The Black Women Who Rule The Sea
The Black Women Who Rule The Sea
On "The Little Mermaid", Eurocentric imaginations, and Black water memory
Last Friday night, Disney captured our attention with a trailer for The Little Mermaid movie, set to be released in May 2023. The trailer is simple: We are miles deep within the ocean, completely enveloped in a bioluminescent world. We follow a woman’s tail through a tunnel where a fiery glow awaits her on the other end. Then we see her beautiful, Black face singing to the surface the most well-known song of the movie: “Part of Your World.” In a matter of days, this trailer has racked up over 104 million views around the world. Little Black girls finally get to see representation that eluded us millennials when we were their age.
But of course, Black people’s celebration wouldn’t be complete without an influx of racism on the Internet. Some tech whizzes created an AI version of the trailer in order to replace Halle with a white woman. Or Twitter users who started the hashtag #notmyariel, criticizing the “woke” representation that’s desecrating their childhood fantasies. (Let’s just get this out of the way before I move onto the entrée: For Black people, “woke” once meant “alert,” “conscious.” But in recent years, “woke” has been co-opted, and now it’s what ill-meaning people say when they’re too afraid to say “nigger.”)
OK.
I have been writing online for several years and I’ve seen this story play out time and time again. I’ve seen it with Amandla Stenberg as Rue in The Hunger Games, I’ve seen it every time a Black person plays an elf or appears in some sci-fi fantasy. I’m not going to belabor the point that white people have an easier time believing in dragons and two-headed monsters than the possibility of Black people existing alongside them in their stories.
I’m more interested in questioning as how can any person believe that an icon that is as free and fluid as a mermaid exists only within a Eurocentric imagination?
Mermaids do not belong to one culture. In classical antiquity, there was Atargatis, who was a chief fertility goddess of northern Syria. Mer-folk were recorded in ancient Chinese culture as far back as the 4th century BC. There’s Suvannamaccha, a mermaid princess who appears in Thai mythology, Nyai Roro Kidul of Javanese culture, and mermaid characters in One Thousand and One Nights. All of the aforementioned predate Hans Christian Andersen’s birth, never mind his fairytales.
No one should have a monopoly on who Ariel is because mermaids themselves have transcended country borders for thousands and thousands of years. The Eurocentric imagination is not just racist; it’s incredibly minuscule and suffocating. Then again, the same can be said about racism itself.
I’m not upset that when white people see Ariel, they think of the original Disney movie or Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote the original Little Mermaid. That’s their business. But little Black girls are allowed to look at this new Ariel and perhaps think of Mami Wata, Oshun, or Yemaya. In fact, they have an ancestral right. It’s believed that all of Africa contained knowledge of water spirits before any contact with Europeans. So when I see Black girls get excited about Ariel, I don’t simply see representation. I see a connection between their small, excited eyes to that of an ancient world that their minds may not perceive but their souls do.
I laugh at the audacity of the Eurocentric bigots stamping on the joy of those descended from captured Africans who survived the voyage across the Atlantic. All we know is water. It can be the Mississippi River, the Caribbean, the Pacific, or the major lakes. We know it. We feel it. It’s in our bones. And within us all is a water memory that’s been passed down through generations. That memory is knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade and survival.
Looking at Ariel, I do not simply see a mermaid. I think about the many captured Africans who were thrown overboard, their bones becoming a part of the sediment to the ocean floor. What if they never died, but lived on?
These questions have been explored by many thinkers and afrofuturist creatives like Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Rivers Solomon. We’ve already seen Black coded characters having underwater kingdoms. Hell, Disney did it over 20 years ago! Remember Atlantis: The Lost Empire? Don’t get me started on the long sonic history of Black people’s affinity for the legend of Atlantis. Just listen to Parliament Funkadelic or The Isley Brothers.
What if those who were thrown overboard not only lived but created underwater kingdoms where an Ariel could exist? What if Black Ariel’s voice is not one to be used as a song desirous to be a part of the human world, but that of the entire diaspora, reminding us that we were never mere mortals?
This is what I see when I look at the trailer. I think of what Blackness and water constitute in the Disney canon and African spiritual traditions.
Because we can all agree that water is the presence of life and us Black girls and women deserve to exist on land and within the subterranean. Our song deserves to be sung as a call and response between this world and the next.