Disney’s Black Mermaid is not a breakthrough – just look at the literary subgenre of black mermaid fiction

“Stories of mermaids,” he writes, “have been told across the African continent for millennia. Mermaids are not just a part of the imagination, they are a part of living culture.

However, contemporary culture is pushing back. Mermaids have, in recent years, become a popular subject in literature, cinema and fashion. In many cases, their depictions reflect contemporary culture: they appear as black and brown, sexually fluid, and harbingers of the climate crisis.

As a student of contemporary literature and media — and as a lifelong mermaid lover — I am fascinated by the recent surge in mermaid literature that remixes African folklore and connects the transatlantic slave trade to mermaid tales.

By briefly tracing 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 notion that Disney’s decision to feature a black mermaid represents something of a modern twist.

Here are three very different works of Black Siren fiction that, in my view, deserve attention.

1. “The Deep” by Rivers Solomon (2019)

This novella is marketed as fantasy, but it does the very real and important job of opening up new ways of thinking about the legacy of slavery.

Specifically, it prompts readers to think of mermaids as products of the Middle Passage, the harrowing phase of the transatlantic slave trade in which enslaved Africans were transported in crowded ships across the Atlantic Ocean.

The novel’s conceit is that pregnant and enslaved Africans who jumped or were thrown overboard by slave ships gave birth underwater to children who transitioned from amniotic fluid to seawater and evolved into a society of mermen.

The protagonist, Yetu, is a mermaid who serves as a repository for 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 “The Memory” to her people in a ritual of sharing.

As the narrator explains, “Only the historian was allowed to remember,” because if ordinary people “know the truth about everything, they won’t be able to go on.”

Once a year, the society meets to hear the story. Memories are not lost or forgotten but submerged and transformed, hosted by the ocean and hosted in the body of a mermaid.

This vibrant and readable book can be related to the work of literary scholar Christina Sharpe, who presents the concept of “wakefulness” – a means of contemplating the ongoing effects of the Middle Passage. For Sharpe, “The wake” is “a method of encountering a past that hasn’t passed” and of trying to “memorize an event that is still ongoing”.

“The Deep” also offers an allegory for the challenges of working in archives of the African-American experience – the chief siren is, of course, the historian – and evokes the work of another leading contemporary black studies scholar, Saidiya Hartman, who has written about erasing black women from archives largely compiled by white men.

2. “The Siren of the Black Shell” by Monique Roffey (2020)

This beautiful and complex work of Caribbean literature immerses itself in magical realism but is deeply rooted in today’s reality, in particular, the effects of colonialism and exploitative tourism.

Like “The Deep,” “The Mermaid of Black Conch” explores lost ancestors and imagines alternate futures. The novel highlights the continued impact of white settlement on a fictional Caribbean island called Black Conch.

One day, a mermaid named Aycayia gets caught in a fisherman’s net. She is ancient and indigenous – “red-skinned, not black, not African” – and she carries the weight of history. David, the fisherman who finds her and falls in love with her, recalls her first sighting: “She looks like a woman from long ago, like the old-time Tainos I saw in a history book at school.”

Similar to Solomon’s historian in “The Deep,” this mermaid is depicted as an embodied archive; her hair is a home for sea creatures and her face is a history book.

However, Roffey’s mermaid is an anomaly, singular and isolated, not a member of a tribe. The ocean keeps this ancient beast safe, hiding it from the destructive forces of Western capitalism, embodied in the father-son duo of American tourists looking to capture and capitalize on what they see as an aquatic trophy.

3. “Laguna” by Nnedi Okorafor (2014)

“A star falls from the sky. A woman rises from the sea. The world will never be the same again.” The publisher’s 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 non-human, that stretches across Nigeria.

The arrival of the aliens off Lagos transforms the area and the people, miraculously remedying centuries of oceanic destruction caused by industrial and colonial exploitation. He also turns Adaora, a marine biologist involved in a bad marriage, into a mermaid.

“Laguna” is much more than an allegory of ecological repair. But I want to highlight how the literature explores the global ecological crisis and, in particular, how ecocriticism plays a key role in the emerging genre of black mermaid literature.

As ecocritic and Caribbean literature scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes, sea level rise caused by global warming is spurring a planetary future that is “more oceanic.”

Many contemporary mermaid tales share a keen sense of concern for the environment.

Sirens serve as beacons, in both senses of the word: as an emergency alert and as a means to convey a message about humanity’s increasingly oceanic planetary future.

In “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals” (2020), black feminist theorist Alexis Pauline Gumbs points to “several marine mammal practices that resonate with the strategies and trends of the black freedom movement.” Racial justice and environmental activism are aligned and, as many Black mermaid novels teach readers, inseparable.

There are many other works that I could have included in this roundup: Natasha Bowen’s “Skin of the Sea” (2021), which grounds her storytelling on the West African myths of Mami Wata and the goddess Yemoja, or “A Song” by Bethany C. Morrow Below Water” (2020), a young adult novel that tells the coming-of-age story of a black girl who becomes a mermaid.

None of these texts are outliers because they feature black sirens.

Instead, they are part of a larger cultural movement: a contemporary craze for mermaids that deserves critical attention and appreciation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/disneys-black-mermaid-is-no-breakthrough-just-look-at-the-literary-subgenre-of-black-mermaid-fiction-194435.