There are traditions in the world that do not describe the ocean as a force to be navigated or a resource to be harvested or a danger to be survived. In the Yoruba tradition — one of the oldest and most complete spiritual systems in human history, born on the western coast of Africa and carried across the Atlantic in the holds of slave ships by people who refused to let the crossing erase what they knew about the nature of the world — the ocean is a mother. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Literally: the ocean is Yemanjá, and Yemanjá is the ocean, and the relationship between the people who live on her shores and the water that defines their lives is the relationship between children and the being who brought them into existence and has never, in all the generations since, stopped watching over them. She is called Yemòjá in the original Yoruba — a contraction of Yeye omo eja, which means “mother whose children are like fish” — and the name contains the entire theology: she is the mother, her children are numberless and everywhere in the water, and the water is her body, and to be in the water is to be held by her.
The Yoruba brought her to Brazil in the centuries of the slave trade, and in Brazil she became something even larger than what she had been in Nigeria — because Brazil has the longest coastline on the Atlantic of any country in the world, and every kilometer of that coastline became hers, and every fishing village and every port city and every beach where the waves come in and go out twice a day became a place where her presence was felt and her name was known and her favor was considered the difference between a good catch and an empty net, between a safe voyage and a ship that did not return. In the Candomblé tradition of Bahia she is the queen of the sea, dressed in silver and blue, crowned with the foam of breaking waves, her offerings laid at the waterline at dawn on the second of February every year by millions of people who carry flowers and candles to the beach and release them into the water and watch to see if she accepts them — which she signals, the tradition says, by taking them out with the tide rather than returning them to the shore.
The coral bastion in this piece is Yemanjá's wall — not built by human hands but grown by the sea itself over the centuries that she has been watching the coast, the structure that the ocean creates when it decides that a particular place needs protection and is willing to invest the time and the mineral patience that protection requires. The great wave behind it is not attacking the bastion. This is the misreading that people make when they see a wave and a wall together and assume the wave is the aggressor. The wave is Yemanjá arriving — it is her movement through the water, her body in motion, the form she takes when she is traveling from the deep ocean to the shore to check on the things she has placed there and make sure they are still in order. The bastion does not need to resist the wave because the wave and the bastion are the same being, the same intention, the same mother checking on what she has built and finding it exactly as she left it.
The green turquoise shell at the crown of the coral wall is Yemanjá's jewel — the one she places at the highest point of everything she considers worth protecting, the marker that tells those who know how to read the sea's language that this place is under her specific attention. The purple shell with the hexagonal texture is her eye — the pattern of the honeycomb that appears in her iconography as the symbol of community, of the organized intelligence of creatures that work together to build something larger than any individual can build alone, which is what the Yoruba diaspora did when it carried her across the Atlantic and rebuilt her worship in every coastal city of the Americas from Salvador to Havana to New York. The small conical yellow-green shell and the ancient branch of driftwood are the offerings that the fishermen left at her shrine before the last tide — placed at the waterline and accepted, taken out to sea with the current, received by the mother who takes what her children bring her and returns what they need.
On the second of February, on every beach where Yemanjá is known, the same scene plays out simultaneously across thousands of kilometers of coastline: people dressed in white carrying white flowers and blue candles to the edge of the water and releasing them and watching. The release is the prayer. The watching is the faith. What comes back from the water — what the sea returns from what was given to it — is the answer. This piece is built from that exchange: the coral that the sea built over centuries out of the mineral offerings of the water, the shells that the sea selected from the millions on the seafloor and placed at this particular location at this particular moment, the golden resin base that holds the tide pool in permanent suspension — the moment before the wave arrives and the moment after it recedes, both of them preserved simultaneously, because Yemanjá does not experience time the way her children do. She experiences all of it at once, the way that the ocean contains every voyage that has ever crossed it and every wave that has ever broken on every shore, all present together in the body of the mother whose children are like fish and whose love, like the sea itself, has no edge that anyone has ever been able to find.
"Yemanjá, queen of the waters, we bring you flowers, we bring you light. Accept our offering and keep our people safe on the water and on the land."
— Traditional Candomblé prayer, Bahia, Brazil
Artist's Note
I did not plan to make a piece for Yemanjá. I assembled the coral and the shells and the branch on the resin base and stepped back and understood that I had made one. The great wave in the background was not chosen for drama — it was chosen because when I placed this piece against images of the ocean, the wave was the only background that made the coral wall look like what it is: not a defense against the sea but a part of it, continuous with it, built from the same material and serving the same purpose. The green shell at the crown is the piece of the piece — the element that makes everything else make sense, the jewel that Yemanjá placed at the top of her own altar to indicate that she had been here and she approved of what she found.
At CuepoxyGift, the most sacred pieces are the ones that were already sacred before the artist understood what they were making. "The Bastion of Yemanjá" is for those who know her name — and for those who are about to learn it, and will understand, when they do, why the wave does not break the wall but becomes it.
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A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Bastion of Yemanjá" is part of the artist's private collection and is not currently available for sale.
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— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift