Water Brings Necessary Change: A Reflection on Swimming in Your Skin Again

Terence Nance’s films function like dreams. The narratives unfurl like a tangent of thoughts we may experience through both the conscious and subconscious. In his short film Swimming in Your Skin Again (2015), the tangents often manifest in the form of a sermon. Or maybe even an anti-sermon. The sermon is defined, more or less, as a public address rooted in a religious and moral agenda. The anti-sermon, however, is a rejection of orthodoxy and provides the opportunity to bend, question, subvert, and reimagine beliefs through the form of address.

Swimming in Your Skin Again begins with a sermonic disclaimer, encouraging viewers to disassociate the film’s vignettes with all forms of orthodox beliefs from Judeo-Christianity to the Church of Bey(oncé). Nance might suggest the twenty-minute film means nothing, purporting to be a series of visuals and sounds only. What might we make of this nothingness? Is there salvation in an unknowability? Within a Black American context, the art we make can often run the risk of being erroneously analyzed and interpreted as a definitive representation of Black identity and living. Swimming in Your Skin Again’s porousness—its refusal of legibility and meaning-making—can be a form of liberation. It seems that in Nance’s disclaimer, he anticipates such a flattening of interpretation and advises against it.

Hortense Spillers reflects beautifully on the power of the Black sermonic in her germane essay, “Moving on Down the Line: Variations on the African-American Sermon,” published in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, one of the most critical theoretical texts on Black studies and culture of the twenty-first century.₃ In it, Spillers celebrates the Black sermonic tradition and declares that the sermons highlighted in her book “provide an imaginative field of inquiry into the strategies of African survival, evinced on a hostile landscape of social and political praxis.”₄ Spillers, in some ways, decouples traditional religion from the impulse of Black sermonic. She proposes that its primary function is to encourage imagination beyond one’s current state. Perhaps the Black sermonic impulse is inherently anti-sermonic: the result of practicing religions forced on Black people by colonizers via subjugation and violence. In doing so, African spiritual traditions were often embedded and covertly intertwined with the enslaver’s religious orthodoxy. How does the conflation of certain spiritual technologies function in an atmosphere of continued grief and violence? How can we utilize and reimagine spirituality and the communicative form of the Black sermon to speak to what often seems the inevitability of anti-Blackness while occupying a Black embodiment? The gesture of an anti-sermonic communicative form and the repetition of that form may help us find faith in the recapitulation. I view Nance’s cinematic impulse in this imaginative scaffolding: his work encourages us to question and consider how nonlinear forms of thought, tangents, and (anti-)sermonic expression might evoke, question, and perhaps resolve existential inquiry in a Black embodiment.

Swimming in Your Skin Again situates the viewer in a humid landscape sprinkled with neon-colored church interiors where people praise and perform, not for god but perhaps for each other. Blue light emanates in tandem with the blue pool water. The film’s writer and protagonist—Nance’s younger brother, the singer and performer Norvis Junior (Nelson Mandela Nance)—maneuvers through ritual anchorages of life in and around Miami, Florida. Norvis Junior is in swamps, backyards, storefront churches, and natural and human-built bodies of water.

“I exist, and that’s a problem,” Norvis Junior sings. From the beginning, we are grounded in the Black male figure’s pessimism and ambivalence. As he stands over the vibrantly hued pool, his mother calls, with a maternal chumminess, asking how he is. He responds, “You know … I don’t give a fuck.” She is unfazed by his bluntness. She follows with encouraging words about how it will all get better, a reminder that this too shall pass. Simultaneously, Norvis Junior watches himself lifeless in a pool of water—indicating perhaps a death, rebirth, and gestation.

In Swimming in Your Skin Again, water is the main event, and the protagonist is a character in its constellation, benefiting from the waters’ gifts. In Yoruba spiritual traditions, water deities govern all things that flow, all that is unfixed and agile, while constantly finding ways to nurture what already exists. Water has the power to consume and fill space while being shapeable and lithe enough to transition into multiple forms. Water is intuitive and encourages all around to be in this state of ever-changing flux. Norvis Junior encounters the healing beauty of water through the actual element and via femme figures who are often adorned in yellow in the film. A series of shirtless boys recite a hum of words, mostly indecipherable, reminiscent of contemporary mumble rap. They each mutter the linguistic into a yellow bullhorn while walking through a forest swamp before passing it on to another boy. Eventually, they are quieted by an elder femme figure, also in yellow. Markings of yellow pigment are made, impressed upon the backs of the boys by the femme deity clad in yellow. These marks are visible later on Norvis Junior in the form of a dark brown birthmark on his back.

Testimonies of stasis, unknowing, surrendering to change and taking refuge in unknowing persist throughout the cinematic offering. Even if this film doesn’t believe in anything, as its introduction states, it believes that more knowing does not equate to peace. The woman in yellow who marked the backs of the young boys declares:

… the less I moved, the less I knew, because moving means not knowing, and stasis is the key to ignorance. Anyway, god is change. And, in the end, god will prevail.

To invoke the imaginative yet prescient worlds that Octavia Butler wrote about and perhaps an ethos of Oya, the Yoruba orisha who embodies the wind: change is the only sure thing. Change is the only thing we should believe in. To that end, Nance inserts reminders of oppression and ecological disasters that continue to threaten the Anthropocene. Swimming in Your Skin Again reminds us that Florida, the film’s setting, is projected to be consumed by water in the near future due to the climate crisis and melting ice in other parts of the world. In Swimming in Your Skin Again, the prowess of water is made palpable. Water is blessed, divine, and often associated with femme celestial figures who function as compasses for the protagonist; ethereal femme figures are enveloped or adjacent to bodies of water, as Norvis Junior follows. The film ends at an ocean shore. Fully clothed in yellow shirts and pants, Norvis Junior walks into the ocean until he is consumed by it. As the camera pans out, we see a femme figure who has led him there. A young voice remarks about spiritual beings they see who are visible to no one else.

In Yoruba belief, water goddesses provide abundance, but they also bring destruction. People who follow these beliefs view this destructive power as righting a wrong, helping to reorient the earth and its mortal beings back into alignment with earth’s natural order.₅ The influx of this vivacious and calamitous water by way of ecological disasters brings a clearing that is necessary for renewal. What if we viewed all imminent disaster and ruin through this lens?

The film Swimming in Your Skin Again is a performative gesture, a Black (anti-)sermon that incites engagement with unknowability and faith in the wake of apathy. How can we sit in the chaos of the escalating climate catastrophe, pervasive violence, and never-ending imperialism while gesturing toward another world, perhaps even a post-apocalyptic world, through a sermonic form that exists not only within traditional Black orthodoxy but also errantly outside of it? In other words, what might it mean to have faith in something completely unknown? The Black sermon, or anti-sermon, appears to be most productive when expressed with courage and conviction. The deity or doctrine at the center of the anti-sermon matters less than the actual tone of fervor and faith in which it is shared. At the beginning of the film, a Black elder woman preacher sermonizes in an all-white skirt suit in a small storefront church altar to a group of people in pews. The god that she is preaching on behalf of is bleeped out. Whoever they are, they are not made legible. Her anti-sermon campaign toward an undefined dogma is seductive; she makes you want to believe. Having faith in faith is the ministry. Swimming in Your Skin Again questions how we might dissociate ourselves from the limitations of religious dogma while taking up the possibility of the Black (anti-)sermon to consider a faith grounded in nature, unknowability, and change.