Before taking this class my mermaid knowledge was not very deep. It was centralized around Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” and “Splash” with other media off-shoots and some casual knowledge of non-western mermaids like Mami Wata. I picked up on the transgressive nature of the hybrid creatures as a kid and the one world existing next to another world, internalizing the “superiority”of the human world but really thinking Sebastian had a point when he said “life under the sea is better than anything they’ve got up there”. I still agree with Sebastian, but now having dove deeper into mermaid lore I understand the world of mermaids I was shown was only a reflection of the “up there”.

Mermaid stories tell us more about humans and about how we think about our environment and the ones we don’t have access to, than about mermaids. Studying some areas of the Blue Humanities has made me reframe how I see the land I inhabit and the water that has felt like a neutral space. The language used in western contemporary discussion is still centered on our land experience with, as often as we can, categorizing nature in straight lines and championing the importance of borders. This course taught me even more how deep the roots of colonization run, not just in a cultural or political sense. It has changed how we interpret and interact with what we consider nature, making lines and borders out of convenience and cruelty.

In the last few weeks of class with reading “The Deep” it has also reframed the concept of the mermaid story and the oral traditions that kept mermaids in the conversation. Yes it was helped along with Christianity, but not in the same light and I kind of love how the things mermaids were vilified for are one of the reasons we still love them and have them representing strength and connectivity. “The Deep” is an amazing and heartbreaking story that changed how I looked not only at the stories we read in class, but the nature (or environment) of creativity. Much like how land is designated as “my space” or “your space”, creating art and stories is a collective that does not exist in a vacuum. It is a layer upon layer, a story on top of a story.