Our Lady of the Workboats: Solidarity and Spirituality on the Bay of All Saints

At the end of Jorge Amado’s Mar Morto (1936), a sailor’s grieving widow defies a fate that seems inevitable. Instead of resigning herself to a life of precarity, she takes command of her husband’s boat. In doing so, she aligns herself with Iemanjá, a sea deity from the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé. This essay takes this episode, and Amado’s novel, as its intellectual point of departure. Joining literary studies with maritime social history and nautical science, it charts the physical characteristics and cultural histories of the Baia de Todos os Santos in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which influenced Mar Morto on the level of form and theme. In the spiritually charged home waters of Amado and his characters, ocean literacy is both locally specific and diasporic: intertwined with African-descended cosmologies and ongoing struggles for sovereignty and freedom. By attending to these forms of what Justin Dunnavant (riffing on Katherine McKittrick) calls “livingness on the sea,” this essay models a maritime literary studies that recovers gendered and racialized ocean literacies and demonstrates the importance of local ways of knowing the ocean to the global literature of the sea. It is drawn from a book project tentatively titled “Atlantic Shapeshifters: Sea Literature’s Fluid Forms.”