Blue Stories: Indian Ocean Narratives and Cultures of Trauma and Healing

This thematic stream invites conversations with narratives of the sea, how living and non-living communities of the sea and those by the sea live off and, on the water, and how the Indian Ocean has surfaced varies realities for them across histories and geographies. This theme will both read and narrate social narratives on the Indian Ocean, including those that have been narrated as hearsay but have never got to the mainstream, or engaged with as part of the identity of the people. The premise for this conversation is that the people of the Indian Ocean come from  histories of dispersal and violence: of slave trade and the monsoon winds that allowed voyages to move from the Atlantic Europe to beyond the Indian Ocean, yet despite these histories, people of the Indian Ocean and their present histories do not see their identities as entangled with these histories of the Indian Ocean. This work will borrow the concept of unplanned for, hijacked and incomplete journeys to explore these erased, silenced, and invisible stories, and how these stories are told. The theme will in this way engage with the gaps in the archive, to understand the ghostly presence of Indian Ocean histories, and how this absence and amnesia can be meaningfully engaged with. The stream will ask the following questions: How do the people of the Indian Ocean know they are of the Indian ocean? How do they tell their histories of entanglement and identities of the Indian Ocean? The stream uses embodiment as a method of interrogating history to understand the afterlives of slavery.

Serah Namulisa Kasembeli, Mzuzu University
serahkas@gmail.com