The origin story of Drexciya is a fictional coda to the history of the Atlantic slave trade, during which at least 1.8 million people from Africa died on slave ships and were thrown, unnamed and unrecorded, into the ocean. The Afrofuturistic narrative conceives this same ocean as a liberatory device for pregnant African women who, according to the myth, jumped or were flung alive off slave ships while being transported from Africa to the New World.
The Drexciyan mythos proposes that the unborn children of these women emerged from the womb with the ability to breathe underwater and that their descendants form the aquatic metropolis of Drexciya. As with most origin stories, the details seem implausible, but the tale is an empowering account of resistance in the face of oppression.
The creators of the Drexciya legend weren’t writers but a Detroit electronic music duo of the same name who released three studio albums between 1999 and 2002. The collaboration, comprising Gerald Donald and the late James Stinson, might have intended for their invention to be militarized, as evidenced by the album art and the music’s aggressive drumbeat. But a number of Black women artists, inspired by their creation, have seen the potential for feminine energy to be a central part of the story. These artists complicate the Drexciya myth by adding depth to the often-bellicose conceptions of its creators. In robust interrogations of the tale, the five Black women artists below employ various genres and media to depict Drexciya as a sophisticated outpost of African culture.
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Ayana V. Jackson
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Ayana V. Jackson’s contribution to the Drexciya story is her focus on the ingenuity of the underwater civilization’s people. In her exhibition “From the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya with Ayana V. Jackson,” on view through April 2024 at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the photographer features portraits of herself, dressed in elaborate gowns that she created with the help of several Black designers.
She researched the clothing worn by 16th-century Africans and Europeans to lend authenticity to the designs, which repurpose detritus that might be found in the ocean, including shredded plastic, spoons, flip-flops, raffia, and banknotes. The diptych Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I–II (2020) comprises two portraits, one with the artist facing the ocean and the other with her back to it; banknotes are used for the skirt of her dress. The costumes that Jackson has created, some of which are on display in the exhibition, depict the Drexciyans as inventive in their reuse of materials, just as African people from throughout the diaspora have been.
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Firelei Báez
Image Credit: Copyright © Firelei Baez. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Image: Phoebe d’Heurle As an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Firelei Báez only learned about Drexciya in 2009—10 years after the duo’s first release—as an art student at Cooper Union in New York City. She’d always been interested in the water deities and was intrigued by the thought of water as a place of healing, respite, and rejuvenation.
Untitled (Drexciya) (2020), which was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago earlier this year, is an abstract painting that replicates the cobalt blue of the ocean and the green and brown-red of its plant life. Evoking a plunge toward the ocean floor, the oversize painting reminds us that much of the ocean remains unexplored, suggesting that a civilization like Drexciya might actually exist.
“So much of the history that we’re given as descendants of the transatlantic slave trade is . . . almost a very mechanistic view of what our past has been and what our future potential can be because of it,” Báez says. “And so, by opening up a vision of that, we can start imagining different potentials for joy, for creativity—for being, period.”
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Andrea Chung
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Michigan. Mixed-media artist Andrea Chung is intrigued by the timelessness of the Drexciyan myth. Though it was created in the 1990s, its lesson of resiliency seems as relevant to the contemporary moment as it is to times past. To the Drexciyan story Chung inserts water deities as midwives that delivered the unborn children of the African women said to have given themselves up to the sea during the Middle Passage. The artist likens these women’s sacrifice to a revolutionary act, saying she’s “looking at the lives of enslaved women and how they could take autonomy of their bodies and actively protest in different ways.”
Titled after a quote from Toni Morrison, Chung’s multiroom installation “if they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away,” on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, until October 2023, consists of blue and green hands stretching toward the viewer, playing on the term “catching babies.” Inserting African spiritual belief systems into the Drexciya narrative, her installation includes altars for the ancestors and deities.
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Alisha Wormsley
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist. Alisha Wormsley works in many mediums. Her primary mission is creating space for Black people through her project “There Are Black People in the Future”—the words inscribed on a Pittsburgh billboard in 2017 and subsequently in Detroit, Charlotte, New York City, Kansas City, Houston, London, Accra, and Qatar—and through Sibyls Shrine, an arts residency in Pittsburgh “for Black artists who m/other.”
In the textile work Drexciya (2021), Wormsley takes something horrific and turns it around to give it power. The piece is a photograph of a woman floating in shallow water near a shoreline. A ring of African print cloth surrounds this person, perhaps for protection or possibly as an extension of Drexciya’s utopian metropolis. Though in an unidentified location, the cloth designates the waters as African, perhaps inhabited by the Drexciyans.
“I know there’s an Afro-pessimistic way of looking at Drexciya,” Wormsley says. “But I choose to see it as strength and power.”
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Ellen Gallagher
Image Credit: Copyrigtht © Ellen Gallagher. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Tony Nathan. Like Báez’s Untitled (Drexciya), Ellen Gallagher’s piece Paradise Shift (2020)—part of a larger body of work begun in 2001 called “Watery Ecstatic”—nods toward the ocean floor’s marine life. But the maritime world it depicts is one where the aggressive sounds of Drexciya the band find a home: Gallagher shifts the narrative, offering not a lush oceanscape but dark shapes of brown and black that signify the conditions in which the inhabitants of this world might soon exist. Interestingly, the perspective is from far above, looking down on an ocean floor seemingly deprived of water.
In a 2005 Art21 interview, Gallagher described the Middle Passage as the origin story for diasporic Africans in contrast to stories of Mother Africa. In other words, Africans who were captured and carried into enslavement came from many countries with different customs and languages, and while their amalgamation meant the loss of some of their original culture, it was also a new beginning.
For those people who would become African Americans, this amalgamation started at sea, and Drexciya is an extension of that idea. The original Drexciyans, born underwater, never made it to another land but engendered an autonomous community of free Africans existing in between other places.