The Law Concerning Mermaids — Kei Miller

There was once a law concerning mermaids. My friend thinks it a wondrous thing — that the British Empire was so thorough it had invented a law for everything. And in this law it was decreed: were any to be found in their usual spots, showing off like dolphins, sunbathing on rocks — they would no longer belong to themselves. And maybe this is the problem with empires: how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids — mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful. The law concerning mermaids only caused mermaids to pass a law concerning man: that they would never again cross our boundaries of sand; never again lift their torsos up from the surf; never again wave at sailors, salt dripping from their curls; would never again enter our dry and stifling world.

Miller crosses many threads in this short prose poem. Imperialism favors uniformity. In the first half of this poem, he sets up Mermaids as a symbol of the other among us; the human/nature which western colonial empires have sought to distance, separate, draw boundaries between, and ultimately, control, exploit. In the second half of the poem, he theorizes a form of resistance; if the surface of the sea has been drawn as a boundary between the man and the nonhuman world– mermaids can relinquish their terrestrial halves and escape the imperialist machine. The implications of this twenty first century poem about a (possibly fictional) centuries-old law are critical; now that human colonization and extraction has moved below the sea surface, instead of merely occurring on top of it, is there any place on earth where the “mermaid”– the other among us– can retreat to?