Lalela uLwandle
listen2thesea.neocities.org
Creative final exam /
Artist statement
Sophia Tyree
LIT 3437
Fall 2025
“The deep sea is where most of our sacred ones dwell.”
— Lalela uLwandle, p. 2
Hello, I'm Sophia and this is my humble shoreline on the world wide web. ✧ This page is my Creative Final Exam for Global Literature of Environmental Justice, based on the community theatre project Lalela uLwandle ("Listen to the Sea").
The play washes in from the coastline of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Rather than viewing the ocean as a lucrative "blue space" to be exploited for tourism or industrial development, it listens to the people whose lives flow with the water: fishers, multi-generational families, spiritual communities, and those who walk the shore to converse with the dead. I've woven myself into the code the way they weave their stories into the tide, patiently, line by line, and when I hit upload, the screen will stand for me long after I'm gone.
The stories gathered for the play form a different kind of ocean map, one that policy usually erases, with its ancestors, testimonies, memories, and like disappearing names coded in my floating 🌊 characters. The scrollbox is my script, a little stage where course concepts can talk to my thoughts, and environmental justice can stand not just as a term but a happening, as I so please.
As someone living near a coast myself (in New Smyrna Beach, Florida), I'm accustomed to seeing beaches advertised as pleasure property. Lalela uLwandle asks whose stories we don't hear when imagining sustainability. Memories, spiritual activities, and laments rarely surface in marine spatial planning, but they can easily surface in my NeoCities site.
Thank you for stopping by my amphitheater of empathy. I hope my symbolism is as clear as the crystal blue waters digitally surrounding us. ♡
Artist Statement
My creative final project is a NeoCities website inspired by the research-based play Lalela uLwandle (“Listen to the Sea”). My goal was to build a webspace that performs understanding rather than simply describing it.
From the opening pages of the script, the ocean is introduced as a force that rearranges breath, body, and memory. Niren recalls his father saying, “all the money, all the gold, all the diamonds in the world can’t buy this feeling … the sea … is like a paracetamol tablet for the soul” (p. 1). That visceral healing sensation, something policy alone cannot measure, was the first thing I wanted visitors to feel on my website. So I coded drifting ocean icons (🌊) to travel freely across the screen, not bound by grids or borders. The floating characters act as digital equivalents of these unquantifiable feelings, such non-economic values beyond spreadsheets, GDP tables, or resource extraction reports.
Central to Lalela uLwandle is the tension between the technocratic logic of industry and the intimate knowledge of communities. Faye observes that humanity has “elbowed our way into these private realms” of the deep sea, driven by an obsession to control a “living, breathing mystery” (p. 1). In the play, this intrusion collapses the distance between mythic depth and industrial greed. In my design choices for my site, I balance that through design choices reflective of foreground listening rather than mastery. Rather than sleek 2025 graphic design, I used a late-90s / early-2000s visual language so that the page feels handmade, because listening is a rather handmade practice.
The scrollbox functions as my digital stage, showing how the theatre collects and holds oral testimony. I speak to visitors directly, the same way Nolwandle’s grandmother speaks to her before a story: “Come child, settle, close your mouth and open your ears. Lalela—Lalela—” (p. 2). environmental justice begins not when we evaluate resources, but when we listen to the people whose lives are already imprinted into those ecosystems. The play is thick with ancestral relationships to the ocean. Nolwandle tells of the sacred healers who say that the deep sea is “where most of our sacred ones dwell” (p. 2). This cosmology is radically incompatible with Western development language, which tries to “put a value on something that sustains life” (p. 1). In my own life in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, beaches are marketed as leisure fields, whether that be for backdrops for Instagram pictures, tanning, shorebreak surfing, or boutique condos. My page challenges that narrow view by treating the sea not as scenery, but as an archive of memory, ritual, and grief.
The ghostly, drifting icons represent ancestors carried on currents. They pass across the user’s screen with no obvious endpoint: fortunes, disappearances, and lineage. They are deliberately difficult to “control,” because control is the ideology that harms the ocean. The code refuses to obey user domination; it behaves like wind and tide. One of the most devastating parts of Lalela uLwandle is the story of displacement. Families are pushed away from ancestral shorelines and their spiritual and healing practices are criminalized. In one section, fences rise overnight across beaches. “Rock pools were told they now needed permits … many of them were arrested” (p. 12).
I wasn’t interested in making a “hopeful” environmental website in the generic sustainability sense. Instead, I wanted to honor the ocean’s language. The pale blue color scheme, blinking text, and glitchy layering evoke an odd sensation, perhaps the internet’s version of tidepool salt dried on skin.
All of this, and yet Lalela uLwandleends with an invitation, not a conclusion. Nolwandle declares, “Come. Stand with us … Close your mouths … Open your ears. Lalela. Lalela. The sea has many stories” (p. 18). My website ends in the same spirit. I’m not presenting environmental justice as solved by any means
I believe I met my goals. The site embodies the play’s approach of not just summarizing environmental injustice, but staging it by translating the coast into the web. If the sea has many stories, then digital space can hold them long after I am gone.
Works Cited
Empatheatre Collective. Lalela uLwandle An Empatheatre Radio/Podcast Play. August 2020. PDF.
Links
Lalela uLwandle Transcript ♡ Illustrated Short Film