Crossing Merfolk, the Human, and the

Anthropocene in Nalo Hopkinson’s

The New Moon’s Arms and
Rivers Solomon’s The Deep
Jalondra A. Davis

F rom Syrian goddesses to Disney princesses, mermaids are mutable

figures capable of carrying a multitude of meanings. In Scaled for Success: The
Internationalization of the Mermaid, Philip Hayward argues that the mermaid is
uniquely polyvalent, that it embodies “the potential for multiple associations
and combinations of elements that accrue to a text and/or cultural entity” (3).
In our current moment of accelerating climate crisis, one meaning that the
water-dwelling, hybrid mermaid increasingly and inevitably gestures toward
is a critique of the human—and of humans’ impact on the natural world.
Though there are many ways that the mermaid possibly unsettles the human,
this unsettling is inhibited by mermaid studies’ almost exclusive focus on white
mermaids within European folklore and Western popular culture. My aim in
this paper is to specifically use Black portrayals of the mermaid to explore
critical connections between the mermaid, the human, and the racializing
reordering of the human and natural world under European conquest and
modernity.
Mermaids and water-dwelling beings have a long, rich tradition within
African diasporic culture. Ras Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures and the South
Carolina Lowcountry undertakes a rigorous study of West and Central African
nature spirits, called simbi, some of whom come to be described as mermaids
in Lowcountry folklore (251). Ytasha Womack’s Afrofuturism, The World of
Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture and Nettrice Gaskins’s “Mami Wata Remixed:
The Mermaid in Contemporary African-American Culture” both construct
rich genealogies of a Black aquatic imaginary. These studies include feminine
water deities that take mermaid form, Black female performers’ callouts to
mermaids and water goddesses, and the mythos of nineties electronic duo
Drexciya, who imagined an aquatic civilization founded by descendants of
captive Africans cast into the sea (Gaskins 195-204; Womack 80-96). My
analysis takes the latter narrative—the proposal that African people cast
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350 · Jalondra A. Davis

overboard during the Middle Passage transformed into oceanic beings—as its
point of departure. This idea appears in many texts besides the sonic fiction of
Drexciya, and it should be theorized as a recurring tradition in Black culture
(Davis, “Crossing Merfolk”). I call this narrative “crossing merfolk,” following
M. Jacqui Alexander’s use of “the Crossing” to describe both “the enforced
Atlantic Crossing of millions of Africans that serviced from the fifteenth
century through the twentieth the consolidation of British, French, Spanish,
and Dutch empires” (2) and “the crossroads, the space of convergence and
endless possibility” (8). Focusing my analysis on Nalo Hopkinson’s 2004 novel
The New Moon’s Arms and Rivers Solomon’s 2019 novel The Deep, I argue
that crossing merfolk narratives enhance the mermaid figure’s potential to
disrupt the hierarchical and ecologically disastrous category of the human.
By anchoring mermaid lore within the transatlantic slave trade as it launches
modernity and global racial capitalism, crossing merfolk narratives interrupt
the human. In doing so, these narratives reveal the imbrication of white
supremacist and environmental violence and embody alternative forms of
being.
Several scholars have proposed the mermaid as a figure that disrupts
Western humanism. In Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early
Modern England, Tara Pedersen states that “The notion of a ‘whole human’
who exists in distinct hierarchical separation from the animal world is arguably
upset by competing popular images such as that of the mermaid” (26-27).
In From Amazons to Zombies: Monsters in Latin America, Penelope Braham
argues that “the siren’s hybridity and mutability embody resistance to modern
science and statehood, portending unfamiliar paradigms for human enterprise
and understanding” (89). And Peter Mortensen insists in “‘Half Fish, Half
Woman’: Annette Kellerman, Mermaids, and Eco-Aquatic Revisioning” that
mermaid fictions “specifically can trouble anthropocentrism, which situates
humanity outside (and above) the nonhuman biosphere, and geocentrism,
which particularly disavows humanity’s vital interdependence with aquatic
creatures and oceanic environments” (201-02). These studies signal the
mermaid’s potential challenge to the human, but they pay little attention
to the human itself as a raced, gendered, and classed construct produced
through conquest and racial chattel slavery. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
points out, “A critique of anthropocentricism is not necessarily a critique
of liberal humanism…Many critics of anthropocentricism have mistakenly
perceived that the problem of our time is anthropocentricism rather than a
failed praxis of being” (15). Such an analysis of the human, as not a given
but a “failed praxis of being,” is unavoidable in looking at crossing merfolk
narratives, which locate the origin of mermaids in the stratified making of
the human. According to critical humanist Sylvia Wynter, “Man”—white,
straight, male, able-bodied, propertied, rational, individual, and sovereign—is

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an overrepresentation of the human, the only genre within a diverse array

of humans validated and entitled to power in the emerging colonial/modern
world, whose overrepresentation (in comparison to other humans) is key to
“all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate
change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources” (260-61).
Building upon Wynter’s claim that there are indeed other genres of the
human, my article “Power and Vulnerability: Black Girl’s Magic in Black
Women’s Science Fiction” proposed the term “otherhuman” to describe the
coexisting forms of knowledge production (such as Indigenous cosmologies)
suppressed by Western coloniality/modernity (14). I expand that formulation
here to think about how Western suppression of otherhuman forms of
knowledge also upset the relationalities between people, animals, and natural
elements that provide for more sustainable ways of life. In interrupting the
human, crossing merfolk narratives highlight the human itself as not a static
being but as a violent process, which intertwined intra-human and human-
nonhuman hierarchies. Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms and Rivers
Solomon’s The Deep depict disruptions of the violence of humanism, clearing
space for otherhuman ways of being and doing in both human communities
and the natural world.
Published in 2007, Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms is set in a
fictional Caribbean island called Cayaba. Cayaba reflects the neocolonial
conditions of many Caribbean locales, in that the very pleasures marketed by
its tourism industry (beautiful tropical beaches, waters, and wildlife) are under
threat by foreign resource exploitation. The protagonist of the novel, a woman
named Calamity Lambkin, discovers an injured child stranded on the beach
and takes responsibility for him as she struggles with aging, family conflicts, and
the ongoing environmental threats to Cayaba. She eventually discovers that
the child she has fostered is from a local community of shapeshifting aquatic
people. The “sea people,” as Cayabans call them, are the either evolved or
magically transformed descendants of Africans aboard a slavers vessel that
was wrecked off the coast of the island. Solomon’s The Deep similarly depicts
the Middle Passage as the source for a new form of human hybrid aquatic life.
The novel builds upon the worldbuilding of nineties electronic duo Drexciya
and the hip-hop group clipping’s homage song to the duo, also entitled
“The Deep.” The Wajinru merpeople of The Deep evolve from the wombs
of pregnant African women who were cast overboard. Most of the Wajinru
cannot form long-term memories. Yetu, as historian of the Wajinru, holds all
of the generations’ memories, which she briefly imparts to the community in
a seasonal Remembrance ceremony. Yetu, who is neurodiverse, is tormented
by the traumatic memories of the Crossing. Her decision to escape rather than
take back the memories during a Remembrance ceremony incurs violent storms

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that suggest the effects of climate change, threatening the demise of both the
Wajinru people and the human world. My analysis focuses on how each of
these novels disrupts two facets of Western humanism: (1) epistemologies that
disregard otherhuman ways of knowing in favor of Western rationalism and
science, and (2) concepts of the normative and desirable body that maintain
colonial hierarchies and perpetuate a racialized human-animal divide. I then
briefly analyze how these disruptions play out in the novels’ representation of
crossing merfolk and human communities’ experiences of and resistance to the
Anthropocene.

Interrupting Human Epistemology: Origins of Crossing Merfolk

Crossing merfolk narratives upend the ontological violence of Western
humanism, which elevates rationalism and empirical science above other
ways of knowing. Pedersen argues that “the mermaid asks us to confront
the mechanisms of knowledge production that bring her into focus and to
interrogate the very processes of seeing and knowing” (9). Crossing merfolk
narratives heighten this confrontation of “the very processes of seeing
and knowing” through origin stories that incorporate both “evolutionary
possibility” and otherhuman cosmology (Alonso 106). The New Moon’s Arms
builds on the understanding that species can evolve over time to adjust to their
environments, but it uses memory, oral culture, and myth to both corroborate
and unsettle Western scientific certainty. Following her father’s funeral,
Calamity Lambkin finds a badly injured toddler with bluish-brown skin and
webbed feet on the beach. She immediately recalls almost drowning as a child
while playing and swimming with a similar little girl on the beach (Hopkinson
78). Along with the oral history of a slavers’ ship shipwrecked off the coast
of the island and legends of a blue devil baby that grows into a monster that
drags people under the water, Calamity’s childhood memory “echoes and
extends other stories of jumping and/or drownings in the novel” (Wisker 82).
Attempting to convince her friend Evelyn to contemplate the possibility that
the child, whom she names Agway, is a merchild, Calamity brings up a series
of stories involving creatures and adapted humans living in the ocean,

“It’s interesting, you don’t find, that we have all these stories about devils
living in the sea?”
She shrugged. “Sea kill plenty people in the history of Cayaba. It make sense
the devil would live in the sea.”
Shit, how to get her to think this through? “You know the legend about
Captain Carter?”
“Yes. Such a beautiful love story.”
“I guess. Except the lovers throw themselves into the water and die.”

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She kissed her teeth. “You have to have a little romance, man. The story
says they transformed.”
“They adapted to living in the sea.” (Hopkinson 134)

It is only after Calamity has pushed Evelyn to recall these oceanic oral
narratives that Evelyn becomes willing to consider that Agway may be one
of the island’s fabled sea people, that his bodily differences are evolutionary
adaptations to aquatic life. The alternative knowledge source of oral culture
and the possibilities of evolution coalesce to form an imaginative rationality
that overturns the dominant rationality that transatlantic voyages can only
have ended in death for African people—either literal death in the ocean or
the social death of enslavement (Alonso 108; Kaplan 100).
Throughout the novel Hopkinson also presents an alternative, supernatural
origin for her crossing merfolk: that they were transformed by the Igbo goddess
Uhamiri into seals that can take human form (316). Uhamiri is associated
with Mami Wata, which refers to both a singular divinity and a group of water
spirits that syncretize Indigenous West and Central African water spirits with
“foreign” influences that include Indian snake charmers and European mermaid
lore (Chuks and Makwudo 1; Osinubi 4-5). That the sea people are initially
transformed into seals and can shed their sealskins for their more human forms
evokes the selkie, Northern European folkloric figures who live in the ocean as
seals and on land as beautiful women (Le Couteur 66). Hopkinson’s fluid and
playful intersection of Mami Wata, mermaid, and selkie lore echoes her blend
of African-derived religion, oral culture, and evolutionary science. She does
not attempt to set one authoritative account or resolve the tensions inherent
between these biological and magical origins for the crossing merfolk. The
coexistence of multiple narratives allows for coexistence of multiple realities
and epistemologies—rationality is neither surrendered as beyond Black
capacity nor privileged over the otherhuman ways of knowing represented by
orality, memory, and African cosmology.
Unlike the origin story in The New Moon’s Arms, in which the crossing
merfolk are transformed in response to a prayer, The Deep, inspired by
Black, electronic group Drexciya, depicts a process of spontaneous uterine
mutation. In the liner notes to Drexciya’s 1997 compilation album The Quest,
an “Unknown Writer” extrapolates from evidence of amphibious features
in developing fetuses and from aquatic survival instincts of newborn babies
to propose the possibility that the babies in the wombs of enslaved African
women survived (Eshun 143). Solomon’s novel fleshes out this idea as it
depicts the watery, postmortem births of a new species:

Then the surface dweller’s legs begin to splay apart, and we come under it.
We see it: the head. Our eyes widen, struck. It is not a two-legs head. There

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are fins at the center of its back, on its sides, and at its front. Hairless. And
darker than any land creature...What magic had intervened to transform the
pup in the womb? Was it the ocean itself, the progenitur of all life? Did the
zoti aleyu have a god after all? (Solomon 60)

While Solomon’s adaptation of this Drexciyan myth shares its mystery

and seemingly de-religious context, it also opens the door to a spiritual
explanation for the origins of the Wajinru. While The Deep does not explicitly
invoke specific African cosmologies, it hints at these very cosmologies with
the question, “Was it the ocean itself?” In African diasporic syncretic religions
such as Lucumí and Vodou, the orisha or lwa (intermediary deities or spirits
that are manifestations of a supreme God or universal life force) are associated
with natural elements such as wind and bodies of water (Alexander 303;
Brown 245). Some practitioners of these religions insist that these spirits and
the Catholic saints associated with them are personifications, faces for the
elemental force with which devotees seek communion (Hale 122). Therefore,
the “ocean itself” could refer to Yemayá, Yoruba orisha of the ocean, or Mami
Wata. Both Yemayá and Mami Wata, not coincidentally, are frequently
depicted in mermaid form (Brown 263-73; Drewal 60-62). That the “ocean
itself” is responsible for the birth of the mermaids in The Deep echoes the
divine birth of the mermaids in The New Moon’s Arms at the hands of Uhamiri
and refuses the dominance of Western science over other ways of knowing.

Interrupting Human Form: The Crossing Merfolk’s Body

Crossing merfolk narratives interrupt the human through disrupting not only
the epistemologies of Western humanism but also the body of the human.
Crossing merfolk in these two novels complicate the more typical mermaid’s
relationship to ideal human form. In Making a Splash: Mermaids (and Mermen)
in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media, Philip Hayward describes
mermaids as “relatively straightforward compound figures comprising the
upper half of a female human and the lower half of a fish” (7). While the
absent genitalia and the presence of a phallus (through her tail) permit the
mermaid to be read as a queer figure, she also has features—breasts and long
flowing hair—that reassert her desirability within the heterosexual male gaze
(14-15). The tail withholds, or at least obscures, the possibility of reproductive
sex, producing ongoing mystery and allure. These physical attributes, along
with the predominance of Western narratives depicting mermaids in liaisons
with human men, support Hayward’s claim that “the potency of the mermaid
can be identified as deriving, in substantial part, from aspects of masculine
heterosexual desire (10). The typical mermaid reinforces androcentric
hierarchies in a fetishization of ideal yet unattainable femininity.

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Crossing merfolk narratives often remove this emphasis upon masculine

heterosexual desire and unsettle human hierarchies. These revisions exemplify
Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s concept of “double estrangement,” through which
Sanchez-Taylor intersects Darko Suvin’s definition of cognitive estrangement
and W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness. Sanchez-Taylor
combines Suvin’s argument that the depiction of alternative realities within sf
can serve to defamiliarize and thus raise critiques of “real world” structures and
systems with W. E. B. Du Bois’s theorization of the sense of racial estrangement
and alienation experienced by Black people in a white supremacist society.
According to Sanchez-Taylor,

Sf authors of color present the unfamiliar as familiar to estrange their

readers, but I argue that they also frequently include critiques of sf by
altering established sf tropes…For peoples who are more likely to identify
with the alien “other” in traditional sf more than a white human narrator,
sf becomes a space to where authors of color (who are typically fans of the
genre themselves) can employ recognizable aspects of sf—tropes like the
alien, time travel, and immortality—yet also re-work these tropes to make
room for peoples of color. (7).

Nalo Hopkinson and Rivers Solomon enact double estrangement through

their reworking of the mermaid trope. Reading these novels, we are estranged
from mimetic reality through the fantastic figure of the mermaid, but we
are also estranged from how this figure typically appears. As the mermaid so
reliably conjures associations of sexuality, romance, and whimsy, its rewriting
from within Black experience unsettles such associations by centering
different bodies. Double estrangement makes the mermaid unfamiliar again
and heightens its ability to defamiliarize and critique the human. The bodily
experiences of the crossing merfolk contest interlocking forms of violence and
subordination, exemplifying how “black women’s speculative fiction highlights
the mutual constitution of (dis)ability, race, and gender and its impact on so
many of us in often oppressive and violent ways” (Schalk 83).
Of the two novels, Nalo Hopkinson’s merfolk depart the most from
the compound mermaid form. They take either aquatically adapted but
recognizably human form or, when they have their sealskins, seal form. But
unlike the Northern European selkie myths of white-skinned, raven-haired
women, Hopkinson’s selkies are, as Liza Anatol points out, rotund with brown,
faintly blue-tinged skin, and naturally occurring dreadlocks. They appear “in
stark contrast to the images marketed towards predominantly white tourists
and absorbed by the islanders themselves” (204). The mermaid is a major
marketing tool of Cayaba’s tourism industry:

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At the corner of each picture was a mermaid, exotically brown but not too
dark. No obvious negroes in Cayaba Tourist Board publicity, unless they were
dressed as smiling servers. The fish woman sported the kind of long, flowing
hair that most black women had to buy in a bottle of straightening solution.
They had shells covering their teacup breasts. I would love to see the shell
big enough to hide one of my bubbies (Hopkinson 222).

This passage provides a critique of colonial racialized and gendered

hierarchies. Tourism industries often continue the logics of conquest,
marketing native bodies as items of consumption along with the pristine
natural environment and imaginaries of the local culture (Sheller 13, 23).
In the same scene, Calamity protests the constant blaring of reggae rather
than an actual local music genre, tumba. Like the reggae music that projects
a vaguely Caribbean fantasy onto the specific cultural locale of Cayaba, the
mermaid’s silky locks of hair and seashell bras are importations that enable
Western consumption of a flattened, sanitized exotic. Lynda H. Schneekloth’s
“The Frontier Is Our Home” helps to contextualize Cayaba’s mermaid
billboards’ exploitative promotional strategy. Drawing connections between
colonial print cultures and contemporary representations of urban centers,
Schneekloth examines the gendered imagery of sixteenth-century colonizers’
writings and engravings, in which young, scantily clad, and fair-haired Native
maidens are aligned with the lush landscapes that they occupy, supposedly
welcoming “the white male arrivals with open arms and loving kindness” (211).
By approximating some aspects of whiteness through their flowing hair and
“exotically brown” skin, the billboard mermaids hearken back to the colonial
imagery that Schneekloth describes. These “not-too-dark” mermaids also bear
resemblance to the young women performers of the Weeki Wachee Springs
mermaid show in Florida, whose whiteness has for generations been essential
to the “family-safe yet chastely erotic spectacle” of young women swimming,
dancing, and sometimes drinking Cokes and eating bananas underwater
(Kokai 72-73). Through the portrayal of racially ambiguous mermaids, the
Cayaban tourism billboards intersect the exploitation of Indigenous women’s
bodies in narratives of conquest with that of white, idealized femininity within
mass culture. The femininity of most mermaid imagery coincides with the
feminization of colonial discourse and tourist propaganda. Therefore, it is
probably intentional that Hopkinson, in alignment with the text’s anticolonial
critique, makes the central mermaid figure of the novel not a sexualized young
woman but a toddler boy. Rather than the enticing, exotic feminine figure to
be subdued and conquered, Agway is a small child that requires care.
The merboy Agway departs from the common depiction of the mermaid
as an idealized white (or racially ambiguous) femininity. María Alonso argues
that The New Moon’s Arms’s construction of merfolk as marine-adapted

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humans embodies a “diasporic marvelous realism” in which “speculation

replaces magic” (106). They do not have fish tails, though their webbed feet
and the sticky patches inside their knees that hold their legs together to
swim mimic the look and action of a mermaid’s tail. Small adaptations allow
the merfolk to survive in the water: mammalian diving reflex, lots of body
fat to protect from cold, broad chests to allow larger lung capacity, second
eyelids, and webbed extremities (Hopkinson 134-35). The sea people are
human enough that Agway’s anatomical irregularities do not raise substantial
alarm in the hospital, and he is able to live on land. Yet his body renders him
vulnerable to the systems, such as social services and medicine, that attempt
to “correct” difference. In fact, we can read Agway as (dis)abled. Sami Schalk,
also drawing on the work of Alison Kafer, who resists the hard distinction
between disability and impairment, uses (dis)ability rather than disability
to distinguish between disability and the larger social system of which one’s
specific impairment or challenge is only one part (Kafer; Schalk). Agway is
(dis)abled by his displacement from a social system and physical environment
(the community of sea people and the ocean) to another (the postcolonial
human world), which is unable to accommodate the aquatic survivals read
by Calamity and Evelyn as deformities. He waddles on land because of the
sticky skin patches on his inner legs that enable faster swimming in the sea.
Though Calamity knows, or at least suspects, that Agway is a merchild, she
allows her doctor friend Evelyn to perform a surgery to remove the skin
patches (Hopkinson 280), evoking science fiction narratives that often rely on
technological cures to erase disability.
Agway’s skin surgery brings to mind Cynthia Barounis’s analysis of disabled
swimmer Nadya Vesey’s mermaid performance, “To become human, in this
context, is to overcome one’s disability, passing as ‘normal’ among nondisabled
(in this case, land dwelling) society” (197). To pass as normal has both ableist
and white supremacist connotations. Anatol claims that some of Calamity’s
treatment of Agway—cutting the shells and dreadlocks from his hair, assuming
that his language is gibberish, and failing to learn his real name—perpetuates
“cultural imperialism” (205). Along with the cultural assaults of renaming
Agway and cutting his hair, the skin surgery is aggression in the guise of
care. This distorted care echoes the paternalistic abuse that disabled, Black,
Indigenous, and people of color communities have suffered at the hands
of social systems that try to force bodily conformity to Eurocentric norms.
However well-meaning, Evelyn and Calamity’s actions harm the merboy and
compromise his ability to survive in the water, “extending the violence of
‘universal humanity’” (Jackson 29).
Rivers Solomon’s merfolk in The Deep also depart from typical representation
of Western mermaids and trouble the hierarchies embedded in those more
popular representations. Though the novel mentions some resemblance to

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the Wajinru’s human ancestors, most textual details reveal alien, amphibious
creatures dramatically different from the beautiful, long-haired half-women
of myth and billboards. The Wajinru are described as hairless, scaled, and
boneless (Solomon 42), with gills and fins (Solomon 2). Unlike many
mermaids in popular culture representation and The New Moon’s Arms’s
shapeshifting seal people, they are not what Hayward defines in Making a
Splash as “transformational mermaids”; they cannot become human (188). An
African woman named Waj, who teaches the merfolk human language and
culture and whom they see as a mother of their “civilization,” initially names
them zoti aleyu, “strange fish,” demonstrating that she perceives them as more
fishlike than human (Solomon 48). A striking image of their difference comes
when Yetu tries to ward off the humans who discover her stranded in a tide
pool: “She settled for a scream, opening her mouth wide, showing rows of
sharp, long teeth, narrow and overlapping. Her eyes and nose disappeared
as her mouth expanded, her face replaced with a black, endless pit guarded
by fangs” (Solomon 72). The disappearance of Yetu’s semihuman face into a
“black, endless pit” with rows of fangs asserts her otherness and animality. Her
somewhat human features disappear completely into this scream, revealing
the porousness of the arbitrary boundaries between human and Other. The
image of a Black woman’s face disappearing into rows of fangs invokes the
ways in which Black femininity has been read as monstrous (Brooks 25-27).
Associations of Black femininity with monstrosity have inhibited Black
feminist studies’ critical explorations of monstrosity’s potential to unsettle
the logics of Western humanism. I explore this potential in my earlier work,
“Butler’s Monsters: The Grotesque and the Black Communal Body in Octavia
Butler’s Dawn”:

If a particularly black conception of humanity developed through the

attempts of black people to admit themselves to the category of human,
this conception has sought restoration of the integrity: bodily, familial, and
otherwise, excavated by enslavement and racial genocide. Therefore, a
black feminist grotesque…might resist the tropes of healing, reconciliation,
wholeness, reveling in the uneasy but radical space of abjection, porousness,
and non-closing. (310)

I read Yetu’s scream through a Black feminist grotesque to reclaim the

mermaid as monstrous and the monstrous as a productive disruption of the
human. While the mermaid is commonly analyzed within monster studies
because of its otherness and aberration of boundaries, it sits there somewhat
uneasily due to its common depiction within norms of feminine whimsy
and desirability. If the mermaid is dangerous, that danger is usually in her
sexual allure and mesmerizing song, locating her within a moral discourse as

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a temptation to be resisted (Barounis 190). De-emphasizing feminine allure

and sexuality, Solomon reinserts the mermaid into a family of unsettling,
fearsome monsters, revels in her porousness, and enhances her potential for
“challenging the integrity of existing orders and systems of authority” (Braham
From Amazons to Zombies 12). Aware of the violence of two-legs both to
present-day Wajinru and their human ancestors, Yetu uses her monstrosity as
self-protection. She disappears her human face to ward off the likelihood of
human violence. This calls into question who—humans or monsters—are the
actual source of justifiable terror.
Yetu’s understanding of her bodily difference from humans extends to her
sense of an ontological difference between her and humans. When talking to
Suka, a farmer and one of the humans who cares for her as she is stranded in
the tide pool, she bristles at his suggestion that she is not an animal, but only
“animal-ish,”

Two-legs had specific ways of classifying things that Yetu didn’t like...They
organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with
everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled
the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said themselves—
existing alongside it. (Solomon 84)

In this passage, Yetu critiques a major facet of Western modernity, an obsession

with taxonomy and an androcentric biological and philosophical worldview
“in which humans exist as the central and highest forms of life” (Hejnol G87).
Yet all humans were not ranked equally within this Chain of Being, as Zakiyyah
Iman Jackson points out in her theorization of how concepts of blackness and
animality developed in tandem through modernity. Interestingly, African
peoples and mermaids functioned somewhat similarly in nineteenth-century
scientific thought as alleged missing links between animal ancestors and
modern humans. Scientists examining the Feejee mermaid—P. T. Barnum’s
infamous hoax that marketed the combined skeletons of a monkey and a
large fish as a mermaid corpse—saw similarities between this “mermaid”
specimen and African people, identifying “many of the characteristics of
a human being belonging to “the Negro type” at an intercepted stage of
development” (Brink-Roby 29). The ease with which the mermaid and the
African were linked in the description of the forged Feejee mermaid speaks to
the intersection of emerging theories of race with uses of mythological hybrids
to visualize shifting scientific paradigms. As Jackson claims, “Africa was seen
as a land of new monsters” (6).
Just as The Deep asserts the monstrosity of the mermaid as a critique of
human violence, it claims the animality of the mermaid as a critique of the
Chain of Being. Yetu understands the hierarchical taxonomy that informs

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Suka’s perspective on agriculture, in which the land is an inert object to

be controlled, and his attempt to understand Yetu as “only animal-ish”
(Solomon 84). Her assertion, “I am animal” is an expression not only of
her physical difference from two-legs but of how that divergence produces
a differing “ecological relationality” (Frazier 67). “I am animal” is a radical
claim, the reading of which requires moving beyond a justified hesitancy in
Black studies to engage blackness in intersection with animality (Frazier 54).
Yetu is an embodiment of this fraught intersection, a location which enables
a “vision of life that is profoundly ecological, one that takes place in a social
field made up of dynamic relationships not predicated solely on domination or
exploitation” (Bennett 7). Her incredulity that humans presume to “rule the
land” rather than “exist alongside it” proposes existing alongside the land as
an otherhuman, ecological relationality.

Crossing Merfolk and the Anthropocene

The failure of Western ontology to “exist alongside the land” leads directly to
systems that destroy the livability of the land for plant, animal, and human life.
The human-mermaid interactions in both novels illustrate how environmental
violence threatens both the sea-people and their two-leg cousins, particularly
those already marginalized within the hierarchies of the human. In The New
Moon’s Arms, both the survival of the merfolk and that of the people of Cayaba
are threatened by the encroachment of salt plants that promise employment
to Cayaba’s people, sabotaging their ability to be self-sustaining and poisoning
the waters (Hopkinson 250). This conflict over the salt plants exemplifies the
effects of the Anthropocene, our current geological epoch in which human
activity is the largest force in environmental change (Tsing et al. G11). Black,
Indigenous, anticolonial, and feminist scholars intervene in the growing
literature on the Anthropocene, pointing out that humans’ role in the physical
change of the planet is not equally shared in culpability or benefits. Jane Caputi
argues in the strongest possible terms that “the Man as well as the Human in
the proposed new geological age—the Anthropocene (“Age of Man” or “Age
of Humans”)—does not signify everyone of our species. The Man behind the
Anthropocene is the motherfucker in the word’s original and worst sense (the
most vicious of oppressors and exploiters)” (3).
According to Tsing et al., “Ghosts remind us that we live in an
impossible present—a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat of
extinction. Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into
gardens of Progress” (G6). These authors’ attention to the ghostliness of the
Anthropocene align with The New Moon’s Arms’s depiction of “a shrinking
small world of pollution, takeovers, erasure, and absence” (Wisker 79).
Throughout the novel, oral culture and casual conversation call up hauntings
both of drowned Africans from sunken slaver ships and of disappearing species

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 Crossing Merfolk, the Human, and the Anthropocene · 361

of bats, seals, and fish whose habitats and populations are destroyed by the
hotels and salt plants. This linking of human and ecologies’ ghosts connects
these novels to environmental justice movements, which, as T. V. Reed claims,
“fully understand that the fate of the other-than-human world and the fate
of human beings are inextricably linked, and that the degradation of certain
‘primitive’ peoples and certain ‘underdeveloped’ places go hand in hand”
(252). The same large-scale economic powers that drive small fisheries and
salt farmers out of business also pollute the island and threaten both Cayaban
people and the sea life’s health. Calamity is initially skeptical and disinterested
in her daughter’s involvement in projects to support small-scale, sustainable
industries, reduce Cayabans’ dependence on the tourism industry, and stop
the pollution of the region (Hopkinson 198). This skepticism shifts once
Calamity is moved by her feelings of kinship to the sea people:

“Bittern. That’s what get leave behind when you manufacture salt. One
pound salt give you a pound of bittern. And bittern in high levels is toxic.
Gilmore Saline supposed to dilute in three hundred to one with water and
pipe it way out to sea. We think they releasing it strong just so into the waters
around Cayaba.”
“Oh, shit.” The water the sea people lived in. (Hopkinson 250)

Calamity is alarmed by the information about the bittern because of its

threat to Agway and his ocean family. This connection produces what Grace
Dillon calls an Indigenous scientific literacy, a scientific practice that is
informed by a “sense of spiritual interconnectedness among humans, plants,
and animals” (26). Indigenous scientific literacy suggests that “sustainability
is about maintaining the spiritual welfare of natural resources rather than
simply planning their exploitation efficiently so that humans do not run out of
necessary commodities” (Dillon 26). The New Moon’s Arms demonstrates how
the recovery of ancestral knowledge, of Indigenous scientific literacy, requires
healing of a severed relationship to the natural world. Calamity’s original
knowledge of the sea people, provided through her mother and meeting a
little sea girl as a child, is lost in her adulthood, mimicking the generational
alienation from ancestral knowledge. Her relationship with Agway (whose
name recalls Agwe, Voudon lwa of the sea) restores her connection to the
ocean. After returning Agway to his people, Calamity joins her daughter in
the protests against the salt plants. A flyer for a protest left in the zoo’s seal
enclosure suggests that the merfolk themselves (who sometimes visit the
enclosure in seal form) participate (Hopkinson 321). Therefore, Calamity’s
involvement in the movement against the salt plants signifies not only a
moment of reconciliation in the troubled relationship between her and her
daughter but also a moment of reconciliation between persons across the

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362 · Jalondra A. Davis

human-animal boundary. The sea people and the local Cayaban people
stand together against big industry in defense of their lives. Rather than the
possessive conservationism that underlies mainstream environmentalism,
Calamity’s new desire to protect the ocean is motivated by the knowledge that
she has kin in the ocean. Such relationalities, as Chelsea Frazier describes,
“trouble ecology” by “challeng[ing] the (dis)connections between human and
non- human entities, and initiat[ing] alternative notions of environmental/
ecological ethics” (46).
As Persephone Braham describes in “Song of the Sirenas: Mermaids in
Latin America and the Caribbean,” mermaid lore frequently depicts mermaids
or sirens as culpable for shipwrecks and human destruction, either through
their mesmerizing songs or ability to cause storms (150-51). Rivers Solomon
plays upon this mermaid lore but rewrites it within Black Atlantic history. In
The Deep it is the justifiable grief of crossing merfolk rather than the casual
mischief of the Western mermaid that causes human destruction. This shift of
the mermaid’s destructive power moves it away from a misogynist suspicion of
femininity to a linking of racial chattel slavery with the Anthropocene. Once
the Wajinru discover their relationship to those imprisoned on enslavers’ ships,
they also discover their power over the water: “We and the other zoti aleyu
now present gathered together to trouble the waters, to sink the ship. This
did not come about by plan, but by anguish. As all of us wept and raged, we
noticed the way that our fury made the water pulse and rise” (Solomon 62). In
hip-hop group clipping’s song “The Deep,” the merfolk launch a cataclysmic
tidal wave after humans attack their seafloor home while drilling for oil.
Solomon’s The Deep references this event, not as the central narrative of the
novel but through Yetu’s collective memory: “She saw the two-legs drowning,
but not just in water, on land, too. Water erupted from the sea and flowed onto
the surface…The drownings had been part of the Tidal Wars—that was the
name—a conflict between wajinru and two-legs” (73).
The memory of the Tidal Wars foreshadows and intercuts the storms
caused by the frenzied energy of the Wajinru left in trance state after Yetu flees
the Remembrance ceremony: “They were so lost in it, they were taking their
grief out on the whole world” (Solomon 125). The storms flood the region
where Yetu had been rescued and cared for by a rural human community and
wash away her human lover Oori’s ancestral islands, illustrating the irreparable
harm of increasing climate extremity to the communities that depend directly
on the water for survival (Hobart). While the cause of the current storm is
Yetu’s flight away from the Remembrance ceremony, we must trace her flight
back to the violence that makes the Memory so unbearable. Yetu’s intersection
of the trauma of the Crossing with the current storms answers in narrative
form Ian Baucom’s query, “Can we hold the view from the Anthropocene
and the view from the Middle Passage in concert?” (14). In History 4 Celsius:

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 Crossing Merfolk, the Human, and the Anthropocene · 363

Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene, Baucom builds upon Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s radical argument for the need to desegregate human history
and natural history in the humanities. Also building upon the work of Black
Atlantic scholars Paul Gilroy and Achille Mbembe, Baucom argues that
studies of the Black Atlantic must encompass and are essential to:

an encounter with the forcings of the Anthropocene; an encounter with a

mode of vulnerability/disposability appearing not only under the generalized
“aegis of neoliberalism” but under the crash of the climate-and-capital-
changed oceans, coasts, cities, and political orderings of a new Anthropocene
nomos of the Earth; an encounter with a new mode of precariousness to
which black life is, at once, singularly subject and of which black life (or,
to be more precise to Mbembe, black “forms of life”) is/are prophetic of the
generalized” “becoming-black,” planetwide, of the “species.” (23)

The tumultuous grief of the Wajinru is a grief for the vulnerability/

disposability of black life as produced by the transatlantic slave trade: “We
are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom,
thrown overboard, deemed too much of a drain on resources to stay on the
journey to their destination” (Solomon 58). It is the horror of this vulnerability/
disposability that prompts the first generation of Wajinru to remove long-term
memory from the minds of the newborn pups and create the role of Historian
to carry that burden (Solomon 63). The disruption of that role during Yetu’s
tenure unleashes a collective grief that threatens both the natural and human
world, revealing an ongoing and broadening danger that grows directly from
the precarity of Black life. By using Yetu’s plural consciousness to fuse the
Crossing, the Tidal Wars, and the current floods, Solomon collapses the space
between temporalities and links climate change to coloniality/modernity. The
relationship between the Memory and the storms parallels the relationship
between Black vulnerability/disposability and the acceleration of resource
extraction and carbon emissions launched by racial chattel slavery. The pain
of those assaulted during the transatlantic slave trade feeds directly into the
fury of the ocean, rain, and wind, as racial capitalism accelerates humanity’s
disastrous impact on the ocean and its creatures.

Conclusion
Joshua Bennett argues that within Black Atlantis myths (which overlap and
intersect what I call crossing merfolk narratives), “The haunting presence of
the Middle Passage is recalibrated toward the end of imagining an elsewhere,
however remote or deeply submerged, where black life can flourish” and
“demands a more dynamic approach to organizing life on Earth” (178).
Extending a creative tradition first established in black music, Hopkinson and

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364 · Jalondra A. Davis

Solomon suggest that a place where Black people’s lives could flourish would
be a place where other forms of being cast outside and below the Western
human could flourish as well. By locating the origins of mermaids in “the
haunting presence of the Middle Passage,” these narratives complicate the
ecocritical fantasy of the mermaid, highlighting modernity’s disastrous impact
upon otherhuman and nonhuman lifeworlds. Therefore, any unmaking of
both the ideologies and the systems that make humanity such a dangerous
force of nature must attend to the hierarchies within the human, to the
violence of conquest and racialization. Crossing merfolk that exist because of
this violence, but also exceed it, offer possibilities for a more lateral and livable
world.

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 Crossing Merfolk, the Human, and the Anthropocene · 367

Abstract
Mermaids are plural and complex beings with significant implications, as
human-animal-hybrids, for a critique of androcentrism and the Anthropocene.
Yet theorizations of the mermaid within monster studies rarely critically engage
Black mermaid texts. This article defines a particular recurring narrative
within Afrofuturism’s imaginings of aquatic hybrid people: what I call
Crossing Merfolk, the proposal that those lost during the Middle Passage and/
or their offspring transformed to survive in the sea. Foregrounding mermaid
studies, Black feminist critical humanisms, and feminist, anticolonial, and
environmental justice ecocriticisms in an analysis of Nalo Hopkinson’s The
New Moon’s Arms and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, I argue that Crossing
Merfolk narratives disrupt the Human and its power over subordinated humans
and the Earth. By locating the origin of mermaids in African cosmologies and
the launch of racial chattel slavery, crossing merfolk interrogate the violent
conditions of modernity and the Anthropocene and propose otherhuman ways
of being.

journal of the fantastic in the arts

 Contributors

VINCENT ALBARANO is completing his Film Studies MA at The Ohio State

University with a focus on amateur and underground cinema. He is the editor
of the Experimental Kindergarten zine, and contributor to Dangerous Encounters,
as well as the author of Pinhead Music: The Underground Sights and Sounds of
Keyser, West Virginia and the forthcoming Aesthetic Deviations and The Fantastic
Mundane: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, 1984–1994.

M. KEITH BOOKER is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas,

Fayetteville. He is the author of dozens of published essays and the author
or editor of over sixty books on literature, popular culture, and literary and
cultural theory.

ISRA DARAISEH is Assistant Professor of English at the Arab Open University,

Kuwait. Her research focuses on the intersection between Western and Middle
Eastern cultures, as in her co-authored volume Consumerist Orientalism: The
Convergence of Arab and American Popular Cultures in the Age of Global
Capitalism (I. B. Tauris, 2019).

DR. JALONDRA A. DAVIS is a Black feminist artist-intellectual, merwomanist

Melusine, and fierce warrior mama who currently works as a University of
California Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego. She
holds a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from University of California, Riverside with
a designated emphasis in Science Fiction and Technocultures and a Master
of Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. She is the
author of a coming-of-age novel, Butterfly Jar, set during the 1992 Los Angeles
Uprisings. Her research on Black speculative culture has been published in
the Museum of Science Fiction Journal of Science Fiction and Shima Journal,
with more work forthcoming in the Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms. Her
scholarly book project in progress, Merfolk and the Black Aquatic focuses on
mermaids, water spirits, and other aquatic-themed figures in African diasporic
literature, art, and performance.

COURTNEY J. DREYER is a PhD student in the Communication Studies

department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her primary research
interests include Christian media, horror cinema, and the intersections
between them.
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