Carry me on the waves to the lands I've never seen/We can sail, we can sail with the Orinoco Flow.

Enya, born Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, arrived at any corporate record store from the torn cliffs of Donegal that line Ireland’s Atlantic coast, a homeland she tells us is “quite wild, with mostly mountains, moors, and brown bogs filled with rushes.” It is so breathtaking and intense, Enya tells us, that it both inspires her music and brings her to emotional exhaustion.

Eithne is also the name of the princess of a legendary semi-divine race called Fomor: “the people from under the sea.” Her father, King Balor of the Evil Eye, flung her to exile on a wind-whipped isle to keep her from conceiving a baby, who, it was prophesied, would one day kill the great king. Evil Eye circled Eithne with twelve maids who were instructed to keep her from ever seeing or speaking about a lover of any kind.

With the help of a Druidess, Eithne’s lover Cian snuck into her tower and gave to her triplets, two of whom were drowned in a whirlpool, and one of whom grew to murder his grandfather, the failing patriarch.

And what followed was a golden era of peace. And the people found abundance, hope.

Despite it all, the brave mother Eithne was thrown to in the rapids, and was drowned. Soon, Eithne transformed into the river Inny herself. Running from the East of Ireland to the west, she becomes one with the great River Shannon, who, in turn, leads to the Atlantic Ocean. Shannon, too, is named after a mythological goddess, as are most of the waterways of the island. One of these figures found a magic well; another ate of the salmon of knowledge and became wise; another drowned in tears. The Irish know: women are like water. We wander, live, flow and we sing, like water.

Here, Irish group Clannad (with Enya) sing the Gaelic song from their native homeland of Donegal. The title translates as 'Virgin of the Sea' or 'Mermaid'.

Enya sang of the waters from her earliest days of performing with her uncle’s band, Clannad, in the intricate Irish language, tales of the sea, of the Druids, and of the mermaids. Like this one, “Mhaighdean Mhara,” a ballad drawn from the Irish story in which a fisherman begs marriage from a selkie, who, after raising a beautiful family on land, disappears back into the sea, forever. The song is a call-and-response between mother Mary and her namesake daughter, who waves farewell to her seaward mother with pride.

It seems that you have faded away and abandoned the love of life
The snow is spread about at the mouth of the point
Your yellow flowing hair and little gentle mouth
We give you Mary Chinidh to swim forever in the Erne

"My dear mother," said blonde Mary
By the edge of the shore and the mouth of the sea
"My noble mother is a mermaid"
We give you Mary Chinidh to swim forever in the Erne

We hear of the Irish sea shanties, the work songs that put all the sailors on deck in sync. But what about the forecastle ballads, the songs of losing the ones they loved, and of return, that they sang to themselves in the sleeping quarters at night?

Home, dearie, home. These are Enya’s songs.

The sound of in-betweenness: the voices of the seafarers who used song as a medium for the function of reunification, for continuity. For travel away from homelands that had become infested with murderous landlords who would steal the food form the mouths of Catholic babies. The soundscape of Celtic-ness was the essence of political resistance for Irish nationals beset with the ongoing violence of the anti-colonial Troubles, which were met with heavy urban bombing in the year of the album’s release.

American critic Robert Christgau dogged Enya’s breakthrough album. Her voice repulses him, he tells us: hopelessly ethereal, politically toothless, and naively antifeminist, ripe for objectification, even asking for abuse:

“Whilst…perpetrating banal verse in three languages…[Enya] makes hay of pop's old reliable women-are-angels scam. At least the Cocteau Twins are eccentric. At least [Emerson Lake and Palmer] were vulgarians. D+”

Remembrance, remembrance, this is the reason Enya makes her music. “The purpose of art is to bind people around a belief in continuity,” she tells us. “This music is the sound of something that is passed on.” Remembrance is a political act for we who fought and won a thousand years’ war against the erasure of our language, our music, our way of being. For the Irish, song was the sound of rebellion. Why else did so many Troubles-era guitarists fashion guitars their instruments from the bodies of guns. Enya’s voice, the materialization of this remembrance, is rebel music.

Enya’s producer, Nicky Ryan, sounds this sublime interpretation of his wife, lyricist Roma Ryan’s verse, in the studio, where he layers up to 500 takes. This intricacy, composition, movement is elemental and atmospheric, like the cliffs and waters. It has depth. A mermaid song, soaked in the cool damp of the sea, signals longing, anger, and resistance. A siren, a siren.

The waters are political. The atmosphere, and the atmospheric, are political. Faeries are Druids who harness the elemental powers to thrive; faeries are Banshees who keen, wail, sing, scream out the death of a member of an ancient Irish family. They are here to make things right again.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

This week’s starts with this tribute to the mermaid featured in dear David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. We talk so much about mermaid stories, but what about the mermaid objects that make our world more magical? Tell us about your favorite!:

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

In a few years, I will remember the kindness of the elders at the farmer’s market, my bright students from all over the world, fiddle contests in the holler, the emergency funds the Unitarians gave us to cover the electric bill. The big, big thunderstorms. An old lover, an archaeologist, comes through the valley with a truck full of shards of pottery and arrowheads he’s lovingly dug from the grounds and preserved with scientific care. We play records through the night as the rain pours into the creek out back. He holds me until tomorrow.

Today, though, I am shoved onto the concrete isle of single motherhood in the Walmart parking lot with my toddler in my arms. The guys with white power decals and Don’t Tread on Me flags rev the engines of their stepside trucks to scare people they don’t like, and they don’t like us. We are in their scopes: a single mom, no wedding ring, in yoga pants: a liberal from the college, and her biracial kid with a soft, curly afro, headed to the Red Robin for a two-for-one deal.

Since the election, more locals have been outfitting themselves in paramilitary gear, rigged up with flags and patches from the surplus store. Hatred blasts from their windows at the volume of screams. They lay in wait. It is 2017 and, in just a few weeks, they will gather here on the way to Charlottesville, where they will chant and march over the grounds of the old tobacco plantations, torches in hand.

I am stranded at the dwindling university, non-tenure-track faculty, out of my depth. My temporary status means that the only classroom available to me is the one in which, a decade earlier, an undergraduate shooter began his spree. 32 people were killed; 19 wounded. On the first day of each semester, my students enter the room anxiously as shadows pass by the hazy windows to the hall. When class starts, I lock the doors from the inside: the remodelers carefully thought of this detail. The new plaster on walls cannot paper over the horror; the new windows do not make us forget the survivors who jumped from them. Dutifully, I teach my class on digital anthropology, another on the arts and social transformation.

Up the road, the office of my therapist sits atop a pain clinic. The epicenter of the American opiate epidemic is here in the ancient Roanoke Valley. A trail of pickups and rusty campers lines a path from the offramp as pills make their way from one set of hands to another. For many in Appalachia, whose prospects of meaningful work died with the coal industry generations ago, the medicine can’t keep up with the pain. I want to hold their sadness; I know that I, too, need to be held. It is not their fault. The therapist helps me visualize the physical location in which I carry my self-hatred, my self-blame: it settles into my breastbone, an ache. No matter what I do to try to make it go away, it smolders.

At night, at the threshold of my little cottage in the mountains, I move a full bookcase to barricade the door. I am afraid that the man who hurt us will follow through on his threats. He has an app that allows him to call from different numbers multiple times a day. My protective order has elapsed and I can’t afford a lawyer, and we live within a two-hour reach of his impulses. Just a mile up the road, I turn into a gravel driveway to turn around for something I forgot, and a single-wide trailer appears before me. Someone has painted the letters K.K.K. across its face, black against white.

Two of my students come to me with credible complaints of misconduct at the school; more emerge, and I stick up for them from the powerless side of an administrator’s desk. My possibilities of finding a tenure-track job for the next school year dwindle into nothing, and I’ve got 8 weeks to find a new job, a new home, a new city. I panic.

Under the gaze of the guys with the Celtic Cross tats, I push a giant contraption for football players across the gym floor, ploughing the astroturf. Over weeks, I pile more and more weight on it, until it feels like it won’t budge. I push myself so hard against the machine, digging the balls of my feet into the floor, that my shoes peel halfway off, but I move that thing every time. I get stronger. This is not any kind of a sensible gym exercise; it is a psychosomatic workout. My body needs to know that it has the power to get unstuck, to escape.

When I get home, I spin the old globe I got at the hillbilly flea market. My finger lands on a destination, anywhere but here. Take me back to the West Coast. I will leave everything I have behind yet again, everything but my son and all these books and records, in exchange for my freedom. The wind will whip my hair as I stand on the edge of the subduction zone, the tectonic seam where the earth’s crust cascades into the ocean. I will return to the sea. I will grow fins.

Find me the farthest place, and I’ll never come back.

There are so many ways to move through the waters. Just watch Cecaelia, the sea witch, carrier of underwater chaos, master of mimicry, sand-stirrer. She balances her human head and shoulders atop an undulating lower half: the ass and tentacles of a juicy, sensual octopus. In the world of finfolk and mermaids, she carries a different kind of weight. She is a strategist, an instigator, an unrelenting protector of her underwater home.

Her legacy undulates, too: Cecaelia is found everywhere from First Nations traditions of the Pacific Northwest islands, to the depths of the Disney underworld, to the seapunk fans of Tumblr and Reddit, and the wiki users who gave her the name. Ursula is calling for a little more attention; let’s linger with her, in the negative spaces–the murky pockets of stillness–in which she thrives.

The Octopus Spirits of the Pacific Northwest Isles

the Haida and Tlingit peoples of the Pacific Northwest often call her Devil-fish with great reverence. Here, she is said to hold power over human sickness and health. She is one who guards the environment and demands respect and stewardship. She is a watcher, a healer.

In these traditions, hybrid human/sea-creatures are not sort-of spliced together in the mid-section the way many other mermaids are. Devil-fish transitions effortlessly and wholly between her human and animal forms, fluid and ever-changing. The Chinook Salmon spirit and Miq’Maq half-fish Sabawaelnu do the same: they transpose from one shape to another, mediating between the human and natural worlds. The Haida represent the Devil-fish as a cunning, improvisatory, resourceful element. She can regenerate her body and environment when they have been harmed: a sorcerer. In human form, she keeps the others in line, as in this 19th-Century tale from the Bancroft collection.

One morning, as the tide went out, the old people came to sit and watch the ocean. As they sat there, they saw a woman walking along the beach. Her hair was long and strung into eight braids. Her name was Octopus… "Look," one of the old people said, "Here comes Raven. He is going to bother Octopus." "Ah" another of the old people said. "That is not a good idea. You shouldn't bother Octopus!"

In the lands now called British Columbia, interspecies friendships between women and octopi are so common that National Geographic produced a documentary, narrated by Paul Rudd, about people who think of themselves as “octopus whisperers”. Friends of the Devil-fish bond with her as if she is their beloved pet, or they hers. They rendezvous daily in the tide pools to share treats, head scratches and cuddles. The Devil-fish is always engaged, aware, and able to navigate tricky negotiations with the land-lubbers. She has a good time with it.

The neat line between human and animal becomes entangled, long sticky tentacles and braided tendrils of hair, all bound together in the in-between space where sea meets land. Befriend the Devil-fish, and an entire world opens to you. All wrapped up in each other, it’s hard to tell who is who. A different kind of mermaid.

Naw Naagalang: The Octopus Houses of Haida Gwaii

Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson is a native Haida lawyer, an environmental activist, a musician and multimedia artist who depicted herself as a series of supernatural beings for her groundbreaking exhibition, Out of Concealment: Female Supernatural Beings of Haida Gwaii. She inhabits the legend of the Devil-fish, elegantly guarding the well-being of the oceans. She tells us:

Naw Jaada is in a state of transformation. In nature, octopuses become red in colour to signal aggression. Her red colour indicates her willingness to engage in battle. Seemingly peaceful and calm, she asks us: “Do Canadian citizens really want their governments to continue to deny legal recognition of Indigenous Title?” Naw Jaada reminds us to focus on future generations as we re-conceptualize how to manage human use of the land and sea.

Williams-Davidson’s work is, like the supernatural beings within, hybrid, fluid, and confrontational. It deserves close attention and amplification.

For thousands of years, the Haida have constructed shelters called Octopus houses, places of protection and nurturance, for thousands of years, and their indigenous history of the region is intertwined with the legend of the octopus and her sisters. The project Naw Naagalang: Octopus Houses of Haida Gwai is a partnership between anthropologists, archaeologists, native historians, and spiritualists. It documents the ways in which Devil-fish and humans have cultivated interdependence in the coastal ecosystem.

As with any other gathering and use of the natural world, our kuuniisii taught that yahguudang (respect) for all things was and remains the most important principle governing our relationships with nature. For example, we are taught to ad kyanang kunGasda (to ask first and explain why the various beings were being asked to give their fibre, life and space for us to continue our way of living) and to say Haawa.

Gathered together, the Haida Gwaii Octopus stories and rituals reflect a collective desire to return to the folds of the sea, not to dominate it, or to leave it behind for human civilization. In the “The Devil-Fish’s daughter,” Haida storytellers tell of a two-legged village chief who marries an octopus and brings her to live on dry land with their children, but misses their life underwater. One day, suddenly, the couple returns to the sea to live happily:

Eventually the Devil-fish wife pined for her watery world. Then one day while she and her husband sat in her father-in-law's house, her spouse began to melt. At the same moment the Devil-fish wife disappeared through the gaps between the floor planks. Her husband then took on the form of a Devil-fish and his soft shiny body followed his wife between the floor planks. They both returned to the realm of the Devil-fish and her father.

The agency that comes with the ability to transition, the agency to return, the power to slip through the floorboards at will into the waters below, the power to double and regenerate, to live in many worlds at once. The Devil-fish is a sorceress. She may find herself in exile, but her most important power is that of return.

Share The Mermaid Club

Ursula and Ariel: Partners in Immortality

In 1989, the release of Disney’s epic, underwater princess fantasy, The Little Mermaid, was met with more than 6 million in opening weekend gross. Kids everywhere strapped seashell brassieres over their pajamas, fastened waist-length ginger wigs to their hairlines, and pinched their waists with lavender sashes hung with iridescent scales. They learned Ariel’s songs of longing for their Girl Scout pageants, held their proms under the sea.

And they were electrified by the figure of Ursula, the sea-witch, whose unbridled hips carried the action of the film. Caressed by the ghostly eels who do her bidding, Ursula is also, somehow, hideous in her sexuality, threatening in her gender non-conformity, dangerous in her extra-ness. She remains a feminist truth-teller, a queer medicine woman: terrifying but so compelling.

Disney’s treatment was based on Hans Christen Anderson’s folktale of the same name. She is a complex character, both a hideous crone and a contender for the throne-she claims it was stolen from her by King Triton. In the film, Ursula is an antagonist to Ariel. She takes the maiden’s voice as a fee for helping her grow legs and seduce her prince. Then she cloaks herself in a human body and steals the prince from Ariel.

The men up there don't like a lot of blabber
They think a girl who gossips is a bore
Yes, on land it's much preferred
For ladies not to say a word
And after all, dear, what is idle prattle for?

Come on, they're not all that impressed with conversation
True gentlemen avoid it when they can
But they dote and swoon and fawn
On a lady who's withdrawn
It's she who holds her tongue who gets a man

Diseny’s Ursula, based on the camp of ‘70s Baltimore drag artist Divine, is repulsive and fascinating, a star. She’s less a villain than a sorcerer: a medium who let eels fondle her face as she speaks, to hide in her bosom. In the Anderson tale and the traditions that feed it, the Sea-Witch (who is nameless, archetypal) enables the little mermaid (who is also nameless, archetypal) to grow “hideous” legs, not because she loves the prince, but because she intends to manipulate him into falling in love with her, thereby transforming her into a human who can possess an immortal soul. The Little Mermaid’s grandmother has told her the secret: mermaids live for 300 years, but when they die, they die forever. Humans have souls.

The Little Mermaid becomes obsessed with the idea of eternal life and eagerly begs the sea-witch to cut out her tongue, to mix it with droplets of witch-blood, and use the potion to send her to shore as a human. Every step on these stump-legs, the witch warns, will feel like knives cutting into her torso. Who would want to live on dry land, to keep quiet or the sake of men, to push against one’s full weight against the dry earth? What she wouldn’t give to be immortal, as desired by her grandmother.

“We have not immortal souls, we shall never live again; but, like the green sea-weed, when once it has been cut off, we can never flourish more. Human beings, on the contrary, have a soul which lives forever, lives after the body has been turned to dust. It rises up through the clear, pure air beyond the glittering stars. As we rise out of the water, and behold all the land of the earth, so do they rise to unknown and glorious regions which we shall never see.”

In the tale, which has zero dialogue from any underwater or landlubbing males whatsoever, the sea-witch, the mermaid grandmother, the five mermaid sisters and a team of air spirits are the main characters. The sea-witch works as part of this team of feminine transformation, and the air spirits eventually resurrect the Little Mermaid from the sea form to grant her eternal life. The Little Mermaid’s coming of age is a group effort.

What’s fascinating about the character of Ursula is her continued ascendance as as a hero, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Ariels. More attendees of the annual Coney Island mermaid parade sport purple faces and octopus booties rather than the sleek, fishy variety. Instead of Ariel’s songs of longing, they chant the sea-witch’s lines of empowerment:

Now I am the ruler of all the ocean
The waves obey my every whim
The sea and all its toils bow to my power!!!!

Ursula’s objective was never to win the heart of the prince, but to steal the trident of the sea king, and to rule. Do not mess with an Octopus, a sea-witch, a devil-fish, a woman in-between. This is the lesson we learn from a world of Cecaelia lore.

Cecaelia as Digital Folklore

The origin of the term Cecelia is murky, emerging from internet fandom boards in the 21st century as a way to describe Ursula-adjacent beings: an alternative to the clunky term, “octo-mermaid.” She has proliferated on fantasy and cosplay forums, hentai sites, and digital art archives. As a folklorist, I see this pattern as an emergent hunger for the kinds of wisdom–ecological, queer, resistant, radical– that the Cecaelia has to teach us. As a counterpoint to the delicate Ariels, we turn to the powerful Haida stories of the Devil-fish, and also to global sea-witch traditions from Morgana to Atagardis to the Ningyo of Japan, to the flesh-hungry sirens of the ancient Mediterranean. The call for the Devil-fish is clear, and it comes from many directions.

Let’s give the Devil-fish some space; let’s build her a dwelling, and cultivate it as a matter of sacred order, as the First Nations people have done for thousands of years. She’s ready to emerge, to take a look around, and to guide us into some new ways of relating to ourselves, our bodies, our very nature. Let’s get tangled in her textures, visit her home in the bottoms, invite her to dwell in our homes.

Pat Carroll, the accomplished actor who voiced Ursula in the Disney film, said that she’d be happy for her legacy to be entwined with the persona of sea-witch long after her death. A different kind of immortality: a hybrid one, eternal life with a sense of humor, a belly laugh, and a crackling willingness to try new environments, knowing there will always be a return.

Subscribe now

References:

1. Philip Hayward (2017) “Becoming Ariel, Becoming Ursula”, in Making a Splash: Mermaids (and Mermen) in 20th and 21st Century Audiovisual Media, John Libbey Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 37: “The entity’s name appears to derive from a single source text, a short pictorial story published in Vampirella magazine entitled ‘Cilia’ (Cuti and Mas 1972) that became the basis for the more general figure of the ‘cecaelia’ some time in the late 2000s.”

2. Sarah Allison (2020 April 27) “The Cecaelia: a Modern Twist on Mermaid Myth”, in Writing in Margins.

3. NAW NÁAGALANG - OCTOPUS HOUSES OF HAIDA GWAII

   https://www.seagardens.net/naw

4. Visit this blog for more artwork from the Anderson prints: https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2024/01/sea-witch.html

This is the story of Kópakonan, the seal-woman, who wraps herself in a skin of gorgeous, fishy fats to float through the icy waters of the halfway. In the Faroe Islands, she drifts between the north of Scotland and the south of Iceland, watching the jagged cliffs of the shore, counting the souls who plunge to their death from the heights.

One day, there will be enough dead to have encircled the island, their drowned arms linked together below. Only then will the humans’ cruelty to Kópakonan be repaid. She is angry, dispossessed of her loved ones, set adrift.

Some years ago, she was one of these souls: a human who takes her own life at sea. The Faroese say that these victims of suicide awaken in the icy waters to find that they now possess magical sealskins. They thrive in the sea in communion with the friendly animals there. Kópakonan found a home in the waters and became deeply beloved by the seal-people, and deeply adored by the beautiful, giant bull seal, the king of his kind.

Soft and wild, found and held, ensconced in a layer of sacred protection, a younger Kópakonan would celebrate her rebirth with the other selkies. Once a year, they would shed their skins and dance on their feet on the shore, declaring their freedom. A local farmer plotted to capture Kópakonan and to make her his wife, to force her to have his children, to keep her captive in domesticity. He stole her skin while she danced, leaving her cold and shivering in the night, now naked in human form.

From the storytelling of Edward Fuglø:

The seal woman … could not find her skin and searched for it whilst she cried in her despair because the night was over and the sun began to rise. Just before the sun rose out of the ocean, she caught the scent of her skin in the hands of the boy from Mikladali and she had to go to him. She begged him to return the skin, but he did not want to hear her words and went to his home; she had to follow because he was carrying her seal-skin.

The farmer locked Kópakonan’s magical power away in a chest, but as years went by, he accidentally left the key at home with their children. Kópakonan reclaimed her magic and returned to sea, warning the farmer not to hunt the great bull seal who was now her loving husband. Again, he treated her with disrespect, as his captive, his animal inferior. He murdered her husband and their two seal children, cut and cooked their flippers and heads, and left them for her to find in the caves. Now, she exacts revenge each time a man of the island leaps from the cliffs to his death.

The Faroese seafarers loved their stories of Kópakonan; they sang her legend to other sailors from Ireland, Britain, Norway and distant islands: Micronesia, the Philippines. Why tales of finfolk are found anywhere water touches land, where women and men choose a life of the sea, or fall in love with travelers. I imagine what it what it feels like, in such a small and static village, to long for escape by skin and fin. These are called “migratory folktales,” a global invention of our collective imagination to account for the wayward and mysterious souls who live amongst us.

Share The Mermaid Club

You will know that she sang to you.

That she sang songs of the halfway people: of the Irish selkies who wrap themselves in magical sealskins and slip away from the brutality of dry land to the beautiful abyss.

You will know that as she sang, she fed you from a little plastic bottle and rocked you slowly. In the maternity ward for single mothers in the Newark hospital, she held you for three days.

That the nuns from the unwed mothers’ home bound her breasts to keep her from making milk for you. That they told her not to hold you. 

You will know.

That they told her it would be too painful for all. You will know that they drugged her so she would not remember giving birth to you. Too painful for all.

You will know that as soon as the nuns left her bedside, those other women – single moms in the ward, moms from Jamaica, Belmont, Ironbound – told her to disobey the nuns, to steal you back into her arms and to ask the nurse to pass you a little plastic bottle.

And that when the nuns returned and told you it was time, they tore you away, away from her arms, from her songs, from her milk, from the abundant coast, from the abyss.

That they made you the ward of a properly married couple, who took you to Iowa, and who, when they told of your adoption, insisted that she chose to never hold you. Too painful for all.

You will know that after they took you from her, drugged and bound, she would make her way to Philly and take a gig singing at Irish wakes and weddings.

Songs of the sea, of the forecastle where the sailors slept at night: Home, Dearie, Home.

You will know that she was discovered by a famous folklorist, who would sponsor her to become a professor of Irish songs and stories.

And that one day, that same folklorist would discover you, too, and grant you a fellowship to become a professor of songs and stories. Long before you knew her, you followed her path.

You will know the songs she sang to you. Somehow, you always knew. 

You will study the poetry of liberation: Wade in the Water, Steal Away, By the Rivers of Babylon.

You will know that she, too, was taken from her mother – a teenager who did not know that she was worthy, that she could nourish life. She was drugged and bound. Too painful for all.

You will know that your grandmother was the valedictorian of her Catholic school that year, still aching for her baby, and that in her mourning, she began to circulate from coast to coast: New York, San Francisco, New Orleans.

You will dream of your grandmother, looking for her sealskin. Trapped on land without it.

One day, you will have a baby of your own, keep him safe in your waters, refuse to kill the pains of childbirth, hold him in your arms, attach him to your breast. 

You will know that you can nourish life, after all. You will keep your baby.

You will know that, somewhere on the coast, your first mother has been waiting, leaving letters for you with the nuns. When you find her, you will know that her arms have been aching for you.

You will know that when you pull away from her in fear, she will tell you that’s ok, she will still be there, that it is not your fault, it was never your fault, it was not her mother’s fault before her, and not the fault of those girls back in Ireland whose babies were taken, the women in Memphis whose babies were taken, in Korea, in Ethiopia, in Richmond.

That this rage comes from deep wisdom, deep belonging, mothers to mothers to mothers, trapped on dry land. 

One day, you will find your sealskin and slip it on and meet her there, at the in-between.

You will know that you always knew. That your dreams are memories: that sometimes selkies wander, but they always return to the sea, Home, Dearie, Home. 

She is still there, where songs and stories abound. 

And she will tell you that she’s not going to let you go.

That she never did.

You will know that you can be loved. 

You will know that, in the beautiful abyss, she will be waiting.

This is the story of Cher, yes, our beloved Cher.

Cher slips down the prow of the USS Missouri, glistening under a fishnet body stocking. Waves of dewey young sailors break all around her like the surf as she makes her way to the stage.

She is a goddess of the oceans. Long and delicate, slick as a dolphin, she sings a siren song that ensnares the most vulnerable members of the US Navy: hundreds of them, dressed up tight in little white uniforms that shake loose, even tear apart, as she works her way through them. They pile up behind her.

Cher is a mermaid, she has always been a mermaid, a woman in-between identity, ethnicity, personality. This is the story of ethnic intermixture, of interculturalism, of the global, fluid femme. I touch upon the legacies of the Armenian Mélusine, the Cherokee He-Há-Pe, the Irish Merrow, whose figures inhabit the work of our beloved Cher, who is herself Armenian, Irish, Cherokee. This is the story of body freedom, one of Cher’s many gifts to us.

Cher

She teases the camera, winking. It gazes back with such longing, asking her how she could do this to us—all of us. Sorry, not sorry, she sings, halfway slithering from beneath her oversized leather jacket. A bare shoulder flashes.

Back home from another hell day at Catholic school: the worst of the hell days: seventh grade. Janie and I sit rapt before after-school MTV and witness the whole thing - the premier of the sensational “Turn Back Time” video - with stars swimming in our eyes. She sings:

I don't know why I did the things I did
I don't know why I said the things I said
Pride's like a knife, it can cut deep inside
Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes

Oh my God. She climbs atop the massive middle cannon. The sailors are agog, salivating, their caps askew. We don’t ask what Cher is doing there, in the middle of the sea, as her waves of dark curls ripple down the length of her delicate body. What will they cover, what will they expose, what will they touch? Cher winks at us with her entire being.

It is her nineteenth studio album, and she is the only woman on this boat of thousands. She commands them, ripping off one of the sailor’s caps and perching it atop her wig. A two-inch stripe of black velvet covers only her most sensitive parts. The rest is black netting, like a funky fisherman had failed to capture her at expedition. Cher is too slippery to be possessed. All the same, we feel like she is for us.

Janie and I are trying to read in every sensation, every intersection, the answer to the question of what we will become. She has a blunt bob and wears boy’s flannel shirts, and she is just now starting to realize that she has crushes on other girls, or on beautiful women anyway, kind of an open secret between the two of us. “I think she must have shaved ‘down there,’” she says, gesturing at Cher.

Janie is realizing that Cher is something special. One day, she will tell me how she wants to be with Cher, to love someone like Cher.

I will tell her, in return, that I also want to be with Cher, but in a different way. I want Cher to be my mother, my mother again, that is. I dream her: she is my birth mother, the one who was forced to give me up for adoption: the one I have not known since my days in the waters of her womb. The nuns told us that she was a hippie, a professional singer, a free spirit who needed to travel the world.

Girls In-Between

That same year, Janie and I go to see the film Mermaids in the theatre, starring Our Lady of Cher as Mrs. Rachel Flax, a single mom who has no tolerance for domesticity. She does not cook, only arranges hors d’ouvres and other finger foods on plastic plates. She strings marshmallow kebabs and cuts starfish-shaped sandwiches. On the coast of Massachusetts, wind whips the bungalow she has rented for herself and her two daughters, daughters who she kept even through she did not have the support of their father. She managed to hang on. Across the creek, a convent full of cackling nuns rings the chapel bells. It is the ‘60s, and unmarried women live on the margins.

Says daughter Charlotte, played by Winona Ryder, “Sometimes I feel like you're the child and I'm the grown up.” She is stuck in between the stigma of Mrs. Flax’s single motherhood and the freedom it embodies. Although Jewish, she sometimes dresses in a nun’s habit. Other times, she fingers herself into her own new sexuality. In-between is an emotionally excruciating place to be.

Mrs. Flax’s young daughter, Kate (played by Christina Ricci), is a champion swimmer who spins a globe and picks a destination with her finger: “I wish I could swim forever.”

Says Mrs. Flax, dressed in an overwhelmingly blonde-iridescent mermaid costume for a Halloween party, “Death is dwelling in the past, or staying in one place too long.” She has the girls recite this mantra with her until it becomes their mantra, too.

Thirteen years old, I imagine myself as, at once, all three members of this Holy Trinity. There’s Cher, my Cher, whose Mrs. Flax will one day become a role model for my own single motherhood. In age, I’m situated between Christina Ricci and Wynona Ryder: a swim team champ and a burgeoning hussy. The Director, Richard Benjamin, who based the film on Patty Dann’s novel of the same name, tells us: "The people in this film don't fit in any category exactly. Charlotte is half girl, half woman. Kate is kind of half girl, half 'fish'. They're in the water, out of the water–mermaids, looking for a place to be. What it means is you can't put everybody into a category.”

Mélusine and Her Sisters

Mélusine, the radical water spirit, inhabits the holy wells, streams and rivers of Armenia and far beyond, all over Europe, and across the rim of the Mediterranean Sea: anywhere land touches water throughout the continent. She is known to surface suddenly, stunning, as you pass: the face and shoulders of a beautiful woman flip and turn into an elegant monster with fins, or wings, or two long dragon tails trailing in the waters below.

Cher, daughter of a survivor of the Armenian genocide, speaks her father’s first language. We do not know if she has direct knowledge of Mélusine, but we do know that Cher embodies her power in so many ways: the agency that comes with choosing weirdness, the protection of the fiery mother goddess, the decisiveness of the diva who, in the film Moonstruck, slaps her panicking boyfriend (played by Nic Cage) across the face and cries, “Snap out of it!”

Mélusine is a female spirit of fresh water; she finds you at the edges of her holy well or river, not the depths of the ocean. She is serpent or fish or dragon from the waist down, but sometimes she has wings, two tails, or both. She is sometimes, also, a flying woman: a sorcerer, sage, and snake mother whose legacy stretches throughout the Mediterranean and far beyond. For Armenians, she signals something E Jane Burns calls a “magical politics”: a way to insist, in a Europe that has long treated its Eastern flank as somehow less civilized, less modern, that Armenians matter.

In Armenia, there is a fourteenth-century epic called the Roman de Mélusine by Jean d’Arras. It replaces the stiff figure of the Duke of Berry, conventionally known as the country’s political founder, with the mystical Mélusine, who ties their heritage to the rest of the continent. Mélusine ties Armenians to the mermaid mythology that unifies the a region that the winds of empire and the ravages of colonialism have shaken to its foundations. Here, cultural identity is everything.

The Armenian mermaid makes a nation from the work of the mother, from the ten sons she must protect with her dragon’s power, not the unholy labor of war. Mélusine is not the only mermaid Cher has inherited in the hidden folds of her cultural heritage.

Share

Cher: Armenian, Cherokee, Irish Woman of the Water

He-Há-Pe is a water-woman who appears throughout Native American cosmology. The Cherokee, from whom Cher draws heritage on her mother’s side, in part, tell us that she emerges from a river to steal a sleeping child. He-Há-Pe “shoots him with her invisible arrows and carries his dead body down under water to feast upon it.” She leaves a shadow figure where the child used to be. Seven days later, the child withers and dies. Be careful of the waters, say the storytellers. They soothe the unsuspecting, and then they make their move, and they feast.

In Ireland, another of Cher’s ancestral homelands, tales of the merrow mermaids and selkie seal-women populate the local folklore.

We folklorists study the work of “tradition bearers”: those who carry, embody, and pass culture on in the course of their lives. This can happen intentionally, through the passing down of songs, stories, recipes, books, sacred objects. But it also happens in passive, or atmospheric, or partial, dreamed, intoned, and embodied ways that might never involve us learning where our imaginations come from.

We bear tradition in the way we move through the world, often unknowingly inhabiting the figures, songs and stories that shaped our ancestor’s worldview. In Cher, a world of watery women converge. What is so special about our Cher, our woman of the waters, is her willingness to follow these figures with everything she’s got.

Read more:

Geographies of Loss: Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine

Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia: Mélusine, Jean de Berry, and the Eastern Mediterranean

E. Jane Burns Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2013) 43 (2): 275–301.https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2081978

Merriam, C. Hart. editor, The Dawn of the World: Myths and Tales of the Miwok Indians of California, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln 1993, pg. 228-230

Mooney, James, Myths of the Cherokee. New York: Dover Publications 1995, 349. A reprint of the 1900 publication “Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897-98

Mermaids & Water Spirits by Gary R Varner, AuthorsDen.com https://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewarticle.asp?AuthorID=1215&id=18723

This is TheMermaid.Club; jump in; the water is radical~~~~~~

Subscribe now