Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Mami Wata is a water spirit venerated across the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. In South Africa, a water spirit who is a mermaid figure goes by many names and is either feared or revered for her other-wordly powers. This mermaid figure, I argue, functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water. I analyse artistic representations of the figure of the “watermeisie” (water maiden/water girl), a kind of mermaid creature who is half-human and half-fish. I discuss how this figure functions as a discursive site for South African women artists’ investigations into the before- and afterlives of slavery. I argue that the watermeisie as nomadic figure provides us with a speculative re-mapping of slave memory in Southern Africa. The article examines how the ocean and the figure of the mermaid appear in works by Koleka Putuma, Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba, artists who have brought the watermeisie with all its complexity in South African waters and discourse into focus, by charting a map of slave genealogies using the roots/routes of slavery in and out of water.

KEYWORDS:

• Water
• mermaid
• slavery
• memory
• black aesthetic
• creolisation

In contemporary African art, there is a recurring preoccupation with life under water, both as traditional motif and in speculative reworkings of this theme. In West Africa, Mami Wata cults are prominent to this day, dating back from before colonial contact. In Flora Nwapa’s novel Efuru, an important literary reference, we read about the Mami Wata of Nigeria who is described in the book as a beautiful black woman with the tail of a fish and with hair flowing down to her shoulders, which she combs with a golden comb (1966). The large scholarship on Mami Wata has paid attention to the myth of the Mami Wata and her relation with the socio-cultural as well as socio-economic dimensions (Drewal 1988; Frank 1995; Van Stipriaan 2003; Krishnan 2012; Bastian 2005; Kasfir 2012).

Mami Wata is nearly always represented as holding or being encircled by a serpent (usually around her neck); however, there are also representations of her as having legs instead of a fish-tail and these representations syncretise with other diasporic water goddesses like the Yoruba deities Yemanja and Osun (see Babatunde 2022; Olademo 2020). Outside of Africa, regions including South America and the Caribbean also have mermaid figures who, like Mami Wata, organise death and disappearance through water. In South America, a figure called Iara is said to lure men into her aquatic underworld, and she too carries a comb (Hoefle 2009). Lasirén is a mermaid figure popular amongst the Haitians who is said to kidnap women. Whilst some drown, others resurface from the watery depths with healing powers. A beautiful rendition of Lasirén can be found in Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads; in the novel, three women are connected in time and space by the water goddess who is able to inhabit their bodies, despite their physical and temporal remoteness from each other (Hopkinson 2004). Lasirén is the water mother, the migratory, polymorphous goddess who traverses the salt roads as well as these women’s minds and bodies. Monique Roffey’s recent novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) depicts a related mermaid figure, and in the novel the figure is utilised to reflect on the historical consequences of slavery and colonialism. The mermaid, named Aycayia, falls in love with a guitar-playing fisherman, David Baptiste. The story of this love affair is fictionally linked to a local Caribbean legend of an indigenous woman who was also cursed to be a mermaid. Perceived as a threat to other women because of her beauty, she was forced to live an isolated life in the ocean. In the novel, the legend is linked to contemporary themes of colonialism like extractive tourism, when two Americans on a fishing expedition catch a mermaid instead of a fish and seek to capitalise on this.

The name of the West African figure Mami Wata literally translates to “mother of the water” (Drewal 1988, 102). Water has played a dominant as well as ambivalent role in West African societies, in ways that travelled with those brought across the Atlantic during periods of enslavement. Alex van Stipriaan observes that, across the Atlantic, Mami Wata came to be depicted as an extremely beautiful and pale mermaid-like woman who, unlike her worshippers, was also very prosperous (2003, 324). Van Stipriaan draws a link between Mami Wata and the European vessels that arrived on African coasts

with impressive figureheads of mermaids and other mythological figures, and the stories told by the sailors on board these ships, for whom mermaids, sirens, water-nymphs and other supernatural creatures from the water formed part of their daily world-view, and who sometimes even worshipped the figureheads on their ships. (2003, 325)

Stories of the figure of the mermaid move and evolve along with the process of modernity and colonial contact. In her more archaic personality, the figure appears in dreams infused with ancestral ritual and supposed sightings (Bernard 2013, 148). Yet by the time of the Atlantic slave trade, she was more commonly associated with how she kidnaps people, especially men, keeping them in her underwater palace. In some versions of the story, she flees when she is caught by surprise by swimmers or boatriders, leaving behind her comb and mirror (Van Stipriaan 2003, 325).

The legend of the Mami Wata figure thus links water, spirit myths, and the histories of enslavement and slavery. The siren with her expensive-looking trinkets and combs represents the flotsam and jetsam of African societies in flux, with the cheap articles that arrived as part of the global trade networks of the time. As Nicolas Argenti writes in his work on folktales and memories of slavery in Cameroon “the mami wata cults and stories of Africa are a modern phenomenon, tracing the imbrication of African societies into global trade networks in the form of extractive economies that find their apogee in the transatlantic slave trade” (2010, 237).

The figure of the mermaid, Ananya Kabir has argued, allows us to think about creolisation as a material and theoretical balancing act between contrasting nations, empires and people (2020, 137). In South Africa, the figure has contemporary historical figurations that connect Southern Africa to far richer and deeper ocean histories across the Indian and Atlantic oceans. In Southern African regions, the figure can be read as having a deep-rooted history in slave memory, and the figure gives us new kinds of access to understanding the undersea as an archive, or even a rubbish dump. Memories of slavery present themselves through the figure of the “watermeisie” (water maiden or water girl), a figure who enables various imaginative as well as perceptive understandings of underwater life. The watermeisie is a kind of mermaid, a creature half-human and half-fish. I argue that the watermeisie is a nomadic figure through whom we can attempt a speculative re-mapping of slave memory in Southern Africa, especially in the Cape region where slave-holding and trade was centred. The watermeisie is nomadic in the way she moves across bodies of water, as well as in the ways she is remembered in regions that have been affected by slavery. The figure archives a creolisation discourse in South Africa that is ongoing, and signals to the entangled nature of the lived experiences of Southern Africa before and after colonial contact.

The term watermeisie is a term from Afrikaans, a creole language that grew in the context of 17th-century Dutch slavery at the Cape where slave populations were transported from South East Asia. These slave communities encountered Dutch (and other European) dialects alongside a range of indigenous languages, resulting in a creolised patois subsequently known as “Afrikaans”. In white-centred representations, Afrikaans was historically framed as a European language that developed from varieties of Dutch, but it has long been accepted by linguists that the development of the language is much more complex (see Roberge 2002; also Van der Waal 2012). The histories and lineages of the watermeisie are difficult to trace but the figure emerges from this creolising context, where a range of hydro-epistemologies and beliefs about water shaped each other alongside languages and dialects which were also coalescing into a new form.

As the study of rocks and archaeological investigations indicates, a mermaid-like figure alongside other rain and water creatures characterised the beliefs of South Africa’s First Nation communities (known today as the KhoiSan). Depictions of “fish-people” in KhoiSan rock painting have survived into the twenty-first century, undergoing over time various and often inexplicable changes, in both representation and attempts to fathom their meaning. KhoiSan rock paintings can still be found in the rocky or mountainous parts of South Africa such as the Drakensberg in Kwa-Zulu Natal, the Eastern Cape as well as the south-western Cape.

These KhoiSan beliefs interacted with the hydrocosmologies of African societies across the sub-continent, for whom water is both a manifestation of life as well as an abode for life-generating snake and other mermaid divinities. In her article title ““Living Water” in Nguni Healing traditions, South Africa”, Penelope Bernard explains the various ways this reciprocal relationship between divinities and the human were made possible. She writes that “in the medium of water, these divinities occupy and move between the subterranean, the terrestrial and celestial worlds, uniting these together in a vital cosmic flow of life” (2013, 148). Bernard explains that this teaching about and initiation into the spirit world was often achieved through dreams, other living creatures and submersion encounters (2013, 148). Water for KhoiSan communities was an important life-source in that water provided sustenance for the body and the spirit. For the KhoiSan water was a divine portal into the ancestral world where they received guidance and protection for life on earth; their reverence for water was further ingrained by their nomadic lifestyle which allowed them to mourn the dead without necessarily visiting a gravesite (Bernard 2013).

Also relevant to the generation of the South African versions of the mermaid legend are the hydrocosmologies brought by enslaved people, who were brought to the Cape from as early as 1653 from South East Asian and African territories such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), Madagascar and Mozambique (Machado 2020). These communities brought Muslim notions of water djinns (genies, supernatural creatures) with them, and these cross-fertilised with African and Khoisan hydroepistemologies. One such story is “Die Djinn Vrou” (The Djinn Wife) a story recorded by I. D. du Plessis, an amateur ethnographer whose accounts of Cape Muslim life are a valuable resource although he also exoticised the community (1939). In the story, a well-respected Muslim man marries a woman who is not well liked by the community, who suspects she is a djinn. When the man’s suspicions are confirmed, he is punished by the djinn wife, who turns the man into a dog. As a dog, the man meets a butcher who takes him in, and that is how he meets another sorceress woman, who realises he is a man. She concocts her own medicine and turns the dog back into a man. The woman advises the man to go back home and hide from his wife, gives the man some water to pour into a cup, and gives him words to whisper into the cup as he pours the water over his wife. The man goes back to his devious wife, hides, and eventually does as he was advised. His wife then turns into a “fish-person”, she runs off into the nearest body of water, and is never seen again. She has become a watermeisie.

Due to the histories of forced or semi-forced removal to which many people in South Africa were subjected during apartheid, the divinities that occupy water also became modified. Migration and the isolationist nature of apartheid led to a distinct separation of communities from natural resources, such as bodies of water, so that the celestial powers that the medium of water carries were also affected. The figure of the watermeisie appears in folk memory in South African townships in updated ways, sometimes removed from the deific qualities she maintains in certain traditions and cultures that still exist in the more rural parts of South Africa. The Citizen, a prominent South African newspaper, ran a prominent story on 8 April 2016 of a small boy who was reported to have been killed in a dam by the watermeisie in Mabopane, a South African township north of Gauteng. According to the report, the boy and two other friends had accepted money from a woman who was in the water. When the boy went closer, the woman, whose torso was initially hidden by the water, emerged showing a large fish tail. She pulled him into the water. His lifeless body was later recovered near the dam. Such stories are not unusual. In the townships, the watermeisie is usually said to have been sighted in local rivers and dams; she is used as a tool to instil terror in children, in order to dissuade them from swimming in local rivers and dams, where they might drown (Matsena 2016).

The watermeisie is a mythical nomadic creature that moves across bodies of water as well as imaginaries. She is a figure that lives in bodies of water from the pelagic, which refers to areas in the sea that are not near the bottom of the ocean nor the shore, to the benthic, which refers to areas at the bottom of the deeper ocean. The figure is said to make frequent resurfacings to the shore, in rivers, and other small bodies of freshwater. In this article, with its focus on the South African versions of the creature, I refer to her as the watermeisie because that is how she was introduced to my imaginary. I grew up in Soweto, a part of greater Johannesburg that is landlocked, but has rivers and dams where drownings occasionally occur. References to the watermeisie appear frequently in South African townships (black and largely working class residential areas), where she is a modern urban phenomenon. We used to scare each other as children with watermeisie stories. In this context the major ideas and beliefs associated with the watermeisie are those of beauty and wealth, but also of disappearance and malice. She is reputed to capture and kidnap people, taking them down to her watery abode, where she may keep them to die or bestow on them gifts and wealth that may be useful to them in the world above. She is sinister and selfish. She sees her captives as owing allegiance to her and belonging to her. These are general beliefs about the figure of the mermaid that are not particular to Soweto, but are shared across regions with bodies of water. Similar stories of her exist in other Southern African contexts. Percy Zvomuya, in his article from 5 February (2020) published on New Frame titled “Chasing Mermaids”, writes of a power-hungry prophet who had recently led his congregants on a “mermaid chase” in Zimbabwe. The chase is said to have led to the death of two congregants, who were submerged in the mermaid-dam and never returned, leading to community members blaming the wealth-hungry prophet.

This article is informed by projects that privilege the Global South in scholarship on slave memory and oceanic humanities. Like the work of Kerry Bystrom and Isabel Hofmeyr in their “Oceanic Routes: (Post-It) Notes on Hyrdro-Colonialism” this research is also an exercise in bringing perspectives and methods from the Global South into conversation with hegemonic Atlantic studies and methods (2017, 1). I am interested in reformulating notions of the ocean as an archive as well as a rubbish dump, rejecting the ordered textual archive for the ocean itself as a fecund site from which writing on slave memory can flourish. This to me means producing knowledge using non-linear approaches, and understanding how memory is a field whereby histories can be studied and understood in all their complexities. This assemblage adopts interdisciplinary transitions between oceanic studies on new materialisms and black hydropoetics (see Hofmeyr, Nuttall, and Lavery 2022, 304). In this way, spaces of fluidity and creolisation are understood as “dry” but are rather hollowed out and thus previously unseen literary and artistic regions opened up. Consequently, these theoretical and methodological terrains allow me to submerge myself in narratives that privilege both the terrestrial as well as the immersive.

The two oceans (the Indian and the Atlantic) operate as the archive as well as the rubbish dumps of South African history, and this happens in both the literal as well as the figurative sense. Two literary and cultural studies scholars who have brought this to focus are Gabeba Baderoon and Pumla Gqola, in their provocative work on slave memory in South Africa. Baderoon in her book Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Aparthied theorises a two-ocean consciousness, and writes about how Cape Town’s position between these two oceans allows us to give our attention to both sites as areas of material and cosmological connections, especially where the remembrance of slavery is concerned (2009, 91). Gqola, in What is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Aparthied South Africa, investigates overlapping diasporic links in African and Asian iconographies that conjure memories of slavery (2010). For both these scholars slavery and how it is memorialised publicly and privately in South Africa point to the dangers of the chrononormativity that has long shaped Indian and Atlantic Ocean scholarship. My contribution is to bring the oceanic humanities and scholarship on slave memory in South Africa together by arguing that the ubiquity of the mermaid figure in South Africa functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water.

Black aesthetic engagement with the ocean can be read alongside recent developments in oceanic studies where there has been an attempt to engage with the materiality of the ocean. The black aesthetic centralises black life and experience in its artistic and academic endeavours. Scholars who work with the black aesthetic like Sharpe (2016), Joshua Bennett (2018a, 2018b) and Katherine McKittrick (2020) are now engaging with ecological themes alongside longstanding commitments to artistic and academic work that privileges black life across African and previously enslaved diasporas to argue that black life has always been inextricably linked to ecology. In Southern Africa, at least, this has often been collapsed oppositionally, with the ocean being seen as the site of European imperialisms, and black intellectual traditions being cast in an anti-colonial, national and terrestrial mode. More recently however there has been an attempt to undo this binary and to decolonise the ocean by moving away from terrestrial nationalism and encompassing the ocean (and ecological questions more generally) as central to black intellectual traditions. Examples are black feminist reclaimings of the ocean via new histories of slavery (Gqola 2010; Baderoon 2014; Putuma 2017) and Indian Ocean work which stresses supra-national histories of slavery and indenture (Hofmeyr, Gupta, and Pearson 2010; Samuelson 2013; Vergès 2003). I move on now to discuss some South African examples of the figure of the watermeisie, by examining the figure of the mermaid in selected works from three South African woman artists, poet Koleka Putuma and artists Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba.

In the poem “Water” from the collection Collective Amnesia South African poet Koleka Putuma engages with the myths that permeate everyday discourse in South Africa concerning black people’s relationship with water (2017, 96–97). She recalls a new year’s eve experience and memory, one she supposes she shares with “most people raised black” in South Africa (line 2) – that of going to the beach with “black tights and Shoprite plastic bags wrapped around our new weaves” (line 4). Putuma recalls the elders who forbade her (and others) from riding the waves, elders who feared that “we would be a mass of blackness swept by the tide/and never return/like litter” (lines 6–8). For Putuma, being black makes her vulnerable to the ocean – so much so that her body can easily be reduced to the waste and litter found in the ocean, and that never returns. The elders, Putuma recalls, forbade them from riding the waves “as if the ocean has food poisoning” (line 9) and every time Putuma looks out into the sea, she feels as if she is drowning. The poem deals with the contemporary relationship that black South African people can have with the ocean, and references memories of slavery and apartheid and their legacy in the Cape. Born and raised in Cape Town, a city with powerful slave memories and histories, Putuma often refers to slavery and post-slavery narratives in her work. For Putuma, the very presence of the sea is a reminder of histories of slavery. The ocean is a reminder of South Africa’s involvement in the displacement of people in the Indian Ocean with slaves from South East Asian territories such as Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Ceylon and African countries like Madagascar and its surrounding regions being transported to the Cape, altering the region and the country’s history permanently. It is not only Putuma who remembers this history, the ocean too remembers. Putuma writes:

Yet every time our skin goes under

It’s as if the reeds remember that they were once chains

And the water, restless, wishes it could spew all of the slaves and ships onto shore

Whole as they had boarded, sailed and sunk

Their tears are what have turned the ocean salty,

This is why our irises burn every time we go under. (lines 21–28)

Putuma blends the festivity of the December holiday with her own recollections and with those of history. Her relationship with the ocean is a complicated one and we see in the poem that the ocean is represented as at once the prison and the potential liberator. Its reeds “remember that they were once chains” and the restless water “wishes it could spew all of the slaves and ships onto shore”. The ocean is represented as itself having been traumatised; hence it has kept all the tears, and that is why its waters are salty. Putuma associates bodily with oceanic salt in order to link, poetically, the histories of the human body to the aquatic environment. The reeds and the sea salt become powerful metaphors for pain whilst her body is represented as potential waste material, even mere litter. Although Putuma admonishes the ocean, she also reveres it and she reminds the reader that for black people the ocean can be a site of baptism, otherworldliness, cleansing and a place to connect with the dead (lines 33–36).

For many communities water is a spiritual medium, so much so that different bodies of water can each have their special significance in the spiritual realm. Water is often understood as a medium or route towards transcending to another world, and Putuma’s poem refers to these aspects of the sea. The poem suggests that, for the poet, the ocean has two histories: one associated with pain and another with rejuvenation. In the poem, the ocean cannot cleanse itself and this signals to the immense suffering caused by enslavement. The ocean is a gravesite for the “masses of blackness” to connect with the dead (line 36) following the South African tradition of visiting the gravesites of lost ones at every year’s end. Putuma’s poetry points out the residues of slavery which can still be found in the marine environment. In the poem “Water”, the myth of origin and the notion of South African indigeneity is complicated by narratives of slavery. In the poem, the ocean is posited as a realm of ancestry and belonging; all these are imaginative dimensions in black aesthetics and hydropoetics of writing about the deep ocean. The poem presents us with the multiple ways water operates as a site of contradictions, memories, and contemporary history.

In the next section of this article, I analyse the ways in which these mer-figures and their ability to produce cross-cultural understandings of life underwater have been drawn on by two contemporary South African woman artists: Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba. It would be an illuminating project to also include contemporary artists from elsewhere, such as the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. For this article, however, I focus on South African examples only. In very different ways, as I show below, both Schreuders and Xaba have created works that deal with the topic of the watermeisie. Schreuders’s sculpture “The Lost Girl” offers some insight into the complex identities of white South Africans who identify as being African. Nelisiwe Xaba’s exhibition “The Urban Mermaid” estranges our rigid ideas of traditions and modernities, using the township and the “urban” to re-interpret the traditional understandings of water creatures. The artworks allow me to broaden my discussion on the watermeisie as a site of slave memory whilst also paying attention to questions of ecological collapse and the ways in which the ocean is an archive as well as a rubbish dump. This section argues that the watermeisie can be seen as a mapping of our belonging and accountability as political and imaginative subjects in the deep ocean (Neimanis 2013, 26).

In her article “The African Oceans – Tracing the Sea as Memory of Slavery in South African Literature and Culture” Gabeba Baderoon remarks on the relationships that exist, as well as the divergences between, the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. She sees these oceans as connected and producing what she refers to as a “two-ocean consciousness” particularly in South Africa which is connected to both via the stormy Cape (2009, 91). I want to suggest this consciousness is materially visible in Claudette Schreuders’s artwork “The Lost Girl”, a figure carved from wood. As an artist, Schreuders is interested in her own personal rendition of what it means to be white and African without necessarily neglecting collective histories. I see her work as enacting what Gabeba Baderoon writes of as a phenomenon that emerges when artists and writers work through and with the theme of the sea, and the alternative and more personalised histories from Cape slavery become “recoverable by looking obliquely at the culture of the powerful and probing it for the subsumed histories of slave presence and agency” (Baderoon 2009, 91). Whilst Schreuders and her ancestors were not enslaved in South Africa she allows herself to reconcile with the heritage of slavery and colonialism in South Africa and what it means to be a descendant of the perpetrator which too is a site of slave memory. Schreuders does not look towards redeeming narratives of what it means to be white and South African, but rather works with an intergenerational narrative and memory that bears in mind the legacy of white settler histories across racial and ethnic lines.

Schreuders’ work is usually carved from wood and the works have a strong narrative and storytelling dimension. Her work has a two-ocean consciousness in that she engages with her African and European heritage simultaneously without placing one above the other, but rather working within the complexities of this mixed-heritage and as her artist profile on The Artists’ Press website indicates, her “sculptures demonstrate a convergence of African and European influences from the colon figures of West Africa to medieval church sculpture, Spanish portraiture and Egyptian woodcarving”. In the same profile Schreuders herself is quoted describing her approach as being “western” and yet very much influenced by African art forms, stating that her work should be read as the convergence of two identities that do sometimes clash. Schreuders evokes an Eve of the waters alongside Mami Wata and the watermeisie as she simultaneously pays attention to the layered and syncretic nature of Christianity at the Cape and South Africa in general.

“The Lost Girl” (2000) is a figure carved from avocado and jelutong wood with enamel and oil paint finish. The work, featured in Schreuders’s Burnt by the Sun exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, encompasses themes of ambiguous identities and the clash between the individual’s private and public life. These themes are evident throughout her work and can be seen in her other exhibitions such as Crying in Public and The Bystanders. The figure itself is a sunburnt white woman with an unusually large head and small body who holds her face bent down, facing the head of a snake. She seems to be communicating with it as her hands are gesturing and the snake simultaneously faces her. Her hair seems to be wet and appears flattened and slick as if she has been in water. This watermeisie does not look terrifying or even evil; she also does not exude the outrageous femininity the watermeisie is known for. In fact, she looks introverted, and even kind. The discomfort comes from the fact that she seems comfortable with a snake around her neck. Although Schreuders’s figure alludes to Eve, mermaids and carved, poly-chromed figureheads, there is also an African influence implicit in the stylised physiognomy of the sculpture, which resembles the Baule colon figures of West Africans that were made to represent Europeans in response to colonialism. Like “The Lost Girl” the Baule colon figures are carved from wood, they have unusually large heads and small bodies, and were made to caricature Europeans; Schreuders inverts this tradition. The colon figure has evolved into a decorative form of art, an airport souvenir from West and Central Africa (see Steiner 1989; Bickford 1998; Olesen 2012). Claudette Schreuders has managed to use what many would have seen as decorative to reflect on the ambiguities of the search for “authentic” African identities; especially for white Africans. Instead of caricature and decoration Schreuders opts for openness and reality, even vulnerability, to interrogate a sense of self influenced by historical depictions such as the ones maintained through Baule colon figures. Schreuders adopts and adapts them to confront not only satire but what hides behind it. Her “The Lost Girl” traverses three understandings of the mermaid: the South African concept of the watermeisie, the Mami Wata, as well as a biblical Eve of the waters.

By bringing both conceptions of the mermaid from a Southern African perspective as well as a West African one, along with the idea of the mermaid as an Eve of the waters, Schreuders is engaging with the hybrid legacies of movement and belonging at sea. In an interview, Schreuders explains that the figure of the mermaid appears quite frequently in her work because “she likes the idea of a mermaid as a kind of lost girl, not at home in either land or water”.¹ Schreuders’s lostness is one derived from a feeling of alienation on both land and water; the watermeisie too has a complicated history with land and water and often origin stories of the watermeisies detail a curse or banishment of a female into the water or a water spirit who hunts on land for captives via myriad disguises and keeps her captives in water. For Schreuders this theme of the mermaid’s unbelonging is useful for an understanding of often obscure African-European identity. In the same interview she reveals that she is “amazed at how universal this creature is, she exists in many diverse cultures, simultaneously attractive and repulsive”. The mermaid allows Schreuders to shift between beauty and ugliness, to point to the experience of being white and simultaneously identifying as African, having a full knowledge of the historical process of colonialism. In the publication, The Artists’ Press Schreuders’s work is described as showcasing “‘modern deities’ who face modern problems … figures who have the potential to cure as well as create space for ourselves in environments we have often viewed as ‘alien’”.² Schreuders herself views her approach as being “western” and yet very much influenced by African art forms; and thus her work should be read as a mixture or the convergence of two identities that do sometimes clash. Thus the mermaid figure’s sustained relevance and diversity makes her interesting to Schreuders. The figure works in doubles: European and African, beauty and ugliness, satire and vulnerability, subversion and purity.

Nelisiwe Xaba, the third artist I discuss here, is known for her multimedia contemporary choreography installations and films such as her a collaboration with cinematographer Mocke J. Van Vueren titled Uncles and Angels.³ Her work is politically driven with a specific focus on “challenging stereotypes of the black female body and cultural notions of gender mainstreams”, as her artist’s page declares on the website of the gallery that represents her art.⁴ Xaba works with durational performances during her exhibitions which is a curational format that blends visual art and theatrical performance elements and experiments with the spatial and the temporal. This particular exhibition was showcased at the Goodman Gallery in Johannensburg in June 2016, and featured in an exhibition titled “New Revolutions”. Xaba is focused on the urban experience of the watermeisie and uses materials like plastic to reference life in the urban areas. Plastic is one of the leading waste materials in the marine world today, and the exhibition thus called attention to the environmental disaster caused by plastic, as material, as well as to our consumerist plastic lives.

Xaba places her mermaid in a suburban landscape thus taking the creature away from the locations with which she is usually associated and which have come to define her such as rivers, dams and oceans. Xaba places her sea-creature, drabbed in plastic, in an inland environment to reflect on the ways in which our urban lifestyles influence the marine habitat. Xaba presents an alternative modernity of the mermaid by engaging her via notions of plastic waste and consumption; and instead of a more traditional approach, we meet an urban mermaid. Xaba’s poetic of relation and her urban mermaid are linked to black aesthetic representations of black people’s relationship with water; for Xaba, the legend of the watermeisie points to an enduring relationship black people have with not only water but also survival. The watermeisie is a water-creature that has survived and adapted to ongoing processes of modernity much in the same way that colonised diasporas have. From Xaba’s mermaid we learn that to swim happens even in the absence of water.

Xaba’s mermaid, like Schreuders’, reconfigures the mythical figure in a contemporary light. The exhibition catalogue states that: “The Urban Mermaid takes its inspiration from the mythical creature with a body half-woman and half-fish, known by various names – Mami Wata, Sirene, Mamlambo, Watermeisie, Madame Poisson” (Goodman Gallery).⁵ Xaba recreates these stories in her performance through costume – made of a children’s swimming pool and blue plastic wrap – and sound, a mix of Diamanda Galas plays in the background throughout the entire performance. It was a one-off performance featured in an exhibition titled “New Revolutions”. In the performance, the artist played and posed in various positions; at one point she was swimming, in another she sat watching the audience looking back at her. In a photograph provided on the Goodman Gallery website, she is depicted drinking wine in a laid back position wearing her goggles and blonde wig.⁶ As Nelisiwe Xaba’s mermaid lazes around the backyard with a plastic pool her movement coalesces with the distinctive sounds of a Diamanda Galás mix that plays in the background. Diamanda Galás is an American dramatic soprano, composer and pianist whose sound and performances are known for their political activism. The sound is dark and gloomy; her rendition of “Gloomy Sunday” by Billie Holiday exaggerates Holiday’s already dark sound. This sound contrasts quite starkly with the “plastic” feel of the “The Urban Mermaid”.

The urban mermaid wears a silvery-blonde long-haired wig, as well as plastic goggles. As if showcasing the malleability of the watermeisie, Xaba does not rely on traditionalist depictions of the figure. Xaba’s mermaid is a privileged citizen of Sandton, a wealthy South African suburb, a wine-sipping mermaid. An expensive bottle of wine is featured in the exhibition and the mermaid is seen drinking a glass in one of the photos taken from the installation. The watermeisie here represents a lavish, watery life. The swimming pool signifies an extravagant life or even pretence at extravagance seeing as the pool is a small children’s pool; the bright wig intimates that we are looking at a self-regarding modern girl in Johannesburg today. The leisure of the meisie is now turned into a critique of a certain kind of lifestyle in the city. The Diamanda Galás mix evokes a gloomier mood because the lyrics are quite pessimistic and without hope. Hence there is an implied critique of the plastic feel of the exhibition, which looks brashly bright compared to the sound. Xaba wants the audience to notice this contrast so that they are also made uncomfortable by the leisure of even attending a gallery opening and the type of privilege this activity signifies. The watermeisie seems to be care-free and spends her days lazing around; she seems to have no duties or obligations, except for drinking her wine. Yet there is an in-built critique of this life. Xaba uses a lot of plastic in her installation; the mermaid’s tail is made of blue plastic wrapping, the goggles are plastic, and so is the children’s swimming pool. Xaba seems to be making reference to the often fake and “plastic” lives of black modern girls; she may also be referring to the uncertainty of their lifestyles, using the figure of the mermaid. Life in the city is uncertain because many come to the city to chase dreams that eventually consume them and often the illusions of grandeur and success are the result of accumulated debt and masquerades of success. The watermeisie too is an undetermined figure; we can never really know how real she is in the physical world.

Xaba’s urban mermaid stages a vibrant encounter with melancholia and issues of justice; prominent tropes of the black aesthetic. If the black aesthetic is a corrective, as Addison (1971) suggests, then Xaba indeed corrects and even justifies. Xaba avoids grand narratives yet also works within black intergenerational narratives; her mermaid is a contemporary artefact with a consciousness of the past (Gqola 2004, 2). Xaba uses tropes in the black aesthetic to critique consumption and class relations in urban contexts.

Conclusion

Claudette Schreuders and Nelisiwe Xaba’s mermaids are figures situated within a two-ocean consciousness which engages with South African dialogues of belonging and slave memory. They are in conversation with a global black aesthetic movement, by tackling the ecological alongside the racial. Their works are part of an artistic movement that attempts to navigate new ways to imagine how human and non-human life can be organised and conceptualised in Indian and Atlantic Ocean intellectual histories. As they confront racialised notions of the natural world, Schreuders and Xaba respond to histories of racism and anti-blackness (see Bennett 2018b).

Traditions of black thought have often operated at the limits of the human, in response to histories of racism and anti-blackness, in which black bodies have not always been accorded their full humanity. Schreuders and Xaba turn to the ocean which has long been central to the traditions of black thought. Joshua Bennett suggests in “‘Beyond the Vomiting Dark’: Toward a Black Hydropoetics” that we need to “theorize black ecopoetics not as a matter of ground but as an occasion to think at the intersection of terra firma and open sea, surface and benthos, the observable ocean as well as the uncharted blackness at its very bottom” (Bennett 2018b, 103). This re-exploration involves seeing blackness as historically linked to ecological spaces like the ocean, in order to develop re-imaginations of the aquatic environment. History is indeed locked in the confines of the deep sea, and the sea is both matter and metaphor. The ocean layers are places from which notions of waste and the archive and their relationship with the “figurative darkness” can be envisaged and new cartographic contact zones drawn. In this article, I have argued that the mermaid figure in South Africa functions as site of slavery memory as well as a reminder of the troubled relationship black and previously enslaved communities have with water. I have analysed artistic representations of the figure of the watermeisie in Claudette Schreuders’ and Nelisiwe Xaba’s work to discuss how this figure functions as a discursive site for South African women artists’ investigations into the before- and afterlives of slavery in South Africa.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 https://mapmyway.co.za/between-10and5-weekly-round-up/

2 https://www.artprintsa.com/claudette-schreuders.html

3 https://arts.uj.ac.za/events/show/UNCLESANGELS/

4 https://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/686

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.