Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective by Anissa Janine Wardi (review)

Author Anissa Janine Wardi’s Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective is an ambitious and well-researched study that investigates the confluence of water, cultural memory, and African American historical experience. Wardi undertakes this investigation through an examination of several twentieth-century cultural texts by writers Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, and Richard Wright; filmmakers Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons; and blues singers Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith. Despite differences in genre and style, these texts variously depict encounters between human bodies, living and dead, and the water bodies that sustain and entomb them—encounters that, by Wardi’s account, reveal the aqueous frontier between the natural, human, and ancestral worlds.

The association of the natural world with ancestral and diasporic memory is not new to critics of African American literature and cultural production, and has been the topic of conversation in academic journals, edited collections, book manuscripts, and university classrooms. Collectively, these conversations disclose an abiding interest in the way African American writers, musicians, and visual artists rely upon the natural world to structure their texts and even critique the injustices of the human world. In the three chapters and conclusion that follow the introduction, Wardi both draws from and hones the conversation by privileging water as a site of inquiry, even asserting that scholars “must return to watercourses to gain insight into African American cultural history” (10).

Wardi executes this return to watercourses through engagement with what she calls “African American Ecocriticism,” a method of interpretation that builds upon ecocriticism, variously known as ecological literary criticism, green criticism, or literary-environmental studies. Wardi argues that ecocriticism, which took root as a field of critical literary study within the past two decades, has largely been limited and applied to the nature writing of Anglo writers (10). However, she posits, the premise of ecocriticism—that the human and nonhuman worlds are interconnected and mutually informed and sustained—”finds an earlier analogue in the work of African American writers, who have persistently attended to their physical environments” (11). Citing the writing of former slaves, Wardi explains how the natural world marked the boundaries between enslavement and freedom, and, furthermore, how such engagement with place and environment continues to characterize the African American literary and cultural tradition.

Wardi thus conceptualizes African American Ecocriticism as a means to fulfill two different but related objectives: first, to uncover how the interdependence of the natural, human, and ancestral worlds in African American literature meaningfully expands the ecocritical canon (15); and second, to address how African American writers “evoke a transatlantic history in which language, and by extension their literary works, are given life force through water” (10). To support her mission, Wardi calls forth critical insights by writers, natural scientists, historians, and cultural critics. She then augments this theoretical discussion with close readings of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean (2006). Hughes’s and Wilson’s texts befit Wardi’s theoretical discussion, given that each revolves around the very idea that structures this project—namely, the interrelationship between water, ancestral, and human bodies. Wardi further nuances this idea by demonstrating how characters’ encounters with water sometimes trigger traumatic memory of the Middle Passage, or, conversely, serve as sites of healing and restoration. Additionally, she demonstrates how disparate waterways—such as Hughes’s rivers and Wilson’s ocean—are each carriers of memory that are perpetually channelled into and out of one another, and, consequently, always already bear the imprint of the Middle Passage.

Wardi’s close reading of Hughes and Wilson leads her to a simple albeit powerful conclusion: water manifests history (29). She expounds upon this idea in subsequent chapters, which are organized around distinct water bodies. By organizing the book in this way, Wardi calls attention to the material composition of water bodies and, equally important, to the ways this materiality informs symbolism, narrative composition, and critical interpretation. Wardi’s...