For Those Who Became the Tide

There’s something surreal about being a Black tourist in a Black place that doesn’t often see Black tourists. To walk through streets where the echoes of our ancestors linger in the air, to stand at the water’s edge knowing that the tide carried them away—and yet, here I am, returning.

The ocean holds memories. It has witnessed our beginnings and our losses. It swallowed our ancestors' last breaths during the MAAFA (Middle Passage), and yet, it also carried their spirit forward. They did not disappear; they became the tide. They move with the waves, whisper through the spray, hum in the hush between each crest, and crash. Now, I wade in - not as someone lost, but as someone remembering.

A Return and a Reckoning

To be Black, traveling in Black lands is to straddle the line between belonging and displacement. In Salvador, Bahia - a city that holds one of the largest African diasporic populations outside the continent - I see reflections of my own lineage in the people, the food, and the rhythms of daily life. And yet, I know my presence is an anomaly. Despite the deep connections between Brazil and the United States through the shared legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Black American travelers are still a rarity here. The global structures of power, wealth, and access dictate who gets to move freely, even within lands shaped by our ancestors. It took me seven years to make it down here from the moment I was let in on who Dona Maria was in the capoeira letras. 

The ocean, which once served as a vessel of destruction, has become a place of reclamation. My seasonal migration began in Rio Vermelho, where the annual Yemanjá Festival brings thousands to honor the orixá of the ocean we can see, I feel the weight of 103 years of history in every praise song that I hear. The push and pull of grief and reclamation. I think about what it means to travel, to arrive with a passport that my ancestors were never afforded, to be seen as foreign in a place that holds a portion of their likeness.

The Geopolitics of Our Movement

The ties between the U.S. and Brazil are deep, though often overlooked. Brazil was the largest recipient of enslaved Africans - nearly five million souls, more than ten times the number brought to North America. I didn’t scratch the surface of this until I took the right course with the right professor in college. The legacy of this history lingers in the racial hierarchies, in the economic disparities, in the ways Blackness is simultaneously celebrated and marginalized in both nations.

In the U.S., we navigate a system built on anti-Blackness, where mobility - physical, economic, and social - has always been contested. In Brazil, Black Brazilians continue to fight for visibility and equity, with movements like Movimento Negro echoing the struggles of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the States. Despite the cultural vibrancy of Salvador, systemic racism and economic barriers keep many Afro-Brazilians from fully accessing the wealth of their own heritage (within a capitalistic framework - be clear that to be Black is to be rich in many ways - especially Spirit). Blackness, in both countries, is a site of resilience and resistance.

The Water Remembers

What does it mean to return to a place that never knew you, but knows your people? What does it mean to step into the same ocean that carried your ancestors away, but now welcomes you home?

I think of the rituals of libation, of how we pour water in honor of those who came before us. And then I think of the body - how we, too, are mostly water. I’ve synthesized this at Ancestors in Training to say, that in a way, we are made of all the libations that have been poured before us, all the tears shed, and all the prayers whispered over the waves. We carry our ancestors within us, their memories inscribed in our bones and blood.

So when I enter the ocean, I do not enter it alone. I carry the dreams of those who never had the chance to return. I move with them, in them, through them. I let the water hold me, knowing that it has always known me.

For those who became the tide, I am (was) here. Listening.