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