Book Review: Much ado about mermaids

“The Penguin Book of Mermaids”

Edited by Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown

Penguin Classics, $17

Mermaid folklore, in the western world, can be traced back to Homer’s “Odyssey” in 8 B.C., when Odysseus had his sailors stuff their ears with wax so they’d be deaf to the Sirens’ alluring songs.

Today we’ve got the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, the cheery Disney and Discovery Channel spinoffs of Hans Christian Andersen’s haunting tale, the wigs, plastic scallop-shell bras, glitter makeup and even vinyl tails that some people pull on over their legs to thrash around in the pool.

And now, we’ve got the much-needed antidote, “The Penguin Book of Mermaids,” edited by two University of Hawaii colleagues: professor Cristina Bacchilega, author of “Postmodern Fairy Tales” and other books, and assistant professor Marie Alohalani Brown, author of “Facing the Spears of Change,” an award-winning biography of Hawaiian historian and political leader John Papa I‘i.

Their entertaining and insightful book collects more than 60 mermaid tales from all over the world, many translated for the first time from Hawaiian, Greek, Ilocano, Japanese, Estonian, Italian, Khasi, Persian and Spanish.

“There is something deeply unsettling about a being whose form merges the human with the nonhuman,” Bacchilega and Brown write in their excellent introduction, probing the fearful and yearning corners of the human psyche that resonate to tales of merfolk and other mythical beings, such as Hawaiian mo‘o, the ancient water lizards.

“According to Mary Kawena Pukui, a renowned expert on Hawaiian culture, mermaids are kin to mo‘o,” they write. “Notably, mo‘o personify the life-giving and death-dealing qualities of water, and as such they can be beneficent or malevolent.”

While we are able to enter their watery realm only temporarily, the editors point out, “aquatic humanoids” are “often able to shed the nonhuman portion of their bodies and infiltrate the human world,” living for years on land with their human paramours and part-human children.

Hawaii children will easily identify with the sweet, Chamorro girl Sirena, whose “flaw was that her whole self was always yearning for the water,” and who goes swimming despite her chores and her mother’s curse that she’ll be turned into a fish.

Sometimes the water being is held captive, as in the Irish tale of the selkie, or seal woman, whose husband steals and hides the magical hood she needs to reenter the sea; other times the human is kept in thrall, as was the Hawaiian Puna‘aikoa‘e by a mo‘o who first appeared to him as a woman out surfing and lured him away from his wife.

The tale of Puna‘aikoa‘e is translated by Brown from I‘i’s 1869 story published in a Hawaiian newspaper; also included is “The Mermaid of Honokawailani Pond” by Sara Keli‘iolena Nakoa, who heard it from her grandmother in Ewa.

For local readers, the Hawaiian tales alone are worth the price of this book, which additionally provides a view of our island myths and metaphors in relation to stories with similar themes but diverse settings that take us deep into the natural and social worlds of cultures throughout Oceania, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Thanks to Bacchilega and Brown, mermaids and their kin, after years of appropriation and stereotyping, are reclaiming their image, identity, diversity and rightful places in world history and lore.

Showing us that humans seek to dominate and change nature at their peril, these stories remind us to respect all creatures and ecosystems on our watery planet while better understanding ourselves.