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Dreaming across Waters: Decolonial Belonging, Dreamscapes, and Waterviews in Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue and Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue Between

Malou Brouwer and Eline Kuenen

Abstract

In this article, we offer a comparative literary analysis of Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue (2007) and Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue Between (2020) to explore how water and dreams operate as critical narrative devices in articulating decolonial possibilities. Our work foregrounds the distinctive and shared “waterviews” embedded in Eeyou Istchee and West African cultural traditions, revealing how these perspectives challenge and subvert the effects of colonization. The article showcases striking parallels in how these novels articulate water’s dual role. Set against distinct colonial backdrops—the contemporary settler colonial realities of Eeyou Istchee in Ourse bleue, and the historical legacies of intra-African enslavement and transatlantic slavery in The Deep Blue Between—both works employ water as a symbol of both deracination and empowerment. Furthermore, dreams, strengthened by water, in these narratives emerge as vital channels of (ancestral) knowledge and resistance, facilitating the protagonists’ quests for belonging in colonized and decolonial spaces. By focusing on the interplay between dreams and water, we trace how the protagonists’ experiences are shaped by their struggle to reconnect with disrupted spiritual and cultural landscapes. Dreams emerge as vital spaces where (ancestral) knowledge and resistance are encoded, offering alternative pathways to reclaim identity and belonging. By interweaving these narratives, the analysis not only critiques the enduring impacts of colonization but also amplifies the decolonial potential inherent in Indigenous and African ontologies. Ultimately, the article argues that the shared decolonial “waterviews” in these texts offer transformative insights into the politics of place, resistance, and relationality.

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1. Introduction

  • 1 See Nick Estes’ work in Our History is Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and (...)
  • 2 Yemanjá has different spellings, including Yemanjá, Yemonja, Yemọja, Yemaja, Yemoyá, and Yemayá. Fo (...)

1Popularized by the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) protests,1 “Water is life” has become an increasingly popular discourse across decolonization struggles in the Americas and the Pacific (Yazzie and Baldy 1). Globally water has become a terrain of struggle around climate change. Zoe Todd, for example, argues that decolonization is “embedded in watery worlds” in relation with our “water kin” (Todd). More than a mere resource for sustenance and survival, water is a life-giving force, a home, a relative, an ancestor, theory, and a web of relations for many peoples. In Yoruba culture, for example, water is home to several Gods, including Yemanjá, goddess of the water, who particularly protects women and children (Robinson 50).2 Yoruba legends emphasize that life could not exist without the basic element of water and, as such, they consider water the vital and sacred origin of life (Rinne 41). Yazzie and Baldy, in turn, argue that water teaches us a “multidirectional, multispatial, multitemporal, and multispecies theory of relationships and connections” (1). Many Indigenous Peoples indeed recognize that people are water-based. Hoopa, for example, understand the world as “waterview”: “‘Worldview’ is ‘water view,’ a view from the river not a view of the river. We move upriver, or downriver, to the river, or from the river” (Cutcha qtd in Yazzie and Baldy 2).

  • 3 We use the broader geographical term “West Africa” here to reflect that the local histories, tradit (...)
  • 4 In using the terms “African” and “Indigenous,” we do not mean to imply that there is one African or (...)

2Revealing the particularities of such “waterviews” across contexts, in this article we analyze the decolonial potential of water and waterviews in Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue (2007) and Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue Between (2020). These novels portray similar waterviews embedded in (respectively) Eeyou and West African local histories, traditions, languages, and cultures.3 Although set in different times and locations, both novels take place against a backdrop of colonialism that separates the protagonists from their physical, geographical, and spiritual homes. By analyzing how dreams and water simultaneously hinder and help the protagonists to find belonging, we demonstrate how Pésémapéo Bordeleau and Harruna Attah lay bare and challenge the past and present effects of colonization and colonialism on peoples from different contexts, including Eeyou Istchee (James Bay Cree territory) and the Gold Coast of West Africa and its diaspora in Brazil, and how they emphasize the decolonial potential of waterviews. Building on theories and storytelling about dreaming and (spiritual) connections to water from both African and Indigenous traditions, our comparative literary analysis thus interrogates the boundaries between colonial contexts, often represented in these novels by water as colonial and colonized obstacle, by attending to points of intersection between these works, focusing on the decolonial potential of dreaming and water, while remaining cognizant of their specific contexts.4

  • 5 We will henceforth refer to this character by her chosen name, Vitória.

3This article compares Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue Between and Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue to reveal how water and dreams forge pathways to belonging and co-resistance across disparate colonial landscapes. Harunnah Attah, whose life spans Ghana, the United States, and Senegal, crafts a narrative where twin sisters, Hassana and Husseina, who were separated during a violent raid and later reunited in spirit despite the Atlantic’s vast divide, use dreams to sustain a transcultural kinship that defies imposed boundaries, as Husseina, who reclaims her identity as Vitória5, journeys to Bahia, Brazil, while Hassana remains in Accra. In a parallel yet distinct tradition, Cree author Pésémapéo Bordeleau envisions Victoria’s trip with her husband Daniel as both an urgent quest to reconnect with her Cree roots and a spiritual journey to locate her great-uncle George’s remains—a mission complicated by the imminent flooding of her ancestral lands due to hydroelectric damming. Although rooted in different historical contexts—one emerging from intra-African enslavement and transatlantic slavery, the other from contemporary settler colonialism—both novels deploy water as a dual symbol of deracination and empowerment, and dreams as repositories of (ancestral) knowledge and resistance.

4By interweaving these narratives, this article echoes Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s call to “sail” beyond conventional national literary boundaries: “the traditional organization of literature along national boundaries is like bathing in a river instead of sailing” (56). So rather than confining them to their “national” contexts, comparing these novels across linguistic, geographical, political, and cultural differences answers Thiong’o’s call to bring them out of the confines of colonized literary spaces to reveal their parallel and shared waterviews and their decolonial potential. Although both writers portray a specific colonial situation, Pésémapéo Bordeleau and Harruna Attah use water and dreaming to demonstrate the characters’ journey to belonging. Water and dreaming contribute to rooting the characters in their respective cultures and kinship networks: water appears as both a colonial obstacle and decolonial source of power, and dreams appear as sources of knowledge, as geographic and cartographic information, as social acts of communication and relationship, and as instruments. Reading these novels alongside each other, we argue that Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau and Ayesha Harunna Attah not only critique colonization but also portray decolonial waterviews, embedded in relationality between humans and more-than-human kin.

2. From Alienation to Belonging: Water as Colonial Obstacle and Decolonial Power

  • 6 Quotes from Ourse bleue will be cited as OB, those from its English translation Blue Bear Woman as (...)

5In both novels, water appears both as an obstacle, demonstrating the effects of colonialism, and as power, resisting the alienation and displacement of the novels’ characters imposed by colonization. In Ourse bleue, Victoria and her husband Daniel visit Eeyou Istchee (James Bay Cree territory) where Victoria is looking to connect with her Cree family, culture and spirituality. Tasked in her dreams with finding the long-lost remains of her great-uncle George, Victoria’s road trip increases in urgency and significance due to the imminent flooding of the territory as a result of hydrodamming in the area, which would render navigation difficult (OB 73).6 Set in 2004 Quebec, Ourse bleue’s plot line is interlaced with memories of Victoria’s childhood from the 1960s. Both times are characterized by political discussions around hydroelectricity between the Quebec government and the Cree Nations in the area. In 2024, Canada was the third largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world (Natural Resources Canada), with Quebec’s production counting for over half of Canada’s total capacity (Statista). Early on their trip, even before they become aware of the imminent floodings, Victoria and Daniel encounter a water protester to whom they show their support:

  • 7 “On the roof, a big handwritten sign reads: Save the Rupert River. To the left of the car a man in (...)

Hissée sur le toit, une grande pancarte clame ‘Save the Rupert River’. Écriture à la main. À gauche de l’auto marche un homme vêtu d'un survêtement sport bleu. C’est un fils du territoire. Seul avec la personne au volant, peut-être sa conjointe, qui va à la vitesse de ses pas, il avance tête baissée, les yeux rivés au sol, les épaules raidies de fatigue ou de colère. En signe de soutien, Daniel klaxonne. L’homme, sans quitter l’asphalte du regard, lève le bras avec au bout son poing fermé. (OB 38)7

6The man is protesting precisely the plans to further develop hydroelectric power in the area, which will result in flooding of parts of Eeyou Istchee, including the Rupert and Eastmain rivers, both of which play an important role in the novel as they fuel Victoria’s dreams and spiritual connection to the land (OB 72). The man’s fatigue and anger reflect the Cree Peoples’ continuous protest against hydroelectric dams dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, then Québec premier Robert Bourassa’s political credo was built on developing the province’s strategic assets. For him, “developing hydro, means to conquer the North of Quebec” (qtd. in Isacsson et al. 4:00). His choice of words, which suggests a discourse of conquest throughout, reveals the government’s colonial attitude at the time and reflects how, under settler colonialism, water is viewed simply as a resource to be used for economic and political gain with little regard for the impact on Indigenous Peoples living in the territory. Within settler colonialism as “a structure and not an event” (Wolfe 388), the occupation and “conquering” of water is only one pillar of settler colonialism among the attempted erasure of Indigenous lands, sovereignties, languages, cultures, traditions, kinships, and spiritualities. This attitude towards water had changed little in 2004 as the water walker’s protest shows; he carries these decades – and centuries – of colonial views of water as his “tête baissée” and “épaules raidies” reflect. Victoria further demonstrates this colonial attitude to water when she considers the impact of the planned hydroelectric damming on the local Cree and questions the Paix des Braves Agreement signed in 2002:

  • 8 “I can imagine the suffering this new bereavement must have awakened for the families. All for the (...)

J’imagine la souffrance que ce nouveau deuil a dû éveiller chez les familles. Pour le bien-être de la majorité blanche et celui des Américains qui ne manqueront sûrement pas de faire des offres d’achat sur les surplus d’électricité de la province. Les chefs cris signataires de la Paix des Braves, en permettant ces nouveaux développements , croyaient-ils vraiment venir en aide à leur peuple? Ou n’auraient-ils pas eu tendance à trop écouter les consultants de firmes de toutes sortes, toutes plus ambitieuses les unes que les autres? (OB 129-130)8

  • 9 Officially called the The Agreement Respecting a New Relationship Between the Cree Nation and the G (...)

7The Paix des Braves (Peace of the Braves) was signed on February 7, 2002 to end decades of court battles between the Cree and the Government of Québec.9 Considered by some as a “nation to nation” treaty, the 50-year agreement implements some of the existing obligations of the James Bay Agreement of 1975. It stipulates “the participation of the James Bay Crees in forestry, hydroelectricity and mining development in the Territory” and “[the continuance of] the development of Northern Quebec and the self-fulfilment of the Cree Nation” (Agreement, articles 2.3; 2.4; 2.1). In exchange for joint jurisdiction in the seven municipalities of James Bay and surrounding territories, the Cree consented to hydroelectric development of the Eastmain and Rupert Rivers by Hydro-Québec. Although some welcomed the agreement, others were more critical of it due to the perceived lack of consultation, haste and secrecy in signing it (Oblin 201), and perhaps most importantly, as Victoria also questions, the sense that the Cree leaders had sacrificed the land for economic gain. Victoria’s thoughts demonstrate the difficulty for Cree people “to position themselves within this new reality and find a way to articulate it” (Oblin 200).

8As Victoria’s journey progresses, she learns more about the projects underway on the banks of the Eastmain River, where Elders “affected by the hydroelectric dams” guide Quebecois and American researchers “in their research, showing them where their nomadic ancestors used to stay. Even more importantly, they list the graves of family members who lived on the territory” (BBW 99). Thus, the Elders demonstrate the impacts on the local Cree of colonial views that water is a resource to be exploited. The colonial approach underlying the hydroelectric power generation and its resulting terraformations becomes an obstacle as it severs the kinships with and between nomadic ancestors and erases the spiritual site of the graves – which is reminiscent of the Kanesatake Resistance at Oka, where the intended expansion of a golf course and building of townhouses threatened a Kanyen’kehà:ka burial ground. With the proposed hydrodamming, the water would soon be an obstacle for the local Cree to connect to their ancestors, their nomadic traditions, and their territory. The imminent flooding of ancestral and sacred lands by terraforming practices of extractionist resource farming as depicted in Ourse bleue thus represents not only a danger to the land but also a broader threat to Indigenous ways of being. If hydrodamming consists of purposefully placing an obstacle (the dam) in the way of the water, interrupting its natural flow, it further leads to water and terraformations becoming obstacles elsewhere. Such colonial approaches to water use thus represents a view of the water, erasing waterviews, views from the water.

9In Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue Between, water appears similarly as an obstacle influenced by colonization that hinders connecting with family, ancestors, spirituality and tradition. The novel narrates how the sisters find their way back to each other across the water through their dreams and through water and waterview. Husseina is enslaved by Baba Kaseko for a while until Yaya takes her home and later across the ocean to Bahia in Brazil, where Husseina creates a new life and takes on the name Vitória. Crossing the ocean is thus liberating for Vitória, unlike for those, like Yaya, who were forcibly removed from their homelands during the transatlantic slave trade. Symbolizing the Atlantic Ocean, the deep blue between appears as a physical obstacle as it takes weeks or months to cross. During the transatlantic slave trade, referred to several times throughout the novel, the ocean was indeed a serious barrier that severed people from their families, lands, and homes—not to mention the loss of many lives during the journey to another continent.

10In the novel, water is a dual obstacle: it acts not only as a physical barrier but also as a symbolic impediment to the passage of spirits. Explaining this idea in The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy argues that the transatlantic slave trade destabilized identities, rendering them “always unfinished, always being remade” (xi). In the novel, this instability of identity takes on symbolic meaning: it questions whether the act of crossing water transforms spirits so profoundly that they can never return to their original form. For example, Vitória wonders whether the spirit of Yaya—who journeyed with her from Lagos to Bahia—will be halted by the water after death, unable to return to its homeland, or whether spiritual women, like Victória and Yaya, can help ferry these altered spirits across (TDBB 170). This concern also echoes the Yoruba belief that while spirits can traverse solid matter, they cannot pass through water (Kyles 15). Thus, for Vitória, the ocean embodies both liberation—freeing her from the enslaved experience at Baba Kaseko’s—and obstruction, as it separates her from Hassana and complicates her search for her sister. This complex experience of water as both obstacle and liberation also reflects Glissant’s Poétique de la relation in which he addresses the ocean: "Tu préserves sur tes crêtes le sourd bateau de nos naissances, tes abîmes sont notre inconscient même, labourés de fugitives mémoires" (18). Glissant thus sees the ocean as a layered entity related to the past and memory. The “naissances” here can also be understood as a new life on the other side of the ocean, though during the transatlantic slave trade, as in the case for Yaya and Vitória, it was an imposition that forced them away from their homes.

11The oft-recurring dream about her sister’s drowning in a whirlpool (TDBB 156, 208-209) not only emphasizes the water’s importance in the novel but also positions the water as a being with agency. Vitória’s dream almost becomes reality at the end of the novel when Hassana returns to Lagos, where Vitória is at that time, to get to know her sister better and reconnect. Vitória is waiting for her at the harbor thinking that “[t]he only separation now between her and Hassana was the deep blue of the sea” (TDBB 243). The water once again creates an obstacle as the small boat meant to bring her ashore capsizes. Vitória feels that Hassana is in the water and asks Yemanjá to protect them. Then, it becomes unclear whether the following events are a dream or occurring events, or both: the dream and physical worlds merge. Hassana is pulled under water into a whirlpool:

She is shoved into the water, and she whirls, sucked into a funnel. She is tugged down, water whooshing around her, until suddenly the whirlpool grows still. She is buoyed up by the water, even though it is clearly still moving around her. She doesn’t need to sing anymore. The song is in her, in her chest. She is protected by the Yemanjá, lady of the water (...) ‘This is your home,’ a voice says. ‘You can stay here. Here, all fear disappears’ (TDBB 244-245, italics in original)

12Although a life-threatening obstacle, the water is at the same time also the powerful agent that saves Hassana. Despite the water’s continued dangerous movement, it also “buoys up” Hassana in a controlled manner, highlighting its agency. Moreover, the unspecified voice (“a voice”) suggests the water speaks, as the direct discourse indicates, further emphasizing its agency and demonstrating that the water’s agency “is not limited to innate action or causal relationships” (Watts 23). This resonates with what in Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee cosmologies is called “Place-Thought,” according to which place and thought were never separate: “Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (Watts 21). In Harruna Attah’s depiction, the water propelling Hassana to the surface has agency; it is an agent. Additionally, as the following paragraph shows, Vitória seems to derive agency from Place-Thought:

Everything she’s known and experienced - life in Botu, being kidnapped, being a slave, running away, living in Abetifi, moving to Accra - slips into the hole. But these aren’t her memories; this isn’t her dying. These are her sister’s dreams. Hassana is drowning. She summons her strengths and says, “Yemanjá, Ibeji, we celebrate you, but we are not ready to join you. (TDBB 245, italics in original)

13Hassana’s dreams and life, Vitória’s experiencing Hassana’s drowning, the water’s agency, and Yemanjá’s voice all seem to arise from the same place; the boundaries between them are blurred as Vitória’s experience is only partly conscious. However, once conscious of what is happening, it is in this interwoven space that Vitória “summons her strengths” and speaks to Yemanjá, demonstrating that her agency emerged from this Place-Thought.

14Vitória’s intimate relationship with water and Yemanjá further underscores how she has come to fully embrace her religion. Throughout the novel, and particularly when she is in Brazil, Vitória becomes more and more attached to religion. In Brazil, Vitória “started ... learning a new religion, Candomblé, and its new Gods, orixás” (TDBB 38). Moreover, when she starts using the name Vitória instead of Husseina, it becomes clear to her why Yaya had always told her to profess to be Catholic: “Yaya said in the past, enslavers didn’t want the people they’d bought practicing their own religions, so people pretended to be Catholic and just converted their orixás into Catholic saints” (96). This realization demonstrates how religion can be a form of spiritual resistance. Religion becomes a way to preserve a collective identity and cultural memory within a colonial context as well, echoing Jacob U Gordon’s assertion that “Perhaps one of the most significant areas of African influence on Blacks in the New World is religion” (Gordon 233). Vitória’s connection to Africa through her link to the orisha Yemanjá is what ultimately restores the bond between her and her sister and why she returns to the continent. Although an obstacle, the water, in the form of orisha Yemanjá specifically and as a religious tool of resistance, is what ultimately helps the sisters overcome their alienation from each other and their dislocation from their home. This Yoruba waterview thus serves as a decolonial agent.

15The book’s title, The Deep Blue Between, and its translations further signal how the ocean symbolizes both separation and the potential for decolonization. In the German (Tiefe Wasser zwischen uns), and Catalan (El blau entre nosaltres) translations, the ocean is positioned, as in the English original title, as an obstacle, imposing a vast space and a barrier between the protagonists, one that they must overcome to find their way back to each other as well as to (re)claim their cultural roots. In contrast, in the Dutch and Italian versions of the novel the word “between” disappears from the title, translated as Het Diepe Blauw and Il grande azzuro respectively, both meaning “the deep blue.” The aspect of the ocean as an obstacle is thus not discursively explicit in these titles, suggesting the potential of water as a decolonizing force.

16Water functions as power. Yemanjá is the orisha, or goddess, of the Ogun River in Yoruba culture. However, when the enslaved were transported to Latin America, they lost their connection to the Ogun River. “[I]n her power and desire to protect her children in the Middle Passage” (Faniyi Olayiwola et al. vii), Yemanjá thus became the goddess of the sea. The ocean (and Yemanjá) can thus be seen as a way to maintain contact with the African continent. To that extent, Sheila Smith McKoy writes,

  • 10 Maafa = the African Holocaust, the Holocaust of Enslavement, or the Black Holocaust.

Yemonja has a significant migratory history as a deity. Like the waters that she rules, the spiritual resonance of Yemonja extends far beyond Nigeria throughout the African Diaspora. Yemonja—whose domain includes the rivers, the most senior of all river deities—is positioned as the protector of the people who traversed the Atlantic during the Maafa. (Smith McKoy 56)10

17In this respect, perhaps it comes as no surprise that Vitória, who leaves the homeland for Brazil, maintains a stronger connection with Yemanjá than her twin sister who remains on the African continent. In addition, Michael Lindsay writes that “Yemonja still retains a presence in the subconscious of Black people who implement aspects of her divine nature into facets of their expression in a strange land. Namely, the life reaffirming impact of water that is a consistent theme in the art and religious imagination of Black people is the most prominent connection to Yemonja” (Lindsay 71-72). Vitória’s connection to Yemanjá is thus deeply embedded in her subconscious and the life reaffirming impact of water is not only what connects her to Yemanjá but also what keeps her connection to her sister alive.

  • 11 “We’ll go if needed, Stanley, now that I think about it my most vivid dreams took place when we wer (...)

18In Ourse bleue, water also reaches Victoria’s subconscious. When Victoria goes to her second cousin Stanley for information about George’s old trapping and hunting grounds, she first notes the connection between water and her dreams. She says to Stanley: Nous irons s’il le faut, Stanley, je me suis souvenue que mes rêves les plus percutants sont arrivés en camping entre la Rupert et la Eastmain. Étrange… Ce n’est pas si loin du territoire qui nous concerne (OB 72).11 Throughout the novel, most of Victoria’s dreams occur when she is in proximity to the Rupert and/or Eastmain rivers. In that sense, water flows throughout the novel pushing Victoria towards her fully embracing her Cree spirituality that had been overshadowed by her Christian upbringing and outside influences from her mother and Daniel, who were both scared of her shamanistic powers. These influences had caused Victoria to experience a certain disconnect between her Cree roots and Christian upbringing; even though she was practicing Cree ceremonies, she had not fully embraced her spirituality. Her dreams, pushed ahead by the water on their road trip, aid her in fully embracing her hybrid identity and spirituality. This is particularly apparent in the way the material and immaterial worlds, initially separate, become more entangled throughout the novel. The first few dreams are announced in the novel by “Je rêve” (or “A dream” in the English translation), explicitly setting the dreamworld apart from the physical world. This short phrase announces the occurrence of a dream; in the English translation by Ouriou and Morelli, the short nominal phrase “a dream” further underscores how “incidental” the dream is. In the English translation, the first-person singular, present in the original in French, is erased, along with the agency of the dreamer embedded within, thereby diminishing dreaming as an act. In the first part of the novel, “The Journey to James Bay,” Victoria’s dreams often become “etched in [her] memory” (BBW 13) due to something in the physical world, the incline that made her roll into Daniel in their van (BBW 3), a dog yapping (BBW 13), or Daniel shaking her awake (BBW 23). In this sense, the material world makes the dreams part of reality.

19However, the explicit dream announcements (“je rêve”) disappear after a while, and the boundaries between dream and physical world blur, becoming subtly interwoven. When dreaming about Uncle George for the first time, she realizes that there is something real about it, further emphasizing the agency of the dreamer:

  • 12 “A dream. A man snowshoeing. He’s having a rough go of it. Not because of the crusted snow, but bec (...)

Je rêve. Un homme marche avec des raquettes aux pieds. Il avance péniblement. La faute n’en est pas à la neige dure, mais à l’état de l’homme lui-même. Le jour décline. C’est un rêve insolite, comme si la réalité s’y mêlait. Soudain je me retrouve en cet homme. J’ai mal et j’ai peur, une peur liée à un sentiment de panique. Je me sens gibier. Ma peau se hérisse sous l’effet de la douleur. Dans ma jambe droite, les crocs d’un animal s’impriment et me tirent vers le bas. Je hurle dans mon sommeil. Daniel me secoue. Réveillée, je me redresse brusquement et prends conscience de l’endroit. Nous sommes sous la tente, des larmes de soulagement et de peine coulent de mes yeux. (OB 39, emphasis added)12

20Again, at the banks of the Rupert River, this dream is the first to indicate, through “comme si la réalité s’y mêlait,” that the dreamworld is in connection with the material world. It would seem that the dreams connected to locating George’s remains are very much etched on the deep relation and interwovenness between the material and immaterial worlds. Her journey to find Uncle George’s remains comes to a close by her dreaming of what happened to him, again precisely at his location and on the shoreline of the river.

21These dreams emphasize their importance in locating places and people that have been documented among various Indigenous Peoples. Marie-Françoise Guédon, for example, reports that the Nabesna people used dreams to locate game (68), to travel through time and space to find lost objects and people (44, 69-70), and to locate places where people have had unpleasant encounters (101). Similarly, Victoria’s dreams lead her to find Uncle George’s remains, and even more so, she travels through time and space to experience in her dream how his life came to an end. Victoria goes to the White Cave, a traditional spiritual place for local Indigenous people, with two spiritual leaders from her community, Patricia et Malcolm Kanatawet, to engage in a ceremony that will provide her with the vision necessary to locate his remains. It is in this vision that her travel across space becomes particularly clear:

  • 13 “Now I’m soaring like a bird above a wide river. I see the forest along its banks. Then a long bana (...)

Maintenant, je plane comme un oiseau au-dessus d’une large rivière. Je vois la forêt sur ses rives. Puis apparaît une île qui sépare les eaux, elle a une forme de banane très longue. À son début, il y a un rocher monumental fendu en deux par le gel. À l’autre bout, trois îlots se font face. Des joncs poussent dans l’eau autour de l’île et des myriques baumiers odorants sur la grève. Je suis à quelques mètres au-dessus du sol en face des îlots. Je sais que le squelette d’oncle George est là, dans la terre sous les myriques baumiers, recouvert année après année par les résidus de la rivière.
Par la pensée, je capte la demande de Kanatawet “trouve un détail plus précis, un point de repère.” Aussitôt, je m’élève pour avoir une vue d’ensemble. Je calcule l’angle des îles, puis j’aperçois un bouleau solitaire sur la grande île, debout en droite ligne face à l’îlot de gauche. Entre les deux, l’endroit où je sens les os… (OB 169-170)13

22Her dreams, fueled by water as explained above, provide her with a deep knowledge of the place where they will find Uncle George’s remains. Her dreams thus allow for a deeper and more comprehensive insight into what Pearce and Louis call “indigenous depth of place” (114). “Depth of place” knowledge does not only include the land and water but also the spiritual realm: “all parts are interrelated, extend vertically and horizontally in every direction, and directly impact one another” (Pearce and Louis 114). It is expressed through various performative mapping strategies, including narrative historical accounts, song, dance, carvings, and tattoos (115). In Ourse bleue, dreams and visions are similarly used for mapping Cree depth of place, as Victoria, embodying an eagle, maps out where great-uncle George’s remains are located, determining the angle of the islands and finding details such as the birch. This “depth of place” sometimes makes Victoria uncomfortable as she is getting used to this new expanded reality that extends in every direction. While sitting around the fire with the Kanatawets in the White Cave to receive her vision, “despite the gravity of the moment, [her] sense of humour kicks in. The image of a red-antlered caribou, a fat otter, and a blue bear sipping tea around a fire comes to mind!” (BBW 131). As Malcolm taps her on the shoulder to remind her of the serious business they are about to undertake, Victoria acknowledges, “it’s nerves” (131). After the ceremony, however, “[she] is bursting with vitality as though fresh from a long night’s sleep” (134), suggesting that she has come to fully embrace the “depth of place” that embraces material and spiritual worlds.

23It is ironic that the inherently colonial hydrodamming projects in Ourse bleue, aimed at eradicating Indigenous Peoples’ ties to territory, are exactly what pushes Victoria to speed up her spiritual journey. Indeed, the Kanatawets mention how much work they did in one healing ceremony, under the time crunch (OB 164). This was possible due to her strong totem, the blue bear, which reunites her mixed-race heritage, the bear being a significant animal in Cree culture and blue representing Christianity’s virgin Mary. In The Deep Blue Between, in turn, it is precisely the Atlantic Ocean, which played such a major role during the transatlantic slave trade, and the journey across it to Brazil that cause Vitória to build a deeper connection with Yemanjá. In effect, in both novels, water as a colonial obstacle pushes the protagonists to embrace its decolonial potential. Water as a decolonizing force strengthens the protagonists’ connection to the land, their families, and their spiritualities.

3. Dreaming Kinship: Dreams as Knowledge and Relations

  • 14 “It comes to me that George must have run on and on, fleeing the predators, losing his bearings and (...)

24Victoria’s vision about the location of George’s remains, cited earlier, also points to the importance of dreams as a source of geographical and cartographic information. In Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue, dreams, a recurring motif in Indigenous literatures – reaching back to the works of Leslie Marmon Silko (e.g., Ceremony 1978) and N. Scott Momaday (e.g., House Made of Dawn 1968) to name just a few – are posed as an access point for sacred geography and navigation. After a disturbing dream early in the novel, Victoria realizes that it was not merely a dream but part of the truth of George’s mysterious death on one of his trapping expeditions, and that she must find his remains so that he can finally move on to the spirit realm: “Je comprends que George courait devant lui, fuyant les carnassiers, perdant ses repères et son courage. Mes rêves, dis-je, mes derniers rêves me prévenaient. George n’est pas parti, son esprit rôde là-bas, il demande de l’aide! Je dois trouver le moyen d’apaiser son esprit’ .... Je serai l’instrument, j’irai selon les signes, et nous verrons” (OB 41).14 Since his bones, to which his spirit was still tied, had not been found, neither George’s spirit nor his family, including Victoria, had been able to find peace. For that to happen, her dreams in which she embodies George allow her to finally uncover the truth about his death. From her bird’s-eye vision, cited earlier, she learns the details of her uncle’s location, “a long banana-shaped island” (BBW 133); the depth of place Victoria accessed through her dream leads her to the precise location of the remains. Moreover, that she experiences George’s spirit further suggests how in this depth of place connections with ancestors and the spirit realm not only exist but also actively shape her. This suggests that depth of place comes from Place-Thought, where agency is not reserved for humans, but where all beings affect the world and relations among beings. She takes the gathered information to Stanley, a cousin who works at the genealogical museum, and with maps, he pieces together where they need to go. At the location and in the presence of his bones and the water, Victoria then receives a vision about what exactly had happened to George (OB 39). Tapping into Place-Thought and depth of place, Victoria’s dreams and visions, and in particular the one she had in the White Cave, provide her with the geographical and cartographic knowledge needed to undertake and accomplish her journey to find George’s remains and to ultimately find peace for him, herself, her cousin Stanley, and their family.

25Similarly, in The Deep Blue Between, Vitória and Hassana find each other in their dreams. The twin sisters are separated from one another by the Atlantic Ocean, but they are still connected to each other through their dreams. Hassana says of Vitória, “I dream about her all the time .... ‘And then ... I had one of her dreams. She was again surrounded by water and those fluttering sails. She was moving somewhere—I just don’t know where to” (TDBB 184). Even in dreams, water plays a significant role. Inversely, Hassana knows exactly when she finds herself in Vitória’s dreams: “I could always tell which ones were hers, because they were of places I’d never seen before” (TDBB 63). Vitória thus attempts in her dreams to lead Hassana to her, reflecting a similar idea of Place-Thought, where spiritual and physical realms connect, and where Vitória’s agency persists in their dreams. In their dreams, each sees where the other is, but the conveyed information is never adequate to identify a precise location. Our reading of the two novels does not bear out Kayoda Fanilola’s observation that “a dream is only a partial message that cannot mean anything by itself until it is supplemented by additional information that only the dreamer or the interpreter can provide” (Fanilola 1). In both cases, despite seeing exactly where the other person is or where the bones are, even the dreamer cannot fully interpret the geographical information embedded in the dreams—an interpreter familiar with what is seen, or external input is needed to complete the puzzle.

26This example also highlights dreams as relation and social act of communication. When Hassana and Vitória finally find their way back to each other, it becomes clear that at least the latter knew that her sister was dreaming about her. At their encounter, Hassana asks, “‘You were in Brazil?’ Vitória nodded .... Hassana says, ‘I dreamed it’” (TDBB 198), to which Vitória answers, “I know” (198). To access each other’s location and communicate through their dreams, the sisters must experience a profound sense of sadness. Hassana’s dreams about Vitória are consistently preceded by melancholy, as she describes feeling sadness before slipping into the dreamworld. At one point, she explicitly states, “That night, my sadness brought Husseina’s dreams to me” (63). This sadness is not incidental but necessary—Aunty Rose confirms as much when she tells Hassana, “I don’t know about your sister and if she has the same experience, but you need to feel deep sadness to have that openness to her” (75). The novel later suggests that the same holds true for Vitória, who dreams of Hassana only after she “cried herself to sleep” (160). The connection between sadness and dream-induced communion positions melancholia as a critical mechanism for sustaining relationships across separation and loss. Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia frames melancholia as a defining condition of postcolonial societies—an ongoing response to loss that shapes both identity and connection (3). The sisters’ grief operates similarly: their sadness emerges not only from their separation but also from broader losses—of home, identity, and freedom. Their melancholia, then, is more than an emotional state; it generates a space of transnational, even metaphysical, connection. In this context, sadness is not merely a burden but a bridge, enabling communication and intimacy despite physical and existential ruptures.

27While Hassana and Vitória need their sadness and emotion to find each other to ultimately become complete, the contrary is true for Victoria in Ourse bleue. Indeed, before Victoria can access the White Cave with the Kanatawets, they require her to do a cleansing. One shaman says, “For the ceremony in the White Cave, you have to be free of negative emotions, otherwise your visions will be affected” (BBW 127). Negative emotions blur the visions, so Victoria has to let go of her husband Daniel who had passed away in a recent accident during their roadtrip. This need for sadness in The Deep Blue Between and for its absence in Ourse bleue to access the geographical information and to connect to others in one’s dreams is a striking difference between the novels and between the understandings of dreaming in the two cultural contexts.

28Despite this difference, in Ourse bleue dreaming does occur as a means of communication and of relations quite similar to the dreams that connect Hassana and Vitória in The Deep Blue Between. In Ourse bleue, Victoria not only becomes the embodiment of George, but she also receives messages from him, other shamans, and other people through her dreams and visions. These dreams thus act as messages of communication. Beyond this, Victoria accesses other people’s dreams occasionally. Early on her journey, she has a dream that she cannot quite understand immediately:

  • 15 “A dream. A man struggles to free himself from bushes imprisoning him like real arms. A soft glow f (...)

Je rêve. Un homme tente de se dégager des broussailles qui l’emprisonnent comme des bras vivants. Une lueur douce forme un immense cône au-dessus de lui, mais ne l’atteint pas. Il semble vouloir tendre les bras vers cette lumière, mais il est paralysé. Je sens son angoisse. Je veux l’aider, mais je suis incapable de bouger. Je l’entends alors dire: ‘Ton nom est Humbert, tu es un roi gitan et je suis George.’ (OB 26)15

29In this dream, George speaks to the dreamer, but George talks to Humbert rather than Victoria. When she later meets Humbert who will guide her into her spiritual journey, he explains “When you were here last week, your dream tapped into a message sent to me by George’s spirit. He put me in touch with you, but your Sherlock Holmes’ mentality kept you from interpreting the dream properly” (BBW 57). Again, this exemplifies Place-Thought, where spirits too have agency that impacts the world, and where material and spiritual worlds are not completely separate realms.

30Humbert’s reference to Victoria’s “Sherlock Holmes mentality” (BBW 57) refers to a Western mindset that applies logic and deduction to solve deaths and mystery. As such, he also suggests that Victoria’s mind has been influenced, at times too strongly, by Western thought, that is after all part of her mixed heritage. Unable to deal with Victoria’s strong totem, her mother indeed forced her to live in the white world:

The totem [blue bear] that struck fear in my mother, who refused to acknowledge it despite the burning desire I had to speak of it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not possible. You’re just a little girl! The totem is too strong for a mixed blood. No, stop telling me your dreams! You have to live in the white world!’ I can still hear her words in Cree that denied my nature and forced me to keep quiet. (BBW 125)

31On her spiritual quest, however, Victoria reconnects with both sides of her heritage, embracing them together. This mixed heritage is, in fact, what brings her the strength needed for her quest, as Victoria’s totem, “the blue bear that haunts [her] dreams and has guided [her] for so long” (125), shows. The bear, important in Cree culture, has taken on the color of Mary, symbol of Christianity to emphasize the strength from embracing her mixed heritage:

By all accounts, I was a mystical child who prayed to the sun and moon whenever she felt the Great Spirit was no longer listening. In Catholic school, I grew attached to the Virgin Mary, finding her beautiful and kind. I wore blue to look like her .... Patricia says my totem has taken on the Virgin’s colour. My mind created this entity, a symbol of my gifts: the Blue Bear Woman, an original way of uniting my two cultures. (BBW 135)

32Despite the strong totem, Victoria’s mindset had long been troubled by a dominance of Western consciousness that had been imposed since her childhood by her mother who was frightened of her dreams and visions, as well as by her husband’s unease with her spiritual practice later in life. Because the Western mentality had gained the upper hand for so long, she had been unable to interpret this dream. However, reconnecting with her Cree family, roots, territory, and culture opens her mind and spirit to the dreams and visions and allows her to become fully Blue Bear Woman. She is more and more open to the idea that dreams are a valid and valuable source of knowledge. Dreams (and spirituality more broadly) are thus highly valued as sources of knowledge.

33In an interview with Haddad, Harunna Attah also discusses the interpretations of dreams:

Many writers use dreams to play with their narratives, so I was simply joining the back of a long tradition .... My process was to document my own dreams—their texture, color, and flavor—and to transpose these into the dreams the girls would have. The strangest thing also happened as I was writing: my father, who is an amazing raconteur and who has vivid dreams, recounted some of them. Once, he dreamt about a carriage, and I’d written about Husseina dreaming about a carriage, and the two situations were strikingly similar. My connection to these twins is technically through my father’s line, but I’ll leave it to the Jungian analysts and others who study dreamscapes to do their interpretations! (Haddad and Harruna Attah)

  • 16 A terreiro is a Candomblé temple. Candomblé is a religion that emerged from the African diaspora in (...)

34So far, we have intentionally avoided explaining why we did not distinguish between dreams and visions; in many Indigenous cultures, the two are intrinsically linked, as they both are expressions of messages from the spiritual realm. Towards the end of The Deep Blue Between, when she is back in Accra, Vitória receives Yemanjá in the terreiro she set up herself.16 Before, she had prayed to Yemanjá: “just lead me where I should be” (TDBB 199). Yemanjá, in a way, possesses her: “She folds me into her whirlpool, until my limbs are the water, the water is me, is within me. She has brought me home, and I have brought her home. We dance. We twist. We circle around” (TDBB 219). Strikingly, this possession is announced in the same way as her dreams in the novel, by blank lines and cursive, thus suggesting there is no separation between dreams and visions. The possession also demonstrates that she finally feels at home herself (in Accra) and she has brought Yemanjá home in the terreiro. It thus appears as a message from the spiritual realm.

35In Ourse bleue, we see the connection between dreams and visions as part of the spiritual realm explained by one of the shamans guiding Victoria,

  • 17 Beings chosen by the Bear Spirit are endowed with several gifts,” the medicine woman tells me, “the (...)

‘Les êtres choisis par l’esprit de l’Ours ont plusieurs dons’, me dit la femme-médicine, celui de la vision entre autres. Ce que tu ressens au front est ce que les Blancs appellent le troisième, ou grotte de Brahma chez les bouddhistes, et grotte de l’Ours dans notre culture. Comme ta mère t’a empêchée d’utiliser ce don en plein jour, tu l’as utilisé la nuit, dans tes rêves. Rien ne t’empêche désormais de te servir de ce don pour venir en aide à qui le demande, dans le monde visible et celui de l’invisible. (167)17

36As noted, the lines between dream and material worlds become blurred throughout the novel; dreams and visions, both messages from the spirit world, are inherently part of reality and intrinsically connected to the physical world.

37Not unlike Victoria in Ourse bleue, in The Deep Blue Between, both sisters are also encouraged by others to follow their dreams and use them to find each other. For example, Hassana is sent to Scissors House by private Osman to pick up his uniform. Strikingly, it is this green and yellow painted house that provides the key to narrowing down her sister Vitória’s location. In a dream, Vitória also receives information about this house in relation to Hassana: “The most recent was a dream about a building. It was green and yellow. Hassana opened the door and then shut it” (116). At first, Hassana could not locate Brazil: “I studied the African map but couldn’t find a place called Brazil” (88), but when she traces her finger over “the big blue of the sea”, she lands on Brazil. In this way, her dreams, along with the ocean, help her to locate her sister. The dream communication between the two sisters exemplifies what Augustine Nwoye calls the “triangulation of dreaming” in the “African perspective”, which means “the situation where dreams are known to originate from another source to give messages to the individual for the benefit of others” (Nwoye 4). He identifies four different places where dreams can originate:

In this way, the African universe is an alive, circular, and dynamic universe of multiple realities in close proximity and complicated transactions with one another. Given such a worldview, African dreams can originate from (a) within an individual in the human world (as understood in the West); (b) from other human beings in contact with other beings and realities from outside the human world on behalf of other persons, or triangulated “others”; or (c) through contact with members of the ancestral world or the world of the recently dead (as in the dream report by Benedict the Rhodesian and Bishop Akinyele of Ibadan, Nigeria); and (d) from the intervention of the god of medicine and other assorted patron spirits in the numinous or spiritual realm. (Nwoye 22)

38In a way similar to Indigenous depth of place, where land, water, and spiritual realms are interrelated into every direction, the triangulation of dreaming as described by Nwoye enacts such relations across dimensions. We find these origins of dreams in the novels as they point to the connections between “watery worlds” and dreamscapes. For example, dreams do appear in their “Western” sense in Ourse bleue, in particular in Victoria’s early dreams where the material world wakes her up to embed the dreams in reality (a). In The Deep Blue Between, as noted, Aunty Rose tells Hassana that she must feel deep sadness to dream about her twin sister. Rose gives Hassana a little push in the right direction, and she could therefore be seen as an example of a “triangulated ‘other’” (b). Uncle George’s appearances in Victoria’s dreams and visions to ask her to help and to ultimately find his remains are a clear example of dreams originating “through contact with members of the ancestral world” (Nwoye 22) (c). In The Deep Blue Between, Yemanjá takes possession of Vitória (219), instantiating an intervention of something or someone from the spiritual realm (d).

4. Conclusion

39Dreamscapes connect across different dimensions, and waterviews in both West African and Indigenous contexts hold decolonial potential. Water and dreams, and paticularly their intersection, teach Victoria, Husseina/Vitória, and Hassana the “multidirectional, multispatial, multitemporal, and multispecies theory of relationships and connections” (Yazzie and Baldy 1); the information derived from dreams and the agency of water firmly embed the novels’ protagonists among their human and non-human relations. For Victoria the relationships with her numerous family members and Cree friends, her kinship to her dreams and the spiritual realm, and her deep connection to the water are part of a turn inward and, to borrow from Leanne Simpson, a “flight out of settler colonialism” (217). Indeed, and ironically so, in Ourse bleue, settler colonialism, in the form of hydrodamming, pushes her (back) to her Cree traditions, culture, ceremonies, and kinships. Her place-based, land-based, dream-based, and water-based relationships form the foundation of Cree thought and a passage beyond the confines of settler colonialism and into Indigenous spaces. For Hassana and Husseina/Vitória, these relationships also appear but do so differently due to the colonial context in which they live. The colonial barrier between the twin sisters posed by the ocean is overcome by a flight inward, back to family and into new traditions of Candomblé for Husseina; her connection to Yemanjá is pushed forward by the Atlantic Ocean itself.

40From the novels arise knowledges from West African and Indigenous traditions around waterviews and dreaming that inform one another and that, read together, portray a trans-Atlantic understanding of belonging, co-resistance, and decolonization. Our analysis shows that knowledge is created in place, whether by a return to ancestral lands and traditions or by deepening spirituality in diasporic communities and lands. Waterviews and dreaming help the protagonists to ultimately find belonging. Rooted in Eeyou Istchee and the Gold Coast and its diaspora in Brazil, and read through the lenses of Indigenous and African views, the novels demonstrate that belonging is not so much the adoption into a community based on recognition by the other (although that certainly also appears in the novels), but more importantly, an active process of kinship making, not only with other humans but also more-than-human kin. These active relationships are reciprocal: spirits, dreams, and water enter into kinship with Victoria, Hassana, and Husseina/Vitória. Belonging is reciprocal relationality to humans, land, place, dreams, and water.

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Notes

1 See Nick Estes’ work in Our History is Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019).

2 Yemanjá has different spellings, including Yemanjá, Yemonja, Yemọja, Yemaja, Yemoyá, and Yemayá. Following the spelling in the novel, we use Yemanjá.

3 We use the broader geographical term “West Africa” here to reflect that the local histories, traditions, languages and cultures are not bound to the colonially imposed national borders. For example, Yoruba culture and people span several West African countries, including what are now Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. In the novel, the area is also referred to as the Gold Coast, and we use this term occasionally throughout the essay as well following the novel’s terminology. We do so not to perpetuate colonial terms, but rather to use the terms used at the time of the novel’s plot line since Ghana as a country did not yet exist.

4 In using the terms “African” and “Indigenous,” we do not mean to imply that there is one African or one Indigenous culture; we acknowledge the rich diversity of the numerous Indigenous and African cultures, languages, and traditions. We use African and Indigenous here as umbrella terms to refer to the various theories rooted in a number of First Nations and African storytelling traditions. Throughout the essay, we will use more specific terms used by the authors of these works, e.g., Cree perceptions of water, Yoruba understandings of Yemanjá, etcetera. We thus remain attentive to local contexts while placing them into conversation with one another.

5 We will henceforth refer to this character by her chosen name, Vitória.

6 Quotes from Ourse bleue will be cited as OB, those from its English translation Blue Bear Woman as BBW, and those from The Deep Blue Between as TDBB.

7 “On the roof, a big handwritten sign reads: Save the Rupert River. To the left of the car a man in a blue tracksuit walks. He’s from hereabouts. Alone but for the person at the wheel, perhaps his spouse, who keeps pace, he marches on, head down, eyes glued to the ground, shoulders tense with fatigue or anger. Daniel honks in support. Without looking up from the pavement, the man raises an arm, fist clenched” (BBW 22).

8 “I can imagine the suffering this new bereavement must have awakened for the families. All for the good of the white majority and Americans who will likely offer to purchase the province’s electricity surplus. Did the Cree chiefs, signatories to the Paix des Braves Agreement that allowed for the new developments, really believe they were helping their people? Or were they too ready to listen to advisors from various companies, each more ambitious than the next?” (BBW 100)

9 Officially called the The Agreement Respecting a New Relationship Between the Cree Nation and the Government of Quebec, the Paix des Braves was nicknamed by the Quebec Government after the 1701 Great Peace of Montreal also known as La Paix des Braves.

10 Maafa = the African Holocaust, the Holocaust of Enslavement, or the Black Holocaust.

11 “We’ll go if needed, Stanley, now that I think about it my most vivid dreams took place when we were camping between the Rupert and Eastmain rivers. Strange.... That’s not that far from his grounds” (BBW 50).

12 “A dream. A man snowshoeing. He’s having a rough go of it. Not because of the crusted snow, but because of the condition he’s in. Day is drawing to an end. It’s an unusual dream, as though confused with reality. Suddenly, I’m the man. I’m aching and afraid, my fear tinged with panic. I feel hunted. My skin bristles with pain. An animal’s fangs lodge in my right leg and drag me down. I cry out in my sleep. Daniel shakes me awake. I sit up abruptly and take in my surroundings. We’re in the tent; tears of relief and sorrow trickle from my eyes” (BBW 23, emphasis added)

13 “Now I’m soaring like a bird above a wide river. I see the forest along its banks. Then a long banana-shaped island cleaving the water comes into view. Where it begins stands a monumental rock, split in two by frost damage. At the other end, three tiny islets face each other. Bulrushes grow in the water around the island as do sweet gale shrubs onshore. I hover a few metres above the ground across from the islets. I know Uncle George’s skeleton lies here, in the earth under the sweet gale, covered every year a little more by the river’s residue. My mind grasps the Kanatawets’ request. ‘Find a more specific detail, a landmark.’ Right away, I rise for a more elevated view. I calculate the islands’ angle, then notice a lone birch tree on the big island, standing directly in line with the islet to the left. Between the two is the spot where I feel the bones’ presence....” (BBW 133)

14 “It comes to me that George must have run on and on, fleeing the predators, losing his bearings and his last shred of courage. ‘My dreams,’ I say, ‘My latest dreams warned me. George hasn’t left. His spirit is still roaming there, he’s begging for help! I have to find a way to appease his spirit’ .... I will be the instrument; I will follow the signs and we will see” (BBW 23-24).

15 “A dream. A man struggles to free himself from bushes imprisoning him like real arms. A soft glow forms a huge cone hovering above him, never quite touching him. He seems to want to reach out to the light, but he’s paralyzed. I can feel his anguish and want to help but am incapable of moving. Then I hear him say, ‘Your name is Humbert, you are a king of the nomads, and I am George’” (BBW 12).

16 A terreiro is a Candomblé temple. Candomblé is a religion that emerged from the African diaspora in Brazil during the 19th century. For more information about the creation of the Candomblé and the preservation of different cultures within, see Luis Nicolau Parés’ The formation of Candomblé: Vodun history and ritual in Brazil.

17 Beings chosen by the Bear Spirit are endowed with several gifts,” the medicine woman tells me, “the gift of sight being one of them. What you feel on your forehead is what white people call the third eye, or what Buddhists call Brahma’s cave or the Bear’s Cave in our culture. Since your mother kept you from using your gift during daylight hours, you turned to it at night in your dreams. Nothing can stop you now from using your gift to help those who ask, either from the visible or invisible world (131).

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References

Electronic reference

Malou Brouwer and Eline Kuenen, Dreaming across Waters: Decolonial Belonging, Dreamscapes, and Waterviews in Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s Ourse bleue and Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The Deep Blue BetweenEuropean journal of American studies [Online], 20-1 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 23 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/23427; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13qwk

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About the authors

Malou Brouwer

Malou Brouwer received her PhD in Transnational and Comparative Literatures at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on Indigenous women’s translingual poetry from a cross-lingual, decolonial perspective, and she teaches Indigenous and francophone literatures, with a special emphasis on feminism, decolonization, and the environment. 

Eline Kuenen

Eline Kuenen is a PhD candidate at Radboud University Nijmegen (Netherlands) and a secondary school teacher of French. Her research examines the role of orality in the new cultural movement called Afropolitanism and explores if and how Afropolitanism is used as a marketing tool in cultural productions.

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