Non-Fiction
Making Up The Mermaid of Mattakalappu / Sharanya Manivannan
Image by the author.
I was 27 years old the first time that I went to Mattakalappu—known in English, and originally in Portuguese, as Batticaloa. (I use the names ‘Batticaloa’ and ‘Mattakalappu’ interchangeably, just as we do in conversation). It was the place that had been under the skin of my entire upbringing; the place where my mother had grown up, and perhaps a thousand or more years of my maternal lineage before her or I. I was very ill through the ten-hour drive from Colombo, but sat up to notice, through a light drizzle in the late dusk: at the entrance of the town was an arch. Three mermaids, their palms together in a welcoming gesture, posed atop it. A painted banner contained the Tamil words: “The honey-sweet city where the fishes sing welcomes you with affection.” Below this was this English line: “Welcome To City Of Singingfish”. The arch, painted gold, remains at the time of this writing; the greetings have either worn away or been removed. I know because last week, in June 2021, I saw it in the backdrop of photos of a protest after a man had been shot dead by the security detail of a ruling parliamentarian. All of this and more is Mattakalappu: a place of bloodshed, blood-sacrifice, beauty, and desolation.
In a short story I wrote about that first drive, which I would come to embark on several times after, I described the place this way: “Batticaloa town is on the far east of Sri Lanka, a sweet little lordotic curve on a close-to-forgotten coast. It is where we did not get to grow up, or even visit as we did. But to those whose ears and eyes can discern it, there are things in our accents and the shapes of the bones of our faces that claim us as belonging to it. To claim it as belonging to us would only be one more ruthless annexation.”
As a member of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, a diaspora traumatised by genocide, that last line is weighted by the complexity between land and homeland. We cannot confuse our longings for belonging, especially when to do so may endanger or erase the true stakeholders—those who live there, and still experience internal displacement and state or other violence and discrimination. Although I had lived in Colombo as a child, my family had left the island in 1990. That 2012 trip, when I was 27, was our first time there since 1994. My next trip was four years later, but it was only in 2017 that I began to go back to Mattakalappu again (and again). Then, it was to look for mermaids.
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On full moon nights, if you enter Mattakalappu’s Kallady lagoon in a boat, navigate your way to certain places in the water, lower a wooden paddle within and hold the dry end to your ear you’ll hear them: the sounds.
Sounds like croaking frogs or dying pulsars. These are the songs of the singing fish, or of the meen magal—the fish-tailed women who are everywhere in Batticaloa, who appeared in the songs of 20th century writers like Vipulananda Adigal, but who had neither names nor stories.
The mermaids: I’ve spotted them on public facades like that arch in Uranee, on pillars at the entrance of Eastern University, on roundabouts and clock towers, on a tsunami memorial plaque, even on the roof of a shrine. They are in logos, on menus, in places both random and deliberate.
I asked everyone I met, by appointment and by chance, about whether they knew any mermaid tales. Some told me it hadn’t occurred to them to think about it: the meen magal was just there, in symbols and songs. Even among those who spoke to me at length, the knowledge they shared about folklore, oral history, and culture didn’t contain the narratives I was looking for. But the more I learnt about Mattakalappu, the more this seeming nonchalance towards mystery began to make sense. The supernatural and the chthonic, intangible unless experienced, have a strong influence there. Moreover, the terrible reality of having to live with unanswered questions—such as about kin who were disappeared by governments or guerrillas, as the members of the Mothers of the Disappeared movement do—creates its own relationship with mystery, an ability to cope with what one may never understand.
Some people had no interest in mermaids whatsoever, which were certainly everywhere around them on land, whether or not they were in the lagoon. For instance, I met an elderly writer who brushed off my mermaid enquiry but told me that his great-grandfather had kept the corpse of a child inside a gourd. I was not taken aback by this; as someone raised in Mattakalappu culture, I too had an ease with how the supernatural is always a part of people’s memories and experiences. This revenant could be reanimated through rituals to kill enemies. He told me that, in his view, this was proof of how advanced Tamil civilization was, that we had robots before Western science. The difference between our perspectives—especially my distaste for cultural chauvinism as a means of countering the colonial or the imperialist—was very interesting. I also understood then: what is a mermaid or two beside the force of feuds so sinister than one summons killing spirits? What is strange music from the water beside a worldscape so ornate, so terrible and so alluring?
For centuries, the dominant caste of Mattakalappu were Mukkuvars, a fisher-caste whose matrilineal and matrilocal customs were in practice for some way into the 20th century. Between this women-centric culture and the widespread practice of magic employed for a variety of purposes, the place gained a reputation for being dangerous. And seductive. In the north of the island, travellers heading east would be warned with a famous saying about being careful when they lay their head to sleep on the porch of a Mattakalappu woman’s home—she would roll him into her life, mat and all, and then he could never leave.
At my ancestral temple to the goddess Muthu Maari Amman, very close to that mermaid arch and not far from the village of Satrukondan where my Mukkuvar great-grandmother Valliammai staked a claim to her own land after walking out on a failed marriage, I met a priest who grieved the erosion of the culture. He told me that the cows outside the temple with the name ‘Maari’ branded on them belonged to the goddess; they were sold as beef as a proxy for the animal sacrifice that could not be performed at the temple. That had long been illegal. Other traditional practices like firewalking were being erased. Increasing Brahminization meant Sanskrit liturgy was preferred over Tamil. These obliterations were by Tamils themselves and by Indians, and happened alongside obliterations by the island’s dominant Sinhala agenda, which both recently and in the past has included land appropriation, language exclusion, and other measures through which ethnic equality on the island remains out of reach.
I knew that my grandfather, an activist who later served in high political office, had been involved in bringing in systemized religious orthodoxy decades earlier, and felt a kind of intergenerational anguish, and a further deepening of my commitment to honouring my ancestral culture through creating works that would chronicle that disappeared and disappearing world. On my next visit to the temple, six months later, the priest was gone. So were the Tamil recitations. But when I heard a woman devotee singing alone in Tamil, after the formal ritual was over, I sat to listen.
On yet another trip, I heard about the phenomenon of Batticaloa teenagers cutting themselves and posting images of their wounds on social media. This was naturally baffling to many. The teenagers were communicating something to one another in a brutal lexicon. While this may not be unique to the place, I could not help but connect this phenomenon to what the priest had told me. Blood that is not offered becomes spilled anyway, in some way. It is a primal need. Some tutelaries are like that. Some places are like that, too.
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I decided in 2016 or 2017 that the form my quest for mermaid stories would take would be a graphic novel, that I would both write and illustrate it. Along the way, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to extract from that longer work and create a companion children’s picture book. This was not how it played out. Mermaids In The Moonlight, the picture book, took creative and chronological precedence. It was published in February 2021. Incantations Over Water, the graphic novel, was completed in June 2021 and awaits publication.
In Mermaids In The Moonlight, a diasporic Tamil child and her Amma enter the Kallady lagoon on a full moon night. They listen to the sounds from the deep, and Amma recounts mermaid mythologies from everywhere. Nilavoli and Amma invent Ila, the mermaid of Mattakalappu. Her name is derived from the Tamil word for Sri Lanka: ‘Ilankai’.
Although Nilavoli and Amma do not meet Ila in Mermaids In The Moonlight, and only speculate on her and her kin across the waters of the world, in Incantations Over Water she is fully embodied. Ila narrates the graphic novel. Speaking to an unnamed diasporic Tamil woman who has rowed out into the lagoon and found the mermaid in the waters, Ila renders a soliloquy, a seduction, a “self-portrait without mythology” that limns her own loneliness while offering homage to the land and the lagoon and all that lived or lives in either.
Working with a folkloric void, and acknowledging it—especially in Mermaids In The Moonlight—with stories from around the world meant that I was acutely aware of the risk of cultural appropriation. The picture book both opens and closes with offerings of respect for the original tellers of the stories, and with a recommendation that the reader look beyond my own tellings.
While making the picture book, I had some close calls: I was surprised and humbled to stumble on information that Inuit face tattoos should not be drawn by those outside the culture, and course-corrected my plans for my Sedna image quickly. It was sheer serendipity that brought that information to me, and this near-mistake made me all the more aware that we can only know what we know at any given time. We can work with sincere intention, without claiming authority. With an openness to learning comes an openness to making mistakes.
The passage I agonised over most was about the karukayn of Gurindji country, who can remove their tails and walk on human legs as they please. As part of my due diligence, I contacted an indigenous person in the nation known in English as Australia to ask if they could tell me more. As they were from a different culture, they suggested that I find someone who knew the Dreaming of Gurindji country. Leads faded and emails went unanswered. Out of apprehension, I overcompensated with an awkwardly long line of text in the manuscript which strove to be as respectful as possible. In a beta reader session with his young niece, a novelist friend gently pointed out that I had laden the text with too many concepts that were unexplained (and that I could not explain) in my anxiety over making a misstep. I trimmed the line so that it could actually mean something to a young reader, rather than reflect my confusion. Still, I found calm only when I revisited my source for this lore, The Penguin Book of Mermaids. Mr. Ronnie Wavehill of Gurinji country is quoted thus: “I’m telling the stories they told me: my father, my father’s father, my mother’s father and whoever else. They told me, ‘Keep these stories here and pass them on to anyone, whitefellas and all. Tell the stories! Don’t keep them to yourself!’” My desire to be respectful didn’t abate, but my fear was soothed by this reassurance.
I also had an experience in which someone tried to appropriate from me. A dancer friend of mine in New York City had told a musician originally from Sri Lanka about my work in progress, upon hearing about their general interest in mermaids. He had recommended that they read a specific short story of mine, but when the musician contacted me online, it was evident from their message that they had not, and neither had they ever heard of Batticaloa’s mermaids earlier, before my friend had told them about my work. They wanted my insights, time, and unpublished research, to be used for their own album, without having to engage with my published work. The word “collaboration” was never used.
The experience was upsetting especially because what I looked up of their own work was intriguing. I was saddened by their sense of entitlement and lack of respect for a fellow artist. They seemed to be more successful than I was, if Instagram follower counts are anything to go by, and were also of Caucasian descent.
In the creation, preservation, reproduction, and exchange of stories, so much happens that sometimes ceases to be about the stories themselves. At every step of the way, I worried about my positionality in relation to various cultural, political, and personal intersections. What gave me the right to make these works, to make up the mermaid of Mattakalappu? To be a creator breathed into by the ancestors and by natural wisdoms but to also release work into a world in which capital and power determine that work’s ability to flow or to sink is uneasy.
Inspired by mermaid statues, by the way in which a meen magal was spoken of but unstoried, I made up Ila, the mermaid of Mattakalappu. As for the magic—and if you know anything about Mattakalappu, you will know that magic is rarely benevolent—in that lagoon, and what lives within it… Who do all the mysteries of Mattakalappu belong to? They belong to themselves.
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I created Mermaids In The Moonlight and Incantations Over Water during a time of estrangement from my family, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was an estrangement largely caused by my mother, whose culture I was raised in and which is the basis of these books. Into Mermaids In The Moonlight, I poured all the mother-love I have not experienced, and long to offer, bound by the blessing of stories. Nilavoli, Amma, and Ila are all facets of me.
Almost half of the art in Incantations Over Water was created while my father was hospitalised, or in the weeks after his demise. It is an imbued work. While my maternal lineage is the spinal trunk and roots of the book, its heart is love—in its myriad and spinigerous forms. I had not been permitted to have a relationship with any of my family members in a long time, but my father’s soul and mine connected at what I found out immediately afterward was the time of his passing, and in an unknowing yet profound way, I helped him cross into the light. I was menstruating as we performed his last rites, a taboo in orthodox Hinduism, but not in my beliefs. Blood-sacrament, blood ceremony in the old ways of the culture my father had became a part of through love, and through his progenies’ mingled bloodline. We would mourn ritually for 31 days, the Mattakalappu way. My mother, sisters, and I took half of his ashes to a beach in Chennai that same afternoon. We found a man who agreed to carry the clay pot containing them into the Indian Ocean, so Appa’s remains would not flow back onto our own wet feet on the shore.
The pot contained pieces of my father’s bones and cartilage. To me, they looked like corals, like the lives of the seabed. When that man walked into the waves, holding my father’s remains above his head until his own head was underwater, I began to laugh with joy. “Appa is a mermaid!” I thought. The gift of the experience I had had with him as he transcended beyond this life had already shown me he was free, and at peace—and that I too was free to find, make or claim my own. I had long wanted my ashes to be immersed in Kallady and Uranee, but that day I also felt that I want some of them to be immersed exactly where my father’s were.
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Grief illuminates the bridges between worlds. Mattakalappu is seeped in grief, but it is also a place of many bridges, where once were only boats. When I once told my grandfather that I was taking him to the village of Kokadicholai—the site of a 1991 massacre by the military as well as the location of a historic temple at which the 13th century imperialist King Mahon is said to have imposed his rule—his elderly memory clouded over briefly and he said, “No—that requires taking a boat”. He remembered the bridge, and his own role in its having been erected, only once we were on it, water and verdure around us as far as the eye or the imagination could see.
The first time I ever leaned over and looked into the Kallady lagoon was from the original Lady Manning Bridge, built in 1924. A newer parallel bridge was still not open to the public then. It was an afternoon in December 2012 and there were army personnel there; unconcerned. For some reason, even from that height, the waves were clear. I could see anemones within. I know because I looked hard; at 27 years old, I still held my breath for a sighting of mermaids.
Although I have spent many hours since on the banks of the lagoon, I only entered the water myself once. On a full moon night in October 2017, on my precious Mattakalappu grandmother’s birth anniversary—she who had died after longing for decades to set her eyes just once on the porch of the house she had raised her children in—I put on an unphotogenic orange safety vest and stepped into a boat, on which I had purchased a hotel’s standard “listen to the singing fish” experience. That night, it wasn’t a popular tourist attraction. The boat set out with only two navigators, the driver I had cajoled into coming along because the hotel insisted that they would not let me go alone, and me. In a sense, although nothing like rowing a boat out by oneself, it was a private experience. The navigators took the boat to different parts of the lagoon, cut the motor, and let me listen to my heart’s content to the music from the depths.
Those strange, croaking noises—frog-like, to my ears, neither womanly serenade nor zither’s resonance—were indeed music to me. They filled the silences, the erasures, the questions that will ever remain without absolution. With the ink of that moonspun night, I filled the well of my heart, and the void of my pages.