Lost Daughters and Sunken Ships

Abstract

Abstract This essay develops the idea of salvage as a material practice around ships’ cargo and as an archival epistemology. Using a legal court case concerning 43 million dollars worth of silver bars salvaged from the wreck of the SS Tilawa, a website constructed by the son of one of the survivors of the wreck, and the Facebook story of drowned South African cadet Akhona Marara Felicity Geveza, the essay centers the nonevent that unfolded in the wake of the supposed catastrophe. It focuses on the role of economic extraction in creating the historically entangled Indian and African diasporas. The piece insists on salvage as a material practice, as a methodology, and as a mode of temporality that oscillates between the cacophony of a present and the silence of shadowy depths. The threading throughout the essay of the autobiographical, mainly through readings of the author's Indian father's unpublished memoirs as he journeyed from India to Pretoria, stresses the role of misremembering and the tangibility of an archive contained in pillowcases and written in fading ink.