12.03.2021
For centuries upon centuries sirens have been rendered perilous, their song a fatal enchantment that lured weak men to their demise. In mythology sirens are the embodiment of temptation, their otherworldly beauty a danger to those who heard their song and could not simply pass by. And yet nowhere in these ancient stories do sirens hunt, dragging hapless men to their death or smashing their ill navigated ships on the rocks. They simply sing their signature song, keening to forces far beyond mortality and myth.
Sirens bore the feet, wings and tail of birds, warbling to the world as nightingales do, perched on rocky outcrops and cliffs that claimed the ocean as their own. The handmaidens of Persephone, their lullaby a soporific lament that lapped at the weak willed and seduced those who could not strap themselves to the mast of their own good intention, hungry for someone to blame.
We still inhabit a world where women are held responsible for the temptation of their beauty and shamed for their siren song, neither of which have a single thing to do with anyone else. From Odysseus to wifebeaters everywhere, from lunatic legislators to the denizens of dark alleys, it is the poorest indictment on the world of men that weakness and lack of control has always been framed as you made me do it. The subtext screams of the fear of women's power and the fatal need to possess it.
A new song written now. Our voices louder, the diversity of melody emerging from the salt spray is telling an alternate tale. We are yet Persephone's handmaidens, in tandem with her cycles of descent and elevation, inhabiting life and death and rebirth every moon, in league with the mighty forces that have always lived within us.
We no longer fear the control. We do not submit to our burning or our pillaging. We refuse to walk behind or shoulder blame for the faults of others. We are forming vast choirs knowing there is strength in numbers as we sing truth to power. Just as we always have, bearing the greatest risk on our slim shoulders and radiating sublime faculty to all who pass our shore.
My words from 2019, even more prescient now, written in response to the exhortations for women to change their behaviour to "tackle gendered violence". In Australia we call that having things arse about face, though we heard them again here only weeks ago from the Chief of our Defence Forces (irony bomb, anyone). Again from the UK in the horrifying wake of Sarah Everard's senseless murder.
It isn't women who need to change their behaviour. It is the men who kill, taunt or abuse them. It is the systems and institutions - church and state - that protect them and perpetuate the violence. It is casual misogyny that begins with words spoken and written about women, by men.
Change begins and ends in the world of men, or not at all.
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2021