The last chapter of the novel relates the story of a mermaid caught by a fisherman. Like the novel, the story has multiple outcomes. In your response, please discuss the themes of the mermaid story and show how they connect to specific events in Ayodele’s life. Use quotes if possible. This posting is due by Sunday, January 29.
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I agree with everyone so far that the mermaid story fits well with Ayodele’s own struggles with making the tough decisions in her life. When Ayodele says, “The story does not always end the same way,” it illustrates how small moments throughout our lives can impact the rest of our lives. When we look back at the “end of the story,” on all the decisions we have made up to that point, our stories will probably look similar to Ayodele’s, in that our lives can turn out so many different ways. Later in the chapter, she says, “We are quiet as we mourn the halves of our lives that have smothered our youth, and the other half that is stretching into a grave just like our mother’s.” This quote puts life into perspective by looking at it from the point of view of passing generations, from your parents to you to your children. I think that throughout most of this book Ayodele overanalyzed a lot of things. She was very nervous about making the right decision, and rightfully so, but when you think about it in perspective and think about how your life is just a small part of a vast universe, sometimes you need to take the approach that everything happens for a reason, and act on your gut. I personally would rather make the wrong decision than spend my whole life in indecison.
This is a really thoughtful comment. The quote is a downer, but I really like your conclusion about making a decision.
In the story at the end of the book, the mermaid has choices. She can choose whether to live on land or at sea, and when that decision is taken out of her hands, she can choose to save herself and kill the boy, or let him take her onto land and never go near the sea again. The different endings of the mermaid story allude to Ayodele’s different “endings”. Like Ayodele, this mermaid knows that her decisions will make a great impact on the rest of her life, but sometimes even if it seems like she is going to make the right choice, events spiral out of control and she loses her control over her future. In all three sections of the novel, Ayodele think she has made the right decision of who to lose her virginity to. At the beginning of each story, she has a set plan of what her future will look like. However, there are so many variables and factors in how her story plays out that she cannot control them all. Yuan’s death, for example, was like when the mermaid is caught by the fisherman in the story. The decision is suddenly taken out of her hands. In fact, after reading the book, there is no “right answer”. No one can say for certain what choice she should make, because in all of these stories come pain and suffering. However, the message of this book and the mermaid tale is positive, “if you want something, don’t half want it. Either want it properly and go get it, or forget about it so you will not be drawn into someone else’s magic and get the decision taken out of your hands.” (269).
Maybe another message has to do with how you respond when a decision is taken out of your hands – such as Yuan’s death. In Part Two of the story, it seems like Ayodele never really got beyond that.
The major theme of the mermaid story is that the choices that people make and the ways they approach what they want influence how their lives turn out and the choices that remain in their power. The mermaid, much like Ayodele, spends her time fantasizing about the versions of a life she could have that are not what society and not what her family wants her to do. The mermaid does, on some level, accomplish one of her dreams by living on the land or by returning to the sea, but in both scenarios she must compromise in order for them to be able to be a reality. In each version of Ayodele’s life, she must give up some of what she wants in order to continue with the consequences of other choices she has made. “Life is different from my best imaginings.” (P. 224) Whether it was marrying Frederick Adams after her true love abandoned her, converting and hiding some of her religious beliefs from her preacher husband, or being a part of a polygamist marriage, Ayodele could not carry out the plans she had thought up at the age of eighteen.
The mermaid story also discusses desires. It says incantations “can never force us to want something we do not already half-want.” (P. 267) The incantations represent the outside forces in her life such as society and her mother and their views on sex as well as the people who influence Ayodele to make different decisions in her life. When she married in each of her scenarios, it was not because she wholeheartedly wanted it, but on some level she cared little enough to allow herself to be swayed. In each of her potential life stories, Ayodele lets the “incantations” help to drive what happens to her. The mermaid story says that “The moral of the story is, if you want something, don’t half-want it.” (P. 269) But it seems that many of Ayodele’s choices, no matter which story, are based on half-wanting things. She settles, even beginning with who she loses her virginity to. In the first story, she does not chase the man who left her and returns home without putting in much effort to advancing despite him. In the second, though she does suffer a humungous loss when Yuan dies, she does not bounce back and she marries a preacher, compromising what she believes in order to please him much of the time. In the third, she sacrifices what she wants for her child’s wellbeing and financial security. I think that not fully wanting what she said she wanted forced Ayodele into leading a halfhearted life and not accomplishing what she wished she had. Unfortunate as that is, I think it is important to draw away from this the lesson that her story taught about not following the moral of the mermaid story. At least personally, I definitely will think more about what I want and not settle or compromise to the point where I do not get where I want to go in life.
You’ve done a nice job of connecting the story to specific points of Ayodele’s story. Your reading of the ending seems really sound to me.
Thanks, Eliza, Sarah, and Leslie, for these comments and quotations. The mermaid story and the book as a whole raise some great questions about choices we make (or don’t make) and their consequences. How much is in our control and how much chance?
I liked the mermaid analogy of Ayodele’s life, or should we say, lives. I think it takes the entire story into a different context that isn’t necessarily about who she loses her virginity to that will change her life. In the mermaid story, when she is captured by the son of the medicine man, she “yelps with pain and begs the waves to smother the boat. But her song is weak, her voice is not true, and she is captured”(268). I thought this last phrase was interesting because I thought it represented the idea of her childhood and her culture and how she feels potentially breaking away from it. Had she stayed with her family and the norms of life in the Gambia, she would have been pardoned and the boat would have been smashed for her sake. She is not immediately saved because she has ventured out of the traditional lifestyle; going to study abroad or getting pregnant and deciding to have the child at a young age.
The main question of Ayodele’s entire story is, “Will the mermaid let her world be taken from her without her approval?”(269). This is depressing because in all of Ayodele’s stories, her life has been taken from her in one way or another. For example, her future with Yuan died in a motorcycle accident and her future at university died with the birth of her child. It seems like the mermaid has no option but to let the world be taken, forced to find only not so perfect ways to cope with her decisions.
Like Eliza said, the mermaid story embodies Ayodele’s story, a sentiment expressed by Ayodele herself when she says “There once was. A girl called Ayodele. Her story can be told in many ways.” “Reading the Ceiling” is in fact told in a manner similar to the one described by Ayodele as the common telling of the mermaid story. The prologue is the mermaid’s story up until the the fisherman’s son catches the mermaid. The three alternate paths of Ayodele’s life are different versions of the mermaid story that Ayodele heard. Ayodele reveals that she “loved the idea that it was all in the mermaid’s hands…It meant my life could be full of possibilities too” (274). Like Ayodele, the mermaid had her whole life in front of her, she just could not decide which path she wanted to take. “Sometimes it seem[ed] to her that life in the sea is boring…On nights like this she want[ed] to live in the sky…Other times..she [thought] that a life on land, with the chance to visit the sea often, would be perfect” (268). Ayodele reflects this uncertainty in her inner dialogue: “But who with?…My possibilites begin with Reuben…He’s there because he fancies me…Another option is Yuan Chen…I think he’d be gentle…And the largest mango in my pile…My best friend’s father, Frederick Adams….I think he might teach me quickly” (5-8). Furthermore, like the mermaid, because she only half-wanted something, or rather could not decide what she really wanted, Ayodele’s story never really has the “happily ever after” ending. None of the versions of the mermaid story end happily, in one her eyes are taken out, in another she is given legs but can’t use them etc. Ayodele never really finds happiness either, or at least a happiness not tainted by longing for something else. In one story she longs for children of her own and ends up in a relationship she is not completely comfortable with, in another she becomes her mother, the fate that she was trying to escape from the beginning, on the last path, she longs for true love. Perhaps this points to the reality that a true “happily ever after” never really exists, most of us long for one thing or another no matter how much we have. And if you wish to achieve any of those goals that you have for yourself, you must throw in your all and not just “half want it.”
“The moral of the story is, if you want something, dont half-want it. Either want it properly and go and get it or forget about it so you will not be drawn into someone else’s magic and get the decision taken out of your hands.” This story exemplifies the overall story of Ayodele. The mermaid story talks about how stories can be told in different ways depending the choices you make. Ayodele makes three choices but all three of them seem to be decisions that have not made her happy. i do believe that Yuan made her hap because she needed someone to love her for who she is, but i think even then she was searching for something more. i feel like ayodele never knew what she wanted because she always felt the need to fallow the “social norms”. I think through out the book she made decisions that she half wanted. For example in part one i believed she half wanted her profressor because if she fully wanted him she would have gone and got him. In part 2 Ayodele half wants a baby because she needs someone in her life, after the death of Yaun, but she doesn’t actually want the baby. In part three she half wanted any man so she settled for a polygamous one. In reality she wanted someone who loved her and someone who she could feel the lust with. i think that there are alot of examples of this, but i believe that Ayodele just is very indecisive about her whole life and is struggling to find herself. i think that if we all get stuck up on how are lives would or could be, than we start talking about the what if. you need to not think about the future and live in the present and just see where your life takes you.