Tag Archives: Scribner

Reclaiming Mermaids

Posted on by
Reply

Medieval Western depictions of mermaids have been used as a means to exert control over women. “Church leaders needed a feminine, dangerous, and lustful counterpart to their upstanding men. This is where mermaids came in.” (Scribner Ch.1) Christianity sculpted femininity as harmful to faith and devastator of mankind. “Their ultimate goal remained tethered to decentering the feminine.” (Scribner Ch.1) In contradiction to this tradition, Gabrielle Tesfaye’s short film “The Water Will Carry Us Home” illustrates mermaids as bearers of life. Employing an African perspective, Tesfaye challenges Western traditional operation of mermaids by using them to continue life rather than destroy it. By re-imagining the death of those killed at the hands of White Western oppressors, “The Water Will Carry Us Home” not only reclaims History, it reclaims mermaids.

star mapping 0:53
stretched ears 0:55

A key component to presenting an African perspective is the framing of the animation with Yoruban and other African ritual. The film begins with clips of Tesfaye performing living ritual. Among the many images presented, Tesfaye is found mapping stars (0:53) and baring her stretched ears (0:55). These two images hold importance because they ground non-conformational history. African astrology dates back to ancient civilizations of Africa. Modern astrology gained its foundation from African astrology. By representing astrology in the form of star mapping, Tesfaye is recognizing contributions from early African civilizations. This confirms the fact that Africans were not lacking in educational cultivation. Contrary to what conquerors of African communities have attempted to illustrate, these cultures were not obtuse or primitive. Tesfaye’s stretched ears characterize a long-held African tradition that symbolizes wisdom and status. This tradition was not only practiced among Africans. It was a widespread custom, transcending cultures globally such as: Aztecs, Mayans, Ancient Greeks, Buddhists, among others. Westerns view stretched ears as a marker for savages. In baring her stretched ears, Tesfaye persuades her audience to recognize the cultural significance. A practice that transcends cultures globally and symbolizes knowledge and power. These first notable images not only begin to ground an African perspective, but they reinstate African history and culture as universally significant.

The Orisha, Yemaya (4:20)
The Orisha, Shango 2:48
Yemaya with a split tail 4:50

Furthering an African perspective, Tesfaye presents Yoruban Gods; or Orishas in her animation. The Orishas, Yemaya and Shango, a mother and son pair, are protecting the captured Africans. Yemaya is the Orisha of the sea, motherhood, and femininity. (4:20) She gives and protects life. Shango is the Orisha of thunder and lightning, he is a source of fertility and embodies masculinity. He uses his powers to hinder the progress of the ship. (2:48) Watching these two Gods, man and women, working together to hinder the slave ship, upends Christianity’s use for mermaids. The church’s mermaid depictions strove to reduce women in order to uplift men (as reiterated by Vaughn Scribner). Presenting the god of femininity and the god of masculinity in harmony, working together to protect their people, subverts the values of the Christian God. Unlike the reborn mermaids in the film, Yemaya is illustrated with a split tail. (4:50) The Christian church utilized a split tail to represent “feminine lust and danger” (Scribner). Illustrating the Orisha Yemaya, protector of women and renewer of life, with a split tail positively represents women’s sexuality as bearers of life. In explicitly giving a god a split tail, Tesfaye is reclaiming mermaids as a positive representation of women and their sexuality.

the intended end for pregnant women 4:06
Reformation as mermaids 4:32
The third eye 4:40

“The Water Will Carry Us Home” re-imagines the brutal end that White western oppressors intended for pregnant women aboard their ship. (4:06) She re-gifts them life twice: by rendering them as mermaids (4:32) and by telling their stories. Reimagining their savage death with the formation of mermaids reclaims History by undermining their erasure. Closer examination of the mermaids after their rebirth shows that they all have a third eye. (4:40) In Yoruban culture, the third eye is the eye of the ancestors. Restoring these women as ancestors means they spawn descendants. Their genes and their stories are passed on. The dialogue of the atrocities of the Middle Passage is silenced because it is not something that society wants in conversation. It is common to cover up cruelty, especially in the case of mainstream society being the hand of that cruelty. Recreating these women as ancestors ceases the attempted erasure at the hands of the oppressor and reclaims History.

newspaper clippings 3:05
newspaper clippings 2:59
Yemaya grabs the white flower 4:58
Tesfaye throwing flowers 5:20

Throughout the film, real newspaper clippings are used to ground the animation in history. (3:05), (2:59) Tesfaye wants the audience to bear in mind that this is a historical narrative. In addition to the newspaper clippings, Tesfaye uses her ritual framings to ground the story in authenticity. At the end of the animation the Orisha Yemaya is clutching a white flower. (4:58) Then, cut to Tesfaye, throwing white flowers into the ocean. (5:20) Showing Yemaya interacting with one of the flowers that the living Tesfaye is throwing into the ocean further establishes the re-imagining into reality. Grounding the notion that this Orisha is out there as well as the emancipated mermaids. In addition, her ritual settles the account into reality when she is within the locked door. (5:45) In the beginning the live action is shown before the story is unlocked. Afterwards, Tesfaye is locked into the narrative, (5:57) suggesting the story’s reality, grounding the narrative, reclaiming history.

The last clip of Tesfaye 5:45
The doors locking her into the story 5:57

Telling the story of the Middle Passage in a digestible way operates to preserve the ancestry of people who were intended for an unrecoverable death. Lineage is continued when those thrown overboard are re-gifted with life during their mermaid transformation. Reclaiming life in turn reclaims History and narrative. Illustrating mermaids as bearers of life rather than destroyers of it upends the church’s aim to decenter the feminine. Tesfaye presents a positive representation of female sexuality with her mother mermaids. Reclamation of mermaids through an African perspective confutes the White western oppression of erasure.

The Web of Life/ Hope

Posted on by
3

I have two distinct topics to address this week, which I wasn’t able to connect.

1

Eames’/Barnum’s mermaid specimen was exhibited in 1945, and by 1950 newspapers (according to Scribner) had moved on from wonder to scorn– publicly, officially, mermaids were a hoax. In 1959, Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, one of the most important works in Natural History since Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae 100 years earlier. I was fascinated by a paragraph from the newspaper article based on one of Barnum’s staged letters, reproduced in Penguin p. 241 (“The Mermaid“). The third paragraph provides support for the plausibility of mermaids by presenting similar examples of recently discovered “hybrid” animals; the orangutan (“ourang outang”) “linking” animals and humans; bats and flying squirrels “linking” quadrupeds and birds, the flying fish “linking” aquatic animals and birds. I wonder how much this editorial reflects actual scientific thought at the time, and how much it is a layman’s interpretation, a fundamentally distorted perception of scientific consensus, the way popular science news is even today. Either way, it seems to represent an interpretation of the diversity of life somewhere between Linnaeus’s mostly arbitrary groupings (he was far better with plants than he was with animals) and Darwin’s “tree” of life. This idea of distinct groups of animals being connected by hybrids, or “links”, brings to mind a diagram not like a tree– but a web.

2

One line of Scribner’s chapter on Mermaids in the 19th century stuck with me

“… belief in merpeople still held stock in certain areas, as did the lingering hope that these creatures might exist.” (128)

This chapter discusses the movement of mermaids in Western culture from a frontier of scientific exploration (held equal in plausibility to the recently discovered platypuses and dinosaurs) to a debunked myth, but Scribner maintains the thread of human interest in mermaids, whether they believed in them or not. This line stood out to me especially because it expresses something I believe to be true– whether we accept or argue about the existence of mermaids– or, I’d posit, the modern equivalent, extraterrestrial life– there exist many of us who have a personal emotional stake in their existence. My theory? It has something to do with us not wanting to be alone.

Week 2: Mermaids, Illuminated

Posted on by
Reply

Every other page of these first two chapters of Scribner, I found something I HAD to make a post about. My mind is going off in twenty directions already. See at end of post1 a list of things I had to leave behind, but would love for someone else to pick up, if you didn’t have any particularly juicy catches of your own.

I’m deciding to focus on all the art we saw in this chapter: the early illustrations of mermaids from illuminated manuscripts. What strikes me is actually how consistent mermaids have remained; my idea of them today is not so different from the earliest depictions.
I have always loved drawing mermaids and I know I’m not alone. Possessing a long and sinuous tail, as well as often long hair unbound by gravity, and an often nude torso, makes them a really appealing subject for an artist. There are so many opportunities for creative, fluid compositions, there is the human torso for the anatomists among us to dig into, there is the deep symbolism surrounding them as closely as water surrounds them. Now, my mermaid art has been further informed by the aesthetics of illuminated manuscripts, by the Green Men, motifs which occur ubiquitously (like mermaids) and have murky origins– but unlike mermaids, do not continue to capture modern consciousness.

My pursuits, academic, creative, spiritual, professional, exist not in a single field but in an infinitely dense lattice of braided rivers and streams, and I feel that now, in my life, the undercurrent of Mermaids– a spring which arose early in my personal history– the undercurrent of Mermaids is now spreading, slowing, flowing under everything I do, informing other rivulets.

  1. – Thank you Hahnnah for bringing up music: Where are the English and Irish Ballads about Mermaids? Surface level searching returned only Child 289 , “The Mermaid”. I liked this version on spotify.
    – p8 It not a coincidence that medieval bestiaries represented real animals as “hybrid monsters”– they were drawn based on descriptions, and those descriptions could only function by referencing things people already knew (elephants having a snake on their face, rhinocerouses plated with armor, platypus with ducks bills and beavers’ tails). It’s not possible for us to comprehend anything without points of reference, things to connect them to
    – Amphitrite- I checked etymonline, and was surprised to find that they don’t attribute “-trite” to simply “triton”. Amphitrite was a bridge, in between, double-aspect (like amphibian or amphoteric or ambivalent or ambidextrous) of Triton. Being female… gave her the power… to leave the sea??
    – p 27 “To be human is to be hybrid”. Nuff said.
    – p 32-33 Note the sculpture of jonah being swallowed by the whale– the whale itself is a hybrid!
    – Scribner kind of dangerously oversimplifies the origins of Anglo Christianity in Ireland. I recommend further reading.
    – Excellent line from Thomas Cobham quoted on p 43 “Lord created different creatures… not only for sustenance… but for instruction” <- represents two crucial elements of the human relationship to the natural world in one sentence!
    – Melusine was the first transforming mermaid? Perhaps the mermaid canon I grew up with does not have origins as recent as I thought. (See also: The Orford Merman, p 55, on mermaids in captivity)
    – A line from a short story I recently read- Mkondo by Anthony Doerr- describing a fossil of an early proto-bird, which I think reflects the narrator’s unnatural dichotomous worldviews: “What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states”. ↩︎

Why did Christianity Exploit Mermaids?

Posted on by
2

In his first chapter of Merpeople: A Human History Scribner recounts the extensive imagery of merpeople utilized by the church to gain pagan followers while it “hoped to distance itself from the sacred feminine of the pagan past.” (para. 9) The mermaid was contrived to control the narrative of female sin. In medieval times, this era of monsters, why does the Church use merpeople, specifically mermaids, to convert pagan followers and scandalize femininity? Why not dragons, giants, ogres, or unicorns among others? In this class we have established a human fascination with hybridity, and in it an ability to reflect ourselves. Therefore, this representation of sin had to contain a human element. But why not other hybrids, such as harpies? In fact, the church purposefully went out of its way to omit harpies and depict sirens as half-woman half-fish instead as Scribner indicates in paragraph 14: “Homer’s Odyssey alluded to sirens as bird-like creatures. Christian artists diverged from the original descriptions because they no longer needed a hideous siren”. Sirens or harpies, these bird women, no matter how monstrously depicted, would be too easily interpreted as ascending to heaven. In its use of mermaids, the church is able portray beautiful women exuding lust and sin. Because their environment is beneath us, because these beings technically exist below earth, they are essentially only one step away from hell. The mermaid’s environment diminishes any chance of misinterpretation of the church’s warning.

In addition, merpeople are humanity’s attempt to control an environment that is not our own. Christianity aims to be the shepherd of this planet, yet we have only dipped a toe into the oceanic expanse that covers nearly ¾ of it. By worshipping Oannes or Ea, Neptune or Poseidon, pagan religion forges a connection with the sea. And therefore, constructs a command of the deep. Christianity is expanding on this connection, and the human governance of the entirety of Earth, by insinuating the existence of merpeople.

Lastly, I am wondering where modern mermaid stories and culture would be if the church never represented mermaids as prevalently as they did. Would we have grown up watching The Little Mermaid? Would ‘mermaiding’ be a thing? Would we even be taking this class?

What Distinguishes Merpeople from Humans?

Posted on by
1

The question about what distinguishes us as humans has puzzled many scholars throughout the history of mankind. When talking about the history of merpeople, the question of what is a human and what is an animal is often worried about. In addition, mermaids and mermen are hybrids that stand between animal and human. More than even hybrid mermaids, they stand between what is normal compared to what is monstrous. This idea of human is an important matter in what we classify hybrid studies and in monster theory- human, they reveal how we define ourselves by facing the new.

The idea of what it is to be human is a question that has also been discussed throughout the ages. In the Introduction chapter of Merpeople: A Human History, author Vaughn Scribner references a historian Erica Fudge who says the following: “Reading about animals is always reading through humans … paradoxically, humans need animals in order to be human.” Scribner writes about another historian, Harriet Ritvo, who made a statement about how when establishing the definition of humanity, the individuals who make the determination matter more than the subject, based on who or what carries out the assessment. When we view the perspective of those who inhabit the combination of having human-like and inherent sea and water qualities, we are better able to understand that the myths, stories, and divisions that have been built around this group to represent deeper human concerns and issues.

Monstrous entities within Western culture such as merpeople have challenged the way human-animal boundary is perceived. While merpeople are partly human, do they contain all the essential qualities that make humans who they are? These include, reason, dignity, and even spirituality. Or, were their animal traits socially lower on the “natural order,” and due to this their human superiority is reinforced? All these questions have made people reconsider what it truly means to be a human, and the way natural order actually is supposed to work.

The study of merpeople shows how the dividing lines of what dictates humanity are continually uncertain. Our sense of human identity purely relies on what we define as human, nonhuman, civilized, or wild, and that the human domination of nature is not absolute.