Mer-beings among Us: Three Contemporary Novels

Abstract

Mer-beings have surfaced once again. Wandering through contemporary novels, they elicit not only love and desire, but ecological and political commentary on the human failure to care for each other or the seas. These three novels emerging from the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean speak to the malleability of these mythic figures who serve as ciphers for protest against oppression in its many forms. Rivers Solomon’s Afro-futuristic novella The Deep features an underwater sea community of mer-beings. Pregnant African women thrown overboard during theMiddle Passage have produced, in true speculative fashion, babies who can breathe underwater, just like in the womb. The Detroit techno-electro duo Drexciya, according to The Deep’s afterword, first conceived of ‘water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed’ (\uf644\uf648\uf64b). Drexciya’s concept and soundtrack inspired the song ‘The Deep’, written by the rap group clipping, commissioned by NPR for an Afro-futuristic episode on This American Life in \uf645\uf643\uf644\uf64a. Written then as a reverberation, a continuation and variation of what came before, Solomon’s novel builds around the concept of a fantastic world with alternating narrative viewpoints. Engaging in a full-scale exploration of gender fluidity and interspecies relationships, the author builds a framework for commentary on larger questions of environmental protection and preservation, and the role of traumatic memory in creating who we are. Self-described as ‘cyborg wannabe and a refugee of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’ on Amazon, Rivers Solomon chooses ‘they’ as the pronoun for the central protagonist in the novel’s semi-utopian world. In The Deep, finned and scaly mer-creatures sport male and female genitalia. They can mate – or at least enjoy their sexuality – across species. The oppositional and artificial frames that we typically attach to gender and sexuality fall away. With the tragic past of the slave trade an unwanted memory, the Wajinru (meaning ‘chorus of the deep’) assign a single community member the role of historian, who must remember their beginnings and ritually share them so that individuals do not have to bear the burden of continually remembering every day. This past includes the recognition that the very people who birthed them were thrown overboard by ‘split-legs’, placing this new underwater species in direct ancestral relation with those who violated their mothers. This role nearly destroys the protagonist Yetu (meaning in Kiswahili ‘ours’ or ‘us’) mentally; they must escape the group to craft an identity. Overlaying such suffering, Yetu – and later the group –must additionally recognise and come to terms with the present — namely humans searching for oil, destroying this underwater species in the process, and enacting a form of genocide reminiscent of the capture, torture, and murder of Africans centuries before. The use of mer-beings to explore interspecies relationships and history is appropriate given their blend of humans and fish, land and sea, their setting a perfect place to explore gender and sexual flexibility in an Afro-futurist frame. Mermaid figures exist throughout the world and form an important part of the survival of African beliefs in the Caribbean, United States, and Latin America. Africa’s Mami Wata or