Myths of the Skin Trade

Page 29 July–August 2008 Myths of the skin trAde Carol Quinn silkie Anne-Marie Cusac Many Mountains Moving Press http://www.mmminc.org 84 pages; paper, $14.95 In the author’s preface to this collection of poems , Anne-Marie Cusac explains that, according to Irish and Scottish folklore (distantly remembered in Nova Scotia, where these poems are set), “A Silkie is a mythical creature, a seal that leaves the ocean and takes human shape.” Silkies are exceptionally beautiful and watch the shoreline for potential human mates who may have strayed from society or become discontented with their home lives. In her afterword, Cusac writes that, throughout the Canadian Maritime provinces, “seals have plunged in status from a source of food and clothing…to an animal akin to a rodent, crowding and polluting beaches, and eating too much.” Since the 1970s, strict regulation of seal hunting has all but ended the fur trade, and is believed by many Maritimers to have devastated the fishing industry. The collection of poems that results from the conflation of these narratives, however, is less an environmental fable than it is a book-length, mythologized account of impossible love. In a place where survival is difficult, an immortal Silkie and a human woman are fated by their very natures to be incompatible. They have different conceptions of time and conflicting expectations in love. Even the alleged ravenousness of the seal has been incorporated into Cusac’s myth, as the Silkie sometimes speaks of his desire for women in terms of his gluttony. The phenomenological boundary of the sea and the lovers’ different outlooks on time, mortality, and desire give this story of doomed love a mythic resonance. Silkie is less an environmental fable than it is a book-length, mythologized account of impossible love. But how successful is Cusac in creating a cycle of poems that could constitute a contemporary myth? In its treatment of loss, Cusac’s book may recall RobertAlter’s idea that “Myth…enables [humans] to experience imaginatively what logic might deny….” These poems are replete with challenges to the central character’s sense of reality. After the Silkie seduces Dulsie (Cusac’s protagonist), Dulsie’s father warns her, “The legal code doesn’t apply / to impossibilities .” Such a statement reminds Dulsie that she has left the protection of her society, and challenges the validity of her perceptions. Dulsie’s urges and instincts are similarly questioned: “the need creeping along her lips / is not anything / anyone calls ‘real.’” She will respond to her own pregnancy and eventual abandonment with both disbelief and the meager faith of perpetual desire, as cognitive dissonance is the hallmark of this relationship. Dulsie is not the only character to experience doubt and faith simultaneously—and this contradiction may give Cusac’s mythic narrative a particularly contemporary feel. If myths were once unquestioningly believed, a modern audience may sometimes hope that myths contain a sort of truth—the record of an event in the distant past, for example—but also approach myths with skepticism. Dulsie exists at this crux of belief and disbelief, as does the narrator of “metamorphosis 1,” who describes the Silkie’s transformation (apparently while the speaker is skinning a seal): Don’t imagine the change in skin slit snip scissor from wet, thick, fatted whittle hack to papery and thin doesn’t cause pain. Sealskins are central to both Cusac’s myth and the ecological controversy surrounding the seal hunt. The Silkie’s sealskin is his means of escape from Dulsie: a caul of mutability into which he is reborn as a being who scarcely remembers his human lover. Dulsie will steal the Silkie’s fur in an attempt to “make him human,” “change his nature and his smell,” and make it so “he cannot leave her, and she’s won.” In the process, she will unknowingly cause so much pain that he can no longer stay with her. The seal-skinner also seems to be unaware of the pain that he or she is causing. Unlike Dulsie, however, this speaker has good reason to doubt the myth, but keeps telling the old story: Don’t imagine it doesn’t excite him. nip...