Undertow Keys - a sea prophesy
On New Year's Eve as one year rolls into another, we may look for signs that all is well in the world and ponder plans for the future. On the cusp of 2019 and Covid-19, we watched fireworks boom and shimmer at sea, turning the water red. The revenge of fish, when it comes, will be savage and swift, I mused, imagining the chaos underwater. The tiles on the Chinese Embassy sign in Stonetown 亲爱的祖国 (My Beloved Country),has the same blood sheen, I noticed, driving past that afternoon in an afternoon taxi.At midnight, people dance staccato under a mirror ball, reflections splattered across each others' chests. And in the languid after days,walking in the footprints of fishermen,I found nylon- bound squid with thyroid eyes, silver scales cut loose from a tail, fat acoustic shells handed to bikini -clad Italians for small change. A kite surfer soporific in too warm currents drifting back to land. ‘What is that?’ I ask, his tattoo brushing past my eyebrow. ‘A mescaline particle’, he replied, looking straight ahead. Of course it is, I stared at his back, the world is either hallucinating or asleep, jolted awake, natural disasters , like a kite surfer jolted alert when feet hurtle into hot sand. Further down the beach, a fluorescent tween snorkelling in shallow water, emerging with green filligree on her head, half human, half sea, surreal a Magritte painting.
The islands of the Indian ocean are attractive to tourists, yet increasingly the resorts must contend with storms of unprecedented velocity, piracy, warmer waters bleaching coral white, and wave after wave of plastics washing up. Human ideas about nature have constantly changed, and it has been the same with the planet’s shorelines - two hundred years ago the shoreline was considered a place of peril. In the mid-20th century the beach became the world’s preferred vacation destination, and now negative associations are creeping back in, as tourism industry bodies fail to contain news of sea horses dying and sewage leaking out from under the isthmus. This series, including a photograph of a girl being silly with seaweed in the shallows off a resort on the island of Zanzibar, seems to capture some generalisable uncertainty or ambivalence in the experience of paradise today. Is it a mutant sea monster, or a child with a snorkel?Is the stuff on her head and flecking the surrounding ocean seaweed, or green plastic? Pristine landscapes still exist, and blithely happy beach moments are still possible, but as viewers the time for taking such scenes and emotional states at face value is over.
Poems from Trilce by César Vallejo
César Vallejo was a Peruvian poet. He is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante"
All images © 2025 Caroline Suzman
