Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine

Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine began with something I could feel, but could not yet explain.

The work emerged through my intuitive practice of Soul Mapping. I allow Spirit, memory, materials, and place to guide the making, without requiring myself to understand where the work is going. Sometimes an image or form arrives whose meaning becomes clear only years later.

This was one of those works.

At the center of the spiritual cosmology informing this piece is Yemaya—the primordial mother whose body is the vast ocean itself. I understand her waters as having many expressions and layers. Asesu inhabits the surface and shoreline, the threshold where water meets earth. Olokun takes us in the opposite direction.

Olokun takes us down.

Into the profound and mysterious depths of the ocean.

Into the place where light disappears, where what has been submerged is held, and where memory can remain long after the world above has moved on.

That understanding transforms the way I see this work today.

I constructed Olokun with dark, weathered recycled boards that resemble the timbers of an old schooner or the broken architecture of a ship. Rusted chains physically bind and hold the structure together. Inside this heavy exterior sit two large canvas panels filled with accumulated fragments—Maine sea glass, shells, repurposed pottery, paint, and luminous, iridescent materials.

From a distance, I sometimes experience the work almost as a glass-bottom vessel.

The dark wooden structure becomes the ship.

And the luminous panels become an opening through its belly.

Look down, and suddenly there is the ocean.

There is something almost breathtakingly beautiful below: fractured glass catching light, iridescent surfaces, shells and fragments shimmering like objects suspended beneath the water.

That beauty is intentional, but it is not an attempt to beautify history.

It is the tension at the heart of the work.

Above is the vessel.

Around it are the chains.

Below is an immeasurable world of water, memory, and Spirit.

For years, I knew this piece was connected to the Middle Passage, but I did not completely understand why it had taken this particular form.

Then, in the summer of 2026, I experienced Antonio Rocha’s The Malaga Ship: A Story of Maine and the Middle Passage at Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine.

The performance tells the story through an extraordinary perspective: the consciousness of the ship itself.

We encounter the tree before it becomes a vessel—the pride of being transformed into something magnificent and seaworthy—and then the terrible realization of what that vessel will be required to carry. Its belly becomes a container for captive human beings enduring the Middle Passage.

Sitting with that story, something opened for me.

I suddenly recognized the ship I had already built.

The boards.

The chains.

The belly.

The opening into the water.

The Malaga—a vessel built in Maine and later used to carry captive Africans across the Atlantic—gave me a historical language for something my Soul Mapping process had brought forward years earlier.

I began to understand Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine as a tribute to the Malaga, but also as something larger.

It is a meditation on the countless souls carried within the holds of ships crossing the Atlantic—and on those whose bodies entered the ocean itself.

Within stories and spiritual understandings carried through the African Diaspora, the ocean is more than geography. It can become an ancestor, a witness, a grave, a passage, and a womb. I hold close the image of the primordial mother receiving those who entered the waters during the Middle Passage—gathering them into the immense womb of the ocean and carrying their spirits home.

And this is where Olokun resides.

In the depths.

The place that holds what sank.

The place that remembers what the surface cannot see.

The place where broken things do not necessarily disappear.

When I look at the luminous center of this work now, I no longer see simply glass, shells, pottery, and paint. I imagine fragments transformed by water and time—pieces of memory still catching light in the darkness.

The Atlantic becomes an archive.

And Olokun becomes its keeper.

Olokun Heals the Middle Passage to Portland, Maine does not attempt to heal history by erasing its violence. For me, healing means entering the place where the memory has been held, acknowledging what happened there, honoring those who were carried through it, and allowing what has been submerged to become visible.

If Asesu waits at the shoreline, Olokun descends into the deep.

Into the belly of the ship.

Into the belly of the ocean.

Into the womb of the primordial mother.

And somewhere within that vast darkness, the fragments still shimmer.

The ancestors are remembered.

The ocean bears witness.

And the journey home continues.

Keita Annie Whitten ‘2026