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.