A mermaid in search of her voice
My life changed completely when I read The Little Mermaid. Old enough to have my first understanding of the story come from an illustrated book rather than Disney, the version I read was at once brutal and beautiful—as all good fairy tales are. This ended terribly, with the mermaid jumping overboard into the water and turning into a spirit seeking redemption. I loved it. I cried and cried and loved it.
These days the story of The Little Mermaid is glossed over quickly. Themes of alienation, religion and unrequited love. Trigger warnings for suicide and body mutilation. All searches for her image only bring up a cartoon in a bikini. But somewhere there’s an edition of The Little Mermaid that opens to a two-page spread of a naked woman lying pensively on a beach, marveling at the feeling of sand between her toes. It is the instant before she is seen by the Prince, and she does not yet turn towards him with the devotion that will destroy her. I have no idea how or when I acquired this book, or how it made it past the sensors in Saudi Arabia. I do know it was the first time I’d seen the image of a grown woman’s naked body, or read about someone taking their own life. It was a shocking awakening, in many ways.
I was very young, but I remember being deeply unsettled and frustrated. Why did she give up so quickly? Surely there were other princes? Couldn’t it have been enough to feel the sand between her toes to go on living? What if the mermaid’s sisters had understood her enough to give her something other than a knife? Why did love demand cruelty and sacrifice? So many questions, and yet, like the mermaid, I couldn’t even voice them, never mind answer them. I just stared at the picture and cried.
Every once in a while a story unsettles me in that way again. Makes me feel complex things I can’t even begin to explain, only accept that in such stories every line of dialogue cuts just like the mermaid’s knife, leaving frothing blood in its wake (also an illustration in that book, which clearly wasn’t meant for children but maybe back then nobody checked these things). I’ve learned to welcome that discomfort in the same way that I learned to love the pain The Little Mermaid caused me. I know all too well what it is like to be safe and comfortable and sheltered by people who believe they understand me because we share some trait (gender, ethnicity, blood)—and I love my vicious mermaid sisters and their clumsy attempts at claiming me for their latest furious cause. And I also know what it is like to spend every moment in a world that escapes your understanding, when every step feels like broken glass and you cannot speak because you won’t be understood. How tempting those sisters can be, on the bad days.
I’m halfway through writing a novel where a woman hides her sharper edges to fit into a softer world. Not because she’s in love with a softie prince, but the idea of a just world, one that does not place the strong above the weak, is so foreign and intriguing she has to try to reach it. Even when every step feels like broken glass. I’m still, decades from when I first read it, seeking a happier ending for the little mermaid.