Asesu Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine

Asesu Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine emerged through my intuitive practice of Soul Mapping—a process in which I allow Spirit, memory, materials, and place to guide the work, often before I consciously understand what is being revealed.

This work belongs in conversation with Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Maine. Within the spiritual cosmology that informs my work, I understand Olokun and Asesu as different expressions of the primordial ocean mother: Olokun calling us toward the mysterious depths of the sea, and Asesu dwelling at the shoreline—the liminal place where ocean meets earth.

Stories carried through the African Diaspora have profoundly shaped my relationship to the ocean: stories of the waters receiving those who died or were cast overboard during the Middle Passage, and of the primordial mother gathering those souls into the great womb of the sea and carrying them home.

That understanding lives within Asesu.

The physical construction of the work evokes something recovered from the shoreline. Sun-bleached, driftwood-like pieces of recycled barn wood are joined by heavy chains and thick nautical rope. Within them are accumulated fragments: Maine shells and cowrie shells, beach-combed sea glass, ground glass, gemstones, jewelry, cedar and birch bark, dried flowers, acorns, feathers, beads, gold and other remnants of natural and human life.

They become an archaeology of memory—things broken, carried, weathered, transformed and returned.

In the summer of 2026, after experiencing Antonio Rocha’s The Malaga Ship: A Story of Maine and the Middle Passage at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine, another layer of the work revealed itself to me. Learning more deeply about the Malaga, a Maine-built vessel later used to carry captive Africans across the Atlantic, helped me recognize what my intuitive process had been reaching toward years before I consciously understood the connection.

I began to see Asesu as a tribute not only to the Middle Passage but also to the shoreline itself—to the threshold between ship and land, ocean and earth, captivity and survival, and what has been submerged and what must be remembered.

Here in Maine, that threshold carries a particular meaning—Maine’s ports built and launched the ships used to steal Africans. The maritime history of this place cannot be separated from the larger Atlantic world and the economies that grew around slavery and its commerce. The sea that made Maine prosperous also connected these shores to histories of displacement, exploitation, survival and resistance.

Asesu Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine asks us to stand at that shoreline and remember

If Olokun descends into the depths, Asesu comes to the edge.

She meets us where the water touches land.

And there, among wood, rope, chains, shells, glass and the fragments the sea has carried, I imagine the possibility of return—not an erasure of what happened, but a sacred gathering of what was scattered.

A remembering.

A homecoming.

A healing at the shore.

Keita Annie Whitten ‘ 2026