Kingdom

by Irenosen Okojie

Pale and hollowed, the bones appear like rare giant insects on the sand. A skeletal invasion on the long stretch of abandoned beach at the Ghanaian Gold Coast. Here, the turquoise shimmer of water, the chorusing marine life, the vast sky, twisted and turbulent, bear a layer of foreboding that could be distorted again come the following dawn. Faces in the jutting rock cliffs are stretched into corroded expressions, protesting their roles as trapped witnesses of the water’s secrets.

The bones’ origin story begins on a ship – and their rebirth thereafter, in the underwater kingdom following the ship’s unravelling during the harsh thunderstorms across the Atlantic Ocean in 1825. The ship, named The Murky Jade is making its way to Brazil from African shores, encountering turbulent waters and weather. An overfilled ship, an unpredictable captain full of whisky, bad decisions, plus restless workers flapping at the white masts, attempting to derail the inevitability awaiting The Murky Jade’s splendour: this collision is a perfect storm on the seas. Halfway across the Atlantic, The Jade is a hive of chaos as waters rise in the captain’s lodgings; the ship slants at an angle, sending inhabitants sliding, screaming at nature’s fresh assault. Thunderstorms batter flesh. The captain, long brown hair slicked back with dark rain, his soaked black and white cotton clothing made heavy and inadequate, gaunt face contorted into a fearful expression as he hollers at his men. A decision is made. Some slaves are to be tossed overboard to ease the load on the ship. A mixture of scantily clad male and female slaves are brought up. Their traumatised bodies tremble, dark skin like slippery passageways. They shudder at the tipping point, a whirl of emotions inside, muttering their declarations of afterlife while held in the tight grips of white hands before being pushed overboard into the sea’s cold rhapsodic depths. A twist of currents embraces their bodies as they sink downwards, unable to swim. The sea’s creatures glimmer in kaleidoscopic welcome. The slaves’ open mouths reveal the spill of mother tongue and western currencies of sugar, jewellery, gold, silver blood. Their bodies tumble down to the bed of the sea in watery symphonies of death and promised resurrection.

Some time passes before the slaves become statues at the bottom of the sea. Clay forms, holding parts of each other’s missed lives in loving ceremonies. By this point, the captain of The Murky Jade is dead from alcohol poisoning, the ship a ruined instrument. A mosquito on board had spread a rare strain of malaria after biting one of the workers. It then called to its fellow buzzing mosquitoes in the distance, part of an airborne insect colony to feed on the ship’s inhabitants. Soon, the passengers suffered with terrible sickness, fevers that bloom on the skin like badly behaved flowers, high-fluctuating temperatures, cold sweats, endless diarrhoea, the shrinkage of their souls and beings. They stepped into halcyon hallucinations, duplicitously hanging around the ship like a misted sanctuary. The pirate eye of a slave, lodged in the thunderstorm, acting as a compass and crying disciple; the ship’s mast a sullied harbinger of doom. There was no doctor on board or second survival for the captain’s men, only this ending – with the remaining slaves revolting in chains in the ship’s darkened nooks, calling to the ones below in the waters.

A ceremony of resurgence occurs at the bottom of the sea where shadows of the future mimic the shapes of fish; plastic bottles, waste materials, pollution ingested by marine animals such as turtles, seals, dolphins, African penguins, snuffing the light out of them before spreading to Congolese rivers, Brazil’s beaches and more African shores. A skirmish between the past and the present occurs. They tumble into currents twisting like divine constellations. In the ceremonial resurgence of the slaves, the hands of their ancestors turn inside them, and their ancestors too, stretching back to a line of proud ancestry lifting them up and reminding them of their power. Many seasons pass before the slaves’ heads are uprooted from their bodies in separate flights, hurtling into the sea’s ether beyond the lines of its bed. The slaves’ statue bodies are left like sylphs, in hypnosis from their ancestors’ song and dance within them, awaiting their celestial abundance underwater. Their wounds become small seahorses chasing a tempestuous light from above. The process of change occurs, the reduction into those pale bones. Euphoric reimagining made real against the bleakness in the waters as they rise to the top centuries later, pushing through thrashing white waves with their secrets, saluting the nebulous parched sky with their own form of hunger and necessary reckoning on the horizon.

Perched on the sand, the cruelties of the slave trade spill from them as a darkened marrow, a reminder of the past. The bones start to assemble into shapes from a future iteration – as striking, efficient ships’ tools and debris suspended in the airy white room of an art gallery. Spindly-legged driftwood, gnarled and ghostly. Pale ship’s netting collapsed into a murmur, worn from catching its scorched memories in forms of self-flagellation. Frameworks of dissent, the bones fully step into their true potential as a new army, contorting and opening their watery portals of abyss. The shadows of several slave ships appear, including The Murky Jade. The bones step into their new paradigm on the blustery shore, like beautiful obstacle courses, instruments ready to be deployed. They are filled with the knowledge that they can stop an injustice from occurring by culling it at the point of intention, reverse engineering of cruel civilisations, wars, slaveries. Their withering, their reinvention in the smog of the sea gives them this power. The bones open again ready to consume the slave ships in a new annihilation. The burst of light is blinding, shattering: a sudden effervescence despite the bleakness of the past. The language of Babylon brought to colonial vessels.

Irenosen Okojie is a Nigerian-born novelist and short-story writer working in London. Her stories incorporate speculative elements and make use of her West African heritage. Her first novel, Butterfly Fish, won a Betty Trask Award in 2016, and her story ’Grace Jones’ won the 2020 Caine Prize for African Writing.

Dominique White, Cinders of the Wreck is at VISUAL from 8 February – 18 May 2025.