Cher: Mother of Mermaids, Lover of Sailors, Queen of Wanderlust
The aquatic femme of our dreams, she's played mermaids in films, caused sailors to jump ship in her videos, and called forth the spirit of Mélusine, the mermaid mother of Armenian folklore
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.
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