Where Water Can Go

Ilulissat, Greenland 2016

I recently watched footage of thousands of people attempting to swim from Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Much of the reporting focused on the scale of the event, and the language quickly became familiar: crisis, wave, invasion, which we are bombarded with on the news channels. But what stayed with me was when a journalist asked why they wanted to come to Europe, and from within the crowd came one unanimous response: hope. They didn't whisper the word. They shouted it with joy and excitement. It wasn't the expression of people who had given up or even just made an arduous swim. It was the expression of people who still believed another life was possible.

I couldn't stop thinking about this interview. It wasn't because I was surprised that people had reasons for leaving. Every migration story is different. Each person carries their own history and their own reasons for moving. Those reasons may be shaped by economic hardship, political instability, conflict, family, environmental change, or the search for opportunity. What stayed with me was that when asked why they wanted to come to Europe, many answered with one word: hope. It was that word that transformed their faces. For a brief moment, they were no longer speaking only about what they were leaving behind, but about what they believed might still be possible to achieve with access to Europe.

There are countless differences between the men I watched and me. Our histories, our circumstances, the risks we have faced, and the privileges we carry are profoundly different. I did not risk my life crossing the sea, nor have I lived the circumstances that brought them to that shoreline. I don't want to flatten those differences because they matter. Yet despite them, there was one thing I immediately recognized in myself, and my commitment to effort to stay in Europe is Hope. Not as an abstract idea, but as the belief that another life might still be possible for ourselves.

As an immigrant living in Germany, I know something about living with uncertainty, even if it is a very different kind. I never intended to live a life in Europe. I happened to be living in Berlin when I sustained my traumatic brain injury. An accident transformed my entire life, my future, and my ability to return home. The realities of healthcare and recovery made returning to the United States impossible. My life quickly became organized around housing, residence permits, application fees, lawyers, paperwork, and waiting.

Today, I find myself waiting for the outcome of my German citizenship application, uncertain whether the future I have spent years building will continue to unfold here. My circumstances are not the same as those of the people I watched that day, but I understand what it means to hold onto the possibility that another life might still be possible. To have hope that I can have healthcare, stable housing, that I can recover from injury, and to have full agency over my body.

Watching the coverage of Ceuta also made me think about the language that surrounded it. When thousands of people become an invasion, hope itself sounds dangerous. Fear reshapes public opinion, public opinion reshapes policy, and policy reshapes borders. We often speak about movement as though it were a problem to be managed and corrected, yet movement is one of the most fundamental expressions of life. Water flows. Blood circulates. Breath moves through the lungs. We move through landscapes, relationships, ideas, and time. We are dynamically transforming. Yet not all people are permitted to move with the same freedom. The politics begins with deciding whose movement is allowed and whose movement is denied.

Water has long been central to my artistic practice, in video, words, photographs and conversations. It is deeply part of my Indigenous belonging to this world, my relationship with water. My tribe, The Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, exists today because of the safety of water, the swampland of North Carolina in the United States. It refuses to remain still, always finding another path. Watching those men swim toward the shore, I couldn't stop thinking about the water that brought them to the shores of Ceuta. The sea does not recognize the borders we draw across maps. It doesn't distinguish between passports or citizenship. It simply moves where it wants to flow.

Perhaps that is why those images have stayed with me. Beneath the politics, the headlines, and the numbers, I saw something much older than borders. I saw human beings moving toward the possibility of another life. I didn't recognize their circumstances. I recognized their hope.

And perhaps hope moves much like water. It doesn't disappear when it encounters an obstacle. It searches for where it can go.