Page 161 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

turning over rocks and plunging hands into black crevices, the secret lairs of biting eels

and stinging puffer fish; battling the cold, the currents, struggling mollusks, and the

fighting urge to breathe — that was women's work. When Sumiko was born, no

community incurred greater disdain than the ama. They were hinnin, strangers who

dirtied themselves with death's dirty work. But from her mother and grandmother,

Sumiko inherited the belief that all ama shared. It wasn't that women and snail-seeking

were ignoble.

They believed that only women had enough subcutaneous fat to endure cold at extreme

depths. They believed that women needn't fear the ocean's chilling love. And ama

couldn’t be afraid. Sumiko feared only one thing. Not running out of air, not sharks,

demons, freak currents. She was optimistic, curious, and proud, with indefatigableness

she inherited from her ocean-mother. She lived half a century before tasting fear for the

first time: fear of being unable to lie to her daughters.

Daughters, she believed, are those to whom you give existence, shape, mass, energy,

and a place in the world. Daughters devour, exult, and endure. Mothers make and

give, position, suffer, and rejoice. Because Sumiko was of the ocean — where all was

slippery, shadowed, roving, waving — she believed in the fluid simultaneity and

ceaseless blending of visible and invisible life. She believed that mothers' acts and

memories carved their daughters' bodies and believed that daughters should also be

mothers. The ocean was Sumiko's mother-daughter. Awabi were her daughters and

her mothers. Ama followed the awabi as they followed their human mothers into the