Finalist in the third edition of the LALT Literary Essay Contest (2025)
Editor’s Note: “A Lasting Echo: A Few Reconfigurations of the Myth of the Siren” by Venezuelan writer and academic Mariana Libertad Suárez was selected as a finalist in the Third Annual LALT Literary Essay Contest. Here, the author analyzes the symbolic origins of the mermaid as she traces this being’s presence through various works of Latin American literature. Along the way, Libertad Suárez questions, “how did these Homeric figures with no defined physical appearance—but which, according to the enchantress Circe, bewitched all sailors with their ‘high, thrilling song,’ ‘lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones’—become fragile, solitary women, willing to give themselves up for love? When did sirens, or mermaids, lose the wings given to them by their earliest sculptors, acquire their two fish tails—which, in a couple of centuries, would become one—and end up abandoning what made them unique in order to gain male acceptance?”
In the end, every myth evaporates, is trivialized and demystified. The sirens we see painted on the front window of a café or a bar (…) are a trivial echo of the seductresses of yesteryear. The sirens’ charms have dissipated; now they are mere glimmers, a hazy mirage. But it is fitting, I think, to remember how far their myth has traveled, and how the figures and charms of these ancient ladies have changed. It is an intriguing story, with multiple poetic and pictorial echoes.
Carlos García Gual, Sirenas: Seducciones y metamorfosis
Unlike many mythical creatures of classical Greece which, over time, have lost their symbolic power or have remained anchored to an unchanging image, sirens—or mermaids, as they are often known in English—have shown a unique ability to adapt, transform, and endure. These liminal figures par excellence have neither disappeared from the collective imagination nor remained static, like the lamia or the minotaur; instead, they have traversed centuries of history and been reconfigured again and again according to varied sensibilities. To this day, they continue to be reread from diverse emotional standpoints. From the eighth century B.C. to the present day, sirens have been the object of constant reappropriation, such that we might trace their presence from the column capitals of medieval churches to the Renaissance paintings of Hieronymus Bosch to settings as unlike the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis as the churches of Santa María Magdalena in Lima, Peru, and San Lorenzo de Carangas in Potosí, Bolivia.
On the façade of Puno Cathedral, built in the eighteenth century, we see a siren playing an Andean charango. But instead of intimidating passers-by, as Homer’s sirens did, this image invites them to step into the church. This figure is so striking that it gave rise to a contemporary legend. It is said there was a mine-owner who extracted ore from the mountain of Laykacota; he made a living off abusing indigenous workers, beating them and forcing them to toil beyond all limits. All of his laborers were worn out by this mistreatment, so they tried to get as much sleep as they could, but there was one—a quiet man—who left every night at sunset and returned at dawn. When the other miners found out this man was slipping away every night to make love to a siren, he decided to leave for good with his beloved. He knew he was going to be happy, but it pained him to leave his workmates behind, so he carved the siren’s image onto the cathedral so all of them could see her and feel the same relief he did when he held her in his arms. Cristina Jiménez Gómez explains that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prostitutes were frequently compared to sirens, as it was thought these beings corrupted one’s virtue and were full of carnal desire. Before Puno Cathedral was built, and in other parts of the world as well, mermaids aroused chaos in the prescribed family order rather than placid calm. In this sense, we might say the legend from Puno reassembles a trope born in the nineteenth century that curiously remains popular in the twenty-first: the siren who loves human beings.
Although she is quite different from the Puno siren, since her love is unrequited, the most iconic example of this creature being not seductive but noble is the protagonist of “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. This character, who lives with her family at the bottom of the sea, falls in love with a human prince and decides to give up her fish tail—the marker of her identity, which makes her a part of her environment—in order to marry him. With help from a witch, she makes this change, but then she feels a terrible pain when she walks. Her sisters try to find an antidote, and they bring her a knife with which she must kill the prince, but the little mermaid decides she would rather turn into sea foam than murder the man for whom she gave up her own essence and any chance of belonging.
In this context, we might well ask: how did these Homeric figures with no defined physical appearance—but which, according to the enchantress Circe, bewitched all sailors with their “high, thrilling song,” “lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpses rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones”—become fragile, solitary women, willing to give themselves up for love? When did sirens, or mermaids, lose the wings given to them by their earliest sculptors, acquire their two fish tails—which, in a couple of centuries, would become one—and end up abandoning what made them unique in order to gain male acceptance? Taking a perfunctory look at the aforementioned texts, it becomes reasonably clear that the physical, thymic-passional, and psychological changes this creature has undergone are intimately linked to the position of the author who speaks her into existence: the voice that shows us the sirens tends to modify their morphology, granting them a contextual meaning that becomes useful in expressing a series of ideas.
What do we find when we examine certain sirens or mermaids from Latin American literature? In the short story “Las ondinas” by Rafaela Contreras Cañas, published in the late nineteenth century, we are told how Coralina, a mermaid with two younger sisters, decides to leave for the outside world. Like Andersen’s character, she gives up her fish tail in order to win an artist’s love, but she soon grows bored of their relationship and decides to depart. She goes her own way and the man ends up falling in love with somebody else. With this discourse, the author not only distances the siren from the figure of the romantic heroine but also denies her the role of the femme fatale, as Armando, the man she abandons, survives their breakup and is able to continue functioning in society. This is a clear rereading of the ethical codes of Romanticism and, at the same time, a shift in Modernist aesthetics. Contreras uses the figure of the siren to humanize the woman, to show that she is a being ingrained in history and, therefore, her passions and convictions will evolve over time.
Likewise, in the 1970s, Argentine author Marco Denevi wrote:
When the Sirens saw Ulysses’ ship pass by and noticed the men had plugged up their ears so as not to hear them sing (them, the most beautiful and seductive of women!) they smiled scornfully and said to one another: what sort of men are these, who choose to resist the Sirens? And so they kept quiet, and let them go on in the midst of a silence that was the worst of all insults.
Here, he takes a stance with regard to at least two debates that arose from literary studies and feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. First, he speaks of the interpellative power of silence: a subject masterfully addressed by Josefina Ludmer, two decades after Denevi’s text, when she discusses Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in her essay “Las tretas del débil.” Second, he makes visible the separation between women’s desire, sexual practice, and reproductive will, which permeated the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States. Curiously, in this work of flash fiction, he speaks neither of sea monsters nor of mythological beings, but rather of “beautiful women”; this too reveals the process of resignification the author carries out.
Also in the seventies, a siren appeared in a short story as unusual within the Venezuelan literary canon of its time as it was within its author’s body of work: Gloria Stolk’s “Así me dijo el mar.” This story forms part of the book Cuentos del Caribe, published in 1975 by Monte Ávila. When it went to print, Stolk was teaching contemporary literature at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello’s school of journalism and had already been vice president of the Asociación de Escritores Venezolanos, president of the Asociación Venezolana de Mujeres, and director of the Unión de Mujeres Americanas. She had also been a board member of the Asociación José María Vargas and first president of Venezuela’s Instituto de Cultura y Bellas Artes. What’s more, she had earned the Premio Arístides Rojas for her novel Amargo el fondo (1956). All in all, she was a well-established intellectual; this was perhaps why four years later, in 1979, the public was so shocked by her suicide.
Running the risk of biographism that comes with this reading, we might understand “Así me dijo el mar” as a goodbye letter—a declaration of intent which, through a Caribbean siren, Stolk shared with her readers. The story tells how a little girl named Alfida must learn to live with an inexplicable difference: she can only communicate by singing. From a young age, she sets her lessons to melodies, which exasperates her mother, who fruitlessly turns to healers and enchantresses in search of a cure. As Alfida grows up, her singing intensifies. A poet suggests, “in another life she was a siren,” but her mother, ashamed, insists she is simply a fool. The community marginalizes them due to her strangeness, and Alfida starts to feel guilty for her mother’s isolation and to see her song as a curse. One day she falls in love with the sea, and she sings to it for hours, even before dawn. One morning, she does not come home. Her mother, noticing her absence, supposes she has run away with someone, though she cannot imagine who would have wanted such an unusual woman.
Stolk’s life was marked, above all else, by her refusal to stay silent in the face of injustice, her demand for social equality, and, first and foremost, her absolute inability to take part in the world without questioning it. Like Alfida, the way she expressed herself was often questioned in turn and seen as a superfluous act of rebelliousness. Her strangeness within the Venezuelan cultural sphere led to her being accused of betraying her homeland, as one of the heroines of her novels falls in love with a foreigner. Meanwhile, as Carmen Victoria Vivas describes, the intellectual Pedro Pablo Paredes worked to dismantle her critical reading of Venezuelan literature from a pedagogical standpoint, presenting her as an example of what not to do. Despite her recognition and central status in Venezuelan intellectual circles, the likes of which few women of her time enjoyed, she was omitted from the Biblioteca femenina venezolana and, as Raquel Rivas Rojas is right to point out, her fables of identity blurred the borders of the national, turning her discourse into the obverse of Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia, a novel that tells a story of being forced to put down roots. Thus, Stolk’s discourse not only established a critical counterpoint to the patriarchal narrative of Rómulo Gallegos—as did her contemporaries Ada Pérez Guevara, Dinorah Ramos, and Lucila Palacios—but it also distanced itself from the women’s stories that focused on decrying women’s circumstances. Stolk was an unsettling figure who, like Alfida, confounded all others with her song.
Then there’s the ambiguity of the ending, the fact it is said the story sprung from a rumor, that it tells of love for the sea, of escaping with a lover or disappearing with no more talk of the wish to disappear. Alfida is a siren who terrorizes no one, unlike Homer’s sirens; she stirs no unconditional love, like the siren on Puno Cathedral, and has no agency, unlike the siren given to us by Rafaela Contreras Cañas. She is a monstrous, hybrid being, like all history’s sirens, but her non-normative morphology forces her to increase her isolation until she erases herself entirely. We might say, hidden within the archives of Venezuelan literature, there is a siren who has been repoliticized—for, while she is eliminated, she disappears of her own free will. This proves that sirens, as a symbol, not only allow us to reimagine the borders of gender, identity, and belonging; they have also been used as emblems of rebellion, subjugation, and resistance to the structures that, for centuries, have sought to limit and define women.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
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