Intiimne ja võõras. Vesi ja selle kultuuriline kuvand / Intimate Stranger: Water and Its Cultural Imaginary

Abstract

Teesid: Artikkel käsitleb vett ainelise ja kujutlusliku elemendina, mis ühendab inim- ja enam-kui-inimmaailma. Vesi, olles planeedi ja meie kehade algaine, loob materiaalse ja afektiivse seose maailmaga, ületades inimliku mõõtkava ning seda tuleks käsitleda mitte passiivse ressursina kusagil „ära“, vaid aktiivse mäluagendi ja vedela mäluarhiivina, mis talletab ja vahendab lugusid eri skaaladel. Selline „veega koos mõtlemine“ aitab mõtestada meie põimumist teiste kehade ja ökosüsteemidega ning avab uusi võimalusi vee kujutamiseks kirjanduses ja kultuuris.

This article explores water as both a material and cultural phenomenon through the emerging field of blue humanities and offers an Estonian-language overview of the field’s key concepts and narrative frameworks.

Drawing on theories by Stacy Alaimo, Astrida Neimanis, Sidney Dobrin, Steve Mentz, and Serpil Oppermann, it asks how water functions as an agent of memory, storytelling and transcorporeal connection between human and more-than-human worlds. Rather than treating water as an inert resource, abstract substance, or threatening environment 'out there', the study addresses it as an agentic force, a material constitutive of our bodies and a key facilitator of our environmental enmeshment. The article argues that water, as both element and metaphor, destabilises the binaries that have structured the western thought and invites a reorientation of ecological imagination beyond the terrestrial focus that has dominated 'green' ecocriticism. Building on these perspectives, the article proposes the concept of water as a liquid memory archive, capable of storing and mediating environmental histories across human and more-than-human temporalities.

Starting from the theoretical premise of new materialism and transcorporeality, the discussion draws on Alaimo’s conception of bodies as porous and mutually entangled with their environments and Neimanis’s idea of humans as 'bodies of water', to examine how aqueous matter both sustains and implicates us. Every act of consumption, production, and waste disposal participates in a cycle that returns to the human body through the flows of the hydrosphere. This porous continuity unsettles the Cartesian model of the autonomous subject and reveals the shared vulnerability that connects the human body with glaciers, oceans, and rivers. The melting of ice and the movement of breath are thus interlinked processes that register planetary fragility and ethical responsibility.

The historical and philosophical construction of water as an object 'out there' can be traced back to the Enlightenment rationality, which reduced water to an abstract, measurable quantity, detached from its social and ecological contexts. This abstraction parallels the subjugation of matter, nature and the body to human reason, and the associated effort to confine water within boundaries: pipes, dams, swimming pools, or framing metaphors and myths. The 'fatal boundary' between water and air, as biologist Zimmer calls it, is not only biological but also discursive: we associate ourselves with air rather than with water, even though we are largely composed of the latter. The article engages Morton’s notions of 'strange stranger' and 'mesh' to articulate water’s dual status as both intimate and alien. Its liquidity and permeability exemplify the interwoven texture of existence with no clear background or foreground. Yet, as Dobrin warns, the 'anthro-hubristic imperative to know' drives scientific exploration that often reproduces colonial and extractivist logic under the guise of discovery. Oceanic knowledge is thus inseparable from histories of violence against the sea and its life forms.

Following Oppermann’s call to 'think with water', the discussion expands to the ethical and narrative dimensions of aquatic life. Watery stories, told through the agency of non-human bodies such as coral reefs, invite us to read environmental crises not as isolated catastrophes but as slow violence unfolding on a planetary scale. The article also addresses contemporary forms of fast and slow violence, archived through the medium of water. The Kakhovka dam catastrophe in 2023 in war-torn Ukraine instantiates these scalar forms, in which water figures both as a weapon, victim and witness.

Emerging from the 'oceanic turn' in ecocriticism, blue humanities challenge the land-based metaphors that have long structured environmental thought and encourage more fluid, relational ways of imagining ecological processes. In doing so, blue humanities also revisit the anthropocentric and imperial frameworks embedded in western maritime narratives, from The Odyssey to Robinson Crusoe and beyond, which have imagined the sea as either an abyss, danger or a frontier of conquest. Against this tradition, the article considers water stories that foreground the agency of wet environments and nonhuman voices. Blue poetics is introduced as a mode of writing and reading that mirrors water’s fluid temporality and affective ambivalence. The discussion traces this poetics through both canonical and contemporary texts, from Melville’s Moby-Dick to modern reimaginings such as Solomon’s The Deep. In these works, water acts as a transformative medium of death and rebirth, memory and resistance, where the ocean itself becomes a storyteller. The article shows how the ocean becomes what I call a liquid memory archive—a repository that preserves histories of violence and endurance beyond human control or comprehension.

Finally, the article gestures toward planetary and local convergences, reading Kristiina Ehin’s poem 'After the Storm' as a vivid example of Estonian blue poetics. The poem’s imagery of debris washed ashore transforms pollution into an archive of global consumption and political memory. Global oceanic imaginaries are juxtaposed with the micro-scale of the Estonian seashore, with the sea becoming a repository of stories about occupation, but also sexual exploitation or migration.

Thinking with water means acknowledging our shared materiality, vulnerability, and capacity for remembering and narrating across scales, a perspective that the article conceptualises through the notion of water as a liquid memory archive.