{"id":32409,"date":"2022-12-28T03:53:00","date_gmt":"2022-12-28T03:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=32409"},"modified":"2022-12-30T15:28:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-30T15:28:43","slug":"disneys-black-mermaid-is-no-breakthrough-just-look-at-the-literary-subgenre-of-black-mermaid-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/disneys-black-mermaid-is-no-breakthrough-just-look-at-the-literary-subgenre-of-black-mermaid-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney\u2019s Black mermaid is no breakthrough \u2013 just look at the literary subgenre of Black mermaid\u00a0fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessica Pressman<\/a>, San Diego State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mermaids have become a cultural phenomenon, and clashes about mermaids and race have spilled out into the open. This is most pointedly apparent in the backlash over Disney\u2019s much-anticipated \u201cThe Little Mermaid<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Disney unveiled its trailer for the film<\/a>, which will be released in May 2023, social media captured the faces<\/a> of gleeful young Black girls seeing Black mermaids onscreen for the first time. Less inspiring was the racism<\/a> that simultaneously occurred, with hashtags like #NotMyMermaid and #MakeMermaidsWhiteAgain circulating on Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fact that Disney\u2019s portrayal of a nonwhite mermaid is controversial is due to 150 years of whitewashing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2019 op-ed for The New York Times<\/a>, writer Tracey Baptiste \u2013 whose children\u2019s novel \u201cRise of the Jumbies<\/a>\u201d features a Black mermaid as the protagonist \u2013 points out how<\/a> \u201cEurocentric stories have obscured the African origins of mermaids.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMermaid stories,\u201d she writes, \u201chave been told throughout the African continent for millenniums. Mermaids are not just part of the imagination, either, but a part of the living culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nonetheless, contemporary culture is pushing back. Mermaids have, in recent years, become a popular subject in literature, film and fashion. In many cases, their depictions reflect contemporary culture: They appear as Black and brown, as sexually fluid and as harbingers of the climate crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a scholar of contemporary literature and media<\/a> \u2013 and as a lifelong lover of mermaids \u2013 I am fascinated by the recent surge of mermaid literature that remixes African folklore and connects the transatlantic slave trade to mermaid tales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By briefly charting this new literary movement, I hope to show how these stories are part of a larger current with a much longer historical tail. I also hope to put to rest the idea that Disney\u2019s decision to feature a Black mermaid represents some sort of modern breakthrough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here are three very different works of Black mermaid fiction that, in my view, deserve attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Rivers Solomon\u2019s \u201cThe Deep<\/a>\u201d (2019)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This novella is marketed as fantasy, but it does the very real and important work of opening up new ways to think about the legacy of slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, it pushes readers to think about mermaids as products of the Middle Passage<\/a>, the harrowing stage of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved Africans were transported in crowded ships across the Atlantic Ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s conceit is that pregnant, enslaved Africans who either jumped or were thrown overboard from slave ships gave birth underwater to babies who moved from amniotic fluid to seawater and evolved into a society of merfolk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The protagonist, Yetu, is a mermaid who serves as a repository of the traumatic stories that would be too troubling for her people to remember on a daily basis. She is the historian, and once a year she delivers \u201cThe Remembrance\u201d to her people in a ritual of sharing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the narrator explains, \u201cOnly the historian was allowed to remember,\u201d because if the regular folk \u201cknow the truth of everything, they will not be able to carry on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once a year, the society gathers to hear the history. The memories are not lost or forgotten but submerged and transformed, hosted by the ocean and housed in the body of a mermaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This vibrant and readable book can be tied to the work of literary scholar Christina Sharpe, who presents the concept of \u201cthe wake\u201d \u2013 a means of contemplating the continued effects of the Middle Passage. For Sharpe<\/a>, \u201cThe wake\u201d is \u201ca method of encountering a past that is not past\u201d and of endeavoring to \u201cmemorialize an event that is still ongoing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Deep\u201d also offers an allegory for the challenges of working in archives of African American experience \u2013 the main mermaid is, of course, the historian \u2013 and evokes the work of another important scholar in contemporary Black studies, Saidiya Hartman<\/a>, who has written about the erasure of Black women from archives largely compiled by white men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Monique Roffey\u2019s \u201cThe Mermaid of Black Conch<\/a>\u201d (2020)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This gorgeous and complex work of Caribbean literature dips into magical realism but is deeply grounded in the reality of today \u2013 specifically, the effects of colonialism<\/a> and exploitative tourism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like \u201cThe Deep,\u201d \u201cThe Mermaid of Black Conch\u201d explores lost ancestries and imagines alternative futures. The novel highlights the continued impact of white settlement on a fictional Caribbean island called Black Conch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, a mermaid named Aycayia is caught in the net of a fisherman. She is ancient and Indigenous \u2013 \u201cred-skinned, not black, not African\u201d \u2013 and carries the weight of history. David, the fisherman who finds her and falls in love with her, recalls his first sighting of her: \u201cShe looking like a woman from long ago, like old-time Taino people I saw in a history book at school.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Woman
Author Monique Roffey employs magical realism in her book \u2018The Mermaid of Black Conch.\u2019 Ian Gavan\/Getty Image<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Similar to Solomon\u2019s historian in \u201cThe Deep,\u201d this mermaid is depicted as an embodied archive; her hair is a home for sea creatures, and her face is a history book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, Roffey\u2019s mermaid is an anomaly, singular and isolated, not a member of a tribe. The ocean keeps this ancient beast safe, hiding her from the destructive forces of Western capitalism, embodied in the father-son duo of American tourists who seek to capture and capitalize on what they see as an aquatic trophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Nnedi Okorafor\u2019s \u201cLagoon<\/a>\u201d (2014)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA star falls from the sky. A woman rises from the sea. The world will never be the same.\u201d The publisher\u2019s summary describes a science fiction novel that combines the alien-encounter genre with African mythology to create a vast narrative network of characters, human and nonhuman, that stretches across Nigeria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The arrival of aliens off the coast of Lagos transforms the area and the people, miraculously remedying centuries of oceanic destruction caused by industrial and colonial exploitation. It also turns Adaora, a female marine biologist caught in a bad marriage, into a mermaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Woman
Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor. Neilson Barnard\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLagoon\u201d is far more than an allegory of ecological repair. But I want to point out how literature explores the global ecological crisis and, specifically, how ecocriticism<\/a> plays a key role in the emergent genre of Black mermaid literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As ecocritic and Caribbean literature scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes<\/a>, rising sea levels caused by global warming are spurring a planetary future that is \u201cmore oceanic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many contemporary mermaid tales share an acute sense of environmental concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mermaids serve as signals, in both senses of the word \u2013 as an emergency alert and as a medium for transmitting a message about humanity\u2019s increasingly oceanic planetary future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cUndrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals<\/a>\u201d (2020), Black feminist theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs points to \u201cseveral practices of marine mammals that resonate with Black freedom movement strategies and tendencies.\u201d Racial justice and environmental activism are aligned \u2013 and, as many Black mermaid novels teach readers, inseparable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many more works I could have included in this roundup \u2013 Natasha Bowen\u2019s \u201cSkin of the Sea<\/a>\u201d (2021), which grounds its narrative in the West African myths of Mami Wata and the goddess Yemoja, or Bethany C. Morrow\u2019s \u201cA Song Below Water<\/a>\u201d (2020), a young adult novel that tells the coming-of-age story of a Black girl who becomes a mermaid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of these texts are outliers because they feature Black mermaids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, they are part of a broader cultural movement \u2013 a contemporary mermaid craze deserving of critical attention and appreciation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Pressman<\/a>, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessica Pressman, San Diego State University Mermaids have become a cultural phenomenon, and clashes about mermaids and race have spilled out into the open. This is most pointedly apparent in the backlash over Disney\u2019s much-anticipated \u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d After Disney unveiled its trailer for the film, which will be released in May 2023, social media […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":32410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293,8025],"tags":[1920,4694,453,2143,335,1740,9174,2225,6253,13207,4608,5223],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32409"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32409"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32433,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32409\/revisions\/32433"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}