New Currents: Waves of Ternate by Sarojini LewisNew Currents: Waves of Ternate by Sarojini Lewis

The essay, illustrated with images created by Lewis in collaboration with graphic designer Edwin van Gelder and with risograph printing technique by Stencilwerck, is an extract from her artist book, Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambiguous memories by a Pearl Diver without a name. Lewis traces three generations of women in Ternate, reflecting on genealogy, gender and colonial memory, as she evokes family memories through the diver’s eyes. In her visual narrative she embodies missing knowledge and ambiguous memories.

Words by Sarojini Lewis

What if you shift into the identity of a mysterious pearl diver from Ternate who lived before the 20th century?

He appeared in a letter on a moment decribing an evening under the full moon near the seaside of Ternate. It was speculative if he was the father of my great-grandmother, who was born in 1900. A letter, directed to my grandmother, mentioned a pearl diver who remains a forgotten persona altogether. If he was with us in this book, how would he navigate the visual narrative page by page, viewing the archival photographs and maps looking for memories that he could perhaps identify with.

How could you do the same? Like me?

Various journeys by ship in different time frames throughout centuries on the Indian Ocean. I imagine myself there with you. Would you like to go there with me?

The paintings with Ternatian landscapes might light up a memory or two, the photographic souvenir albums that contain several photographs of the volcano’s characteristic shape. Objects shipped from Ternate during colonisation might have long been forgotten by locals, but would perhaps be familiar to him.

Are they possibly recognized by you?

Would he be aware of the colonial gaze present in the visual landscape of the island?
His own presence as a figure of the sea, as a diving mermaid, looking for pearls in one of the archival photographic landscapes might have inspired him to make a series of self-portraits. In this female-male complexity of embodiment my own body shows an emotional connection to my grandmothers house and the bygone.

A photograph of me, fragile and alone in a deserted house: Tuinfluiterlaan 3 in The Hague.

Page by page this narrative of Ternate uses the various collections (Rijksmuseum, University of Leiden) with photographs of the island done by male artists, containing a predominant male gaze. Romanticized landscapes collide with a family letter about a pearl diver. A note with ink, a pearl diver and my body collide. I gaze through the eyes of the pearl diver from a feminist perspective being of mixed Ternatian and Indo-Caribbean descent with a feminine brown body.

Mirroring my own body and searching for yours. I was missing your reflection in the mirror. Am I writing this letter for you? I was disappointed that you could not come. Have you lost interest?

Do you not love me? Or are you perhaps in love with me?

The Ternate Kingdom was previously known as the Kingdom of Gapi. The pearl diver knew the titles of the princes of the kingdom’s four islands of Ternate, Tidore, Moti and Makian. Kolano Maluku, ‘prince of Maluku’; kié ma-kolano, ‘prince of the mountain’; jiko ma-kalono, ‘prince of the bend’ or ‘prince of the bay’, and déhé makalona, ‘prince of the end’ or ‘prince of the cape’. For three centuries, these Moluccan names were used. As the head of the most powerful kingdom of the Maluku Islands, the Sultan of Ternate was called kolano Maluku, ‘prince of Maluku’ or alam ma-kolano, ‘prince of the world’. This Moluku narrative of Ternate was more or less unknown in The Netherlands. Ternate was the most important island for the Dutch clove trade in the 17th century. The first clove tree was found on Ternate, where it remained for centuries, surviving our colonial history.

….... Visiting the first clove tree of Ternate in a dream, while my father gave me a box of letters addressed to the lover of my grandmother. After 13 years she ended a relationship as her lover had fallen ill, leading a double live.

Without a focus on colonial exploitation solely, through my nude photographs, I continuously try to find answers, I do not shy away from confronting the sexual violence connected to historical memory and I employ my body to expose the traces of the violent past. I started to think of my body as a diary full of memories that are not only personal, but also intertwined with encounters of my fellow human beings, you- me and my ancestors. I contribute to the creation of a new image of creole women, an image that shows, at the same time, human fragility and an emotional realm of empowered and confident social beings.

Simultaneously, there is a sense of a generational gap between family members. Traces of our backgrounds are left in the fragmented experience of a subliminal understanding that my ancestors once departed by boat from Ternate to migrate to the Netherlands.

My photographic documentation shows my body in conversation with visual material in Dutch collections, that lead to my own identity in flux. In between imagination and ‘real life’ so to speak. As Stuart Hall has mentioned that our identities are never static but always in flux and transition. How is this process of flux instigated by the encounter of photographs from Ternate in the collection and the grey zone of me transitioning into the missing pearl diver? The intangible memories of Ternate are the absence of personal stories from my grandmother.

Tangible memories are family objects of Nelson Harst, my cousin who lives in New York. Nelson and I collaborated on a series of self-portraits with the objects in his apartment in New York. I photographed a collection of objects that are also from my great-grandmother who came from Ternate. Her name is Ida. I invite the viewer to amalgamate into me and be the character of the pearl diver who wanders through the collection of images of Ternate in this book and the sea. I fell into the sea, a pool of water, and through its water surface I visited my family archive of photos. Swimming through the wash of the waves being drawn back and forward in time, a current, leading me to narrate this to you. Three generation of women descendants from this island imagined and captured in 19th century photographs, some letters and colonial documents.

Gender and identity in art history are not set in a time frame and specific art historical context. Perhaps more as something in flux that moves through time periods and is as Stuart Hall defines ‘never static’. The pearl diver as a metaphor represents searching for hidden knowledge, a concept used by Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin to describe how history is brought to the present through discontinuous fragments. The origin of a pearl, has a theoretical genealogy, the pearl stands for different characters and several possible versions of the origin. In this philosophy the pearl diver serves as a metaphor for accessing fragmented historical truths. In some works of art, the pearl diver symbolizes the artist bringing the pearl to the viewer.

In Uraguchi Kusukazu’s photo archive Japanese ama dive for seaweeds and he accompanied women underwater and their solitary dives. These photos appeared when I searched for pearl divers on the internet and while visiting a recent exhibition. They seem related to my imagination of the character of the pearl diver described in the letter. In this way geneology for me points to fragmented memories with some factual information like, birthplace and migration date and some unexpected fragility mingled in Urachi’s sensual photographs of ama.

In this book, present identities, such as that of my own, living in the 21st century, in our day-by-day reality we are influenced by personas who lived in the 19th century. We transition continuously, from the present until the past and from memories to other realities. A photographic narrative refers to a certain loss of cultural memories. Currents of unfamiliar navigation in the Indian Ocean led to emotional landscapes embodying the pearl diver and his pearls are inherently shaping us.

Movement within the Indian Ocean is often concealed – folded into the immensity of reflective blue and overlooked from the stillness of its shores. Yet the sea continually offers traces of its restless motion. Deep-sea and oceanic dynamics reveal currents that rise and fall vertically, sweep horizontally and curl in circuitous rhythms that animate both the ocean’s transparent surface and its shadowed depths. A choreography unfolds with particular intensity in the Indian Ocean, where the waters carry their own seasonal temperament. Monsoon winds reverse the direction of flow, the South Equatorial Current presses westward as the Equatorial Countercurrent slides east, the Somali Current bends with each monsoon shift, and the Indian Ocean gyre circles like a slow, submerged pulse. These shifting and seasonally charged movements have shaped not only ecological patterns, but also centuries of travel, trade, migration and encounters across the Indian Ocean world. I, too, have long been drawn to these currents, tracing their swirling lines to evoke a notion of drift and rupture, memorialising Ternate and embodying rituals of rise and fall in tidal gestures. Like a cartographer, I seek their paths as counter-maps to imperial borders. A poetic resonance echoes monsoon journeys, shipwrecks and cross-cultural entanglements. Through colour, movement and narrative, this artistic view attempts to visualise what the sea often conceals—its restlessness, its memory, its pull across continents and generations in an intimate narrative.

The Indian Ocean’s fluidity and mutability- causes currents to unsettle fixed assumptions of other transnational and imperial frameworks described in Renisa Mawani’s writing. Especially those imagined through static metaphors of genealogy creating circular webs. Moving across several roots these sea-borne currents offer a more tidal way of imagining movement and multiple migrations. Trace the uneven drifts with me, wandering routes, and rhythmic forces that have long shaped, and continue to shape, colonial, imperial, and ambiguous memories in our present worlds.

Between you and me and our dreams.

This is an edited extract from Sarojini Lewis’ forthcoming book, Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambiguous Memories by a Pearl Diver without a Name. On 29 October 2027, during the New Currents symposium, Sarojini Lewis is part of the Ports as Portals session which explores how personal stories and local histories around port cities can reveal legacies of colonialism, migration and global commerce.