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December 21, 2022 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 5 Arts & Entertainment Jessica Pressman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, San Diego State Universi- ty via The Conversation M ermaids have be- come 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’s much-an- ticipated “The Little Mer- maid.” After Disney unveiled its trailer for the film, which will be released in May 2023, social me- dia captured the faces of gleeful young Black girls seeing Black mer- maids onscreen for the first time. Less inspiring was the racism that si- multaneously occurred, with hashtags like #Not- MyMermaid and #Make- MermaidsWhiteAgain circulating on Twitter. The fact that Disney’s portrayal of a nonwhite mermaid is controver- sial is due to 150 years of whitewashing. In a 2019 op-ed for The New York Times, writer Tracey Baptiste – whose children’s novel “Rise of the Jumbies” features a Black mermaid as the protagonist – points out how “Eurocentric sto- ries have obscured the African origins of mer- maids.” “Mermaid stories,” she writes, “have been told throughout the African continent for millenni- ums. Mermaids are not just part of the imagina- tion, either, but a part of the living culture.” Nonetheless, contem- porary culture is push- ing back. Mermaids have, in recent years, be- come 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. As a scholar of contem- porary literature and media – and as a lifelong lover of mermaids – I am fascinated by the re- cent surge of mermaid literature that remixes African folklore and con- nects the transatlantic slave trade to mermaid tales. By briefly charting this new literary movement, I hope to show how these stories are part of a larg- er current with a much longer historical tail. I also hope to put to rest the idea that Disney’s de- cision to feature a Black mermaid represents some sort of modern breakthrough. Here are three very different works of Black mermaid fiction that de- serve attention. 1. Rivers Solomon’s “The Deep” (2019) This novella is market- ed as fantasy, but it does the very real and import- ant work of opening up new ways to think about the legacy of slavery. Specifically, it pushes readers to think about mermaids as products of the Middle Passage, the harrowing stage of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved Afri- cans were transported in crowded ships across the Atlantic Ocean. The novel’s conceit is that pregnant, enslaved EYE UBIQUITOUS/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES Disney’s Black Mermaid is No Breakthrough – Just Look at the Literary Subgenre of Black Mermaid Fiction A coffin made to resemble a mermaid at a Ga funeral. The Ga people live along the southeast coast of Ghana. Africans who either jumped or were thrown overboard from slave ships gave birth under- water to babies who moved from amniotic fluid to seawater and evolved into a society of merfolk. The protagonist, Yetu, is a mermaid who serves as a repository of the traumatic stories that would be too troubling for her people to remem- ber on a daily basis. She is the historian, and once a year she delivers “The Remembrance” to her people in a ritual of shar- ing. The narrator explains, “Only the historian was allowed to remember,” because if the regular folk “know the truth of everything, they will not be able to carry on.” Once a year, the society gathers to hear the his- tory. The memories are not lost or forgotten but submerged and trans- formed, hosted by the ocean and housed in the body of a mermaid. This vibrant and read- able book can be tied to the work of liter- ary scholar Christina Sharpe, who presents the concept of “the wake” – a means of contemplating the continued effects of the Middle Passage. For Sharpe, “The wake” is “a method of encountering a past that is not past” and of endeavoring to “memorialize an event that is still ongoing.” “The Deep” also of- fers an allegory for the challenges of working in archives of African American experience – the main mermaid is, of course, the historian – and evokes the work of another important scholar in contemporary Black studies, Saidiya Hartman, who has writ- ten about the erasure of Black women from ar- chives largely compiled See MERMAID on page 7
