Water Knows the Way: Diaspora, Return and the Sea

📚 Further Reading / Resources

These readings, artworks, and archives extend the ideas explored in this conversation with Adjoa Armah. They offer grounding in Black Atlantic memory, diaspora, movement, water, ritual, and the poetics of return.

Saman Archive
A long-term research and visual project tracing kinship, ritual, and shifting landscapes in Ghana and its diaspora.
🔗 https://www.samanarchive.com/

Adjoa Armah — Portfolio, Essays, and Projects
Art, archival practice, critical writing, and exhibitions.
🔗 https://adjoaarmah.net/

Works Referenced in the Episode

Kamau Brathwaite — especially Elegguas
Brathwaite’s work, and Elegguas in particular, offers a tidal, sonic approach to Caribbean history, language, and memory. His poetics resonate deeply with questions of water, sound, archive, and return.

Ayi Kwei Armah
Armah’s novels and essays explore African futures, memory, ethics, and the long arcs of return. His work complements this episode’s attention to historical rupture, lineage, and the work of repair.

Logic of the Written Word and Oral Logic: Conflict at the Heart of the Archive⁠⁠ - https://www.afterall.org/articles/logic-of-the-written-word-and-oral-logic-conflict-at-the-heart-of-the-archive/#footnote-8-d84d

Oceanic Thought and Black Feminist Poetics: On Water, Salt, Whales, and the Black Atlantics⁠ - https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/the-ocean/on-water-salt-whales-and-the-black-atlantic

Performance, Movement, and Embodied Inquiry

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution
A performance and research platform exploring the body, choreography, feminist practice, and political movement.
🔗 https://www.ificantdance.org/

Tidal Gatherings
Referenced by Adjoa in relation to watery movement, collective participation, and embodied knowledge.

Black Atlantic Memory, Diaspora, and Return

Saidiya Hartman — Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
A seminal meditation on diaspora, dispossession, and the impossibility and longing of return. Hartman traces the routes and ruptures of the Atlantic world with unmatched clarity and emotional precision.

Édouard Glissant — Poetics of Relation
Glissant’s foundational text on entanglement, opacity, and relationality across the Caribbean and the wider world. Essential for understanding diasporic connection as both fracture and possibility.

This conversation with Adjoa Armah unfolds as a visual essay and a preview of the Saman Archive. Adjoa is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work spans art, anthropology, and archival practice, tracing histories and futures that connect Ghana, the UK, and the broader Black world. Throughout this episode, you will encounter Adjoa’s photography, and glimpses of the persistence and sensitivity of an artist–researcher–archivist whose commitment to understanding changing landscapes is deeply inspiring.

As Adjoa shares her doctoral work, we speak about water as body, boundary, and bridge, and how the sea holds memory for those of us whose histories are shaped by movement, rupture, and return. She reflects on the idea that water knows the way, and how creative practice becomes a vessel for ancestral listening, repair, and world-making.

Our reasoning moves between archives and coastlines, the collective and the intimate, asking what it means to come home when home is everywhere and nowhere at once. This episode listens to the sea as ancestor, teacher, and keeper of story.

Themes: Diaspora and return • Water and memory • Ancestral knowledge • Black Atlantic geographies • Art as method

Hashtags: #SaltwaterReasonings #CaribbeanScholarship #GlobalSouthDialogues #DiasporaReturn #WaterKnowsTheWay #BlackAtlantic #DecolonialKnowledge