On 23 March 2021, the Ever Given, one of the largest ships in the world, sailed into the Suez Canal on its journey to the Mediterranean. By midmorning, the ship was wedged sideways across the canal. 700 million dollars of cargo, stacked almost as high as the Empire State Building, distorted the high winds of a dust storm gusting down the canal, altering the ship’s trajectory. It took six days of dredging, tugging and salvaging to get the ship to move. In those six days, the Ever Given held up more than 400 vessels to halt the traffic of some 10 billion dollars of goods, placing huge pressure on global supply chains that were already strained by the Covid pandemic. As Alex Christian writes, this “sorry saga underlines the fragility of world trade. It took one gust of wind to bring the whole thing to its knees. Another stuck boat, another Covid outbreak, another political crisis looms over the horizon.”[1] 

Contrary to Christian’s intimations, this ‘black swan’ of a stuck ship,[2] while exposing the unraveling seams of overproduction and overconsumption, did not bring capital to its knees. Instead, the ship proceeded to another port only to be impounded by the legal quagmire that is speculative finance--insurance, salvage and repair fees, and penalties as international authorities attempted to parse who owes what to whom. The ship that sails under a Panamanian flag is Japanese-owned, leased to a Taiwanese firm, managed by a German company, insured by a British broker, and manned by an Indian crew. This is transnational capital with crisis as its normative mode; the Suez Canal Authority (SCA) announced plans to widen the canal after the event to accommodate even larger vessels. 

I am arrested by images of the Ever Given, its lacerated bow leaning into sandbanks and later its eerie sullen-ness as it bobs with the waves in a ship hospital. Its new Indian crew grows increasingly bored month after month as lemons rot and tofu goes rancid in their hold. It is not the ship’s accident that can point us towards liberation and a new poetics of black sociality. Nor is black sociality forged by freeing the ship. Instead, it is in the constellation of quiet responses along the Suez Canal as villagers watch this global drama unfold that a radical politics of renewal can be glimpsed. A New York Times reporter interviews Umm Gaafar (a pseudonym as she is too afraid to speak on the record), a 65-year-old occupant of the village of Manshiyet Rugola. Umm Gaafar sees so many ships go by that she barely notices them. 

But the Ever Given is different. The immobile vessel towers above the village’s low brick houses and minarets. She can see it clearly from her house and her neighbor Nadia notes excitedly, “When it lights up at night, it’s like the Titanic . . .All it’s missing is the necklace from the movie.” Umm Gaafar is fascinated by this skyscraper of cargo containers, wondering out loud what they house. Perhaps, she thinks, there are ceiling fans, washing machines, or maybe even a full-sized refrigerator. She jokingly tells the reporter, “Why don’t they pull out one of those containers?. . . There could be something good in there. Maybe it could feed the town.”[3] It is this ‘freedom dream’ articulated by Umm Gaafar that short-circuits capital. She asks for only one container for her village. Hers is an active disinvestment in capitalist accumulation as she insists on recognizing the needs of a community, in mapping alternate geopolitical worlds that don’t leave villages like hers forever on the margins. Rather than her home simply being the backdrop against which 220,000-ton megaships move and get stuck, she asks instead for an opening. Perhaps by opening that one container one can free the tiny wisp of hope that has remained trapped while all around us the Pandora’s box of evils gallops at full speed through war-zones, their hoofs sparking off the hard, drought stricken earth of Southern Africa, their fetid breath curling around addicts’ dream. Open one container, just one so that its contents can be exposed to the sun, light, and wind. 

The number of children amputees in Gaza are so numerous that medical staff have started to place the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes sealed with masking tape. The boxes are labeled with name and body part (Salahadin, Foot) except for the cases where the children were too young to know their names. This story is not about those sealed boxes. Nor is the Ever Given a metaphor for my stuckness, for my feelings of going nowhere in an academic environment that just yesterday, April 3, laid off more than forty workers in an attempt to eradicate diversity and equity initiatives in my home institution. Rather it is the African woman on the banks of the canal, the one who imagines that she will no longer be bypassed by relentless global markets that I see when I close my eyes. Staring at the impasse of towering forces of global capital, structures inherited from the trans-Atlantic and Indian ocean slave trades, something intangible arises from the company of those stuck onboard, those thrown overboard, and those left behind in the wake. For I am all three. Alongside women like Umm Gaafar, I want to model modes of survival that move beyond the logics of individual capitalism towards spaces that are unthinkable and ineffable. The call for a single open cargo container is an Afrofuturist manifestation of our fragile desire to allow that winged thing to see flight. 

Notes

[1] Alex Christian, "The untold story of the big boat that broke the world," WIRED (22 June 2021): https://www.wired.com/story/ever-given-global-supply-chain/. 

[2] Nassim Taleb describes the ‘black swan’ event as a highly improbable but not unforeseen occurrence with devastating consequences.

[3] Vivian Yee, "'A Very Big Problem.' Giant Ship in the Suez Remains Stuck," The New York Times (March 28, 2021): https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/world/middleeast/suez-canal-ship-stuck.html.