseparable from one another. “[T]he world is round,” Gumbs reminds us. Everything is connected and everything returns. In Lost Ark Dreaming, the truth the uppers desperately wish to keep secret is the existence of Yemoja’s Children—“in the words of the master clerics, offspring of the devils beneath the sea”—and perhaps more importantly, the perceived monsters’ intimate interconnection with humanity. When Yekini, Tuoyo, and Ngozi come face-to-face with one of these monsters, the Child gives their name as Omíwálé: “The water comes home.”
Water teaches us: what affects one of us affects us all. Throughout the novella, Okungbowa’s writing prods at divisions and hierarchies, walls and structures, widening the cracks that already existed to deftly reveal that such separations are not as solid as they pretend to be. At one point, Ngozi reflects upon a single sandal within a pile of flotsam, on “how useless the sandal was without the other in its pair, and how much in this tower and beyond was the same: dependent on other people and things for their very existence to be effective and meaningful, useless in their absence.” Every time the Upper leadership of the Pinnacle uses violence to maintain its power, it simultaneously erodes its own ability to survive. “Didn’t they know that if the Lowers crumbled, the whole tower would follow?” Tuoyo wonders. Okungbowa emphasizes the irrationality of domination: the uppers remain so emphatic about maintaining structure that they cannot comprehend that they’re doing so at the cost of their own lives. Building walls, as if they could keep out the sea.
Building walls, both literal and figurative—separations between levels, between who is considered a person and who is considered a monster. In another interlude, Okungbowa writes, “I like how you say conquer when you mean erase. Let me borrow from their saying here: they who rewrite stories are doomed to create monsters.” By rewriting the world into hierarchies, those in power pretend that they can divide some from others, land from water; in the process, parts of the community are turned into monsters. They must be in order to give the fictitious divisions a warrant to stand. Even now as I write about this story, I wonder if I am also doomed to create monsters. Thinking liquidly, interconnectedly, perhaps we all are monsters. For “what are we but stories that touch?” The question then becomes: do you accept monsters as community, or try to pretend you are not one?
As Okungbowa puts it, “When you say nature, friend, I think: community. Because it was never them against nature. It was never them against monsters. It is always—and always has been—them against themselves.” But it doesn’t have to be against, if we are thinking liquidly, centering the inescapability of our interconnection. And it is this acceptance of relation to one another, dependence upon one another—whether upper or lower, human or Child, land or water—that allows a wave of transformation to wash over Yekini’s world. Water teaches us: when we accept the wave, accept that we are part of the wave, nothing can stop us. After all, “if water decide to mean you, nobody fit fight am.”
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