When I was an adolescent, I was terrified of sharks.
So much so that I wanted them to disappear. To go away, to cease to exist.
I wanted to swim in peace when I was in the sea. I did not want to imagine their teeth sinking into my flesh. I did not want to rush back to the shores in fear rather than swimming further, deeper as I wished.
What was fascinating is that back then I had not even encountered a single shark in flesh, let aside being harmed by one. I had never been near the ocean and the seas I swam were inner seas, not many scary sharks roamed there. And the odds of a shark waiting for me to jump in the water, oh my dear primate ego.1 You betcha, my mother laughed at me quite a bit.
The fear of sharks was planted into my being mainly by American storytelling.
Like into many other humans’ imagination. Like many other fears and immaturities. Allow me to point fingers.
The storyteller who inspired the shark terror in my imagination with a movie called Jaws (1975)2 was once my favourite director. These days, I just wish he would donate his fortune to sharks and wither responsibly while repairing the damage he participated in generating drastically.
Later, came all the shark weeks, shark days that kept portraying this intelligent and beautiful creatures as mindless killing machines, as jaws with sharp teeth. And of course, to be able to see the scary teeth and to “make tv” out of an apex predator, men kept bothering, angering and manipulating them. I remember turning off the TV, or changing channels immediately, perhaps bothered by the disrespect of mankind more than the fear of shark-kind.
I do not wish to center myself and my psychology too much but I was a dramatic child who grew up in a patriarchal-politically and monotheistic-religiously charged region, as well as an industrialised human world that was massacring its wilderness. I loved and cared for wilderness back then also, just without sharks. I still do, now with sharks. In the past, I did not understand the implications and consequences of my wish upon the ecosystem. I was just an adolescent human in the human-centric world.
Just, for that imagination to go away and not to be bitten by sharks in my mind I wished for these absolutely amazing beings, who have been swimming in the oceans for about 450 million years, even before trees and dinosaurs appeared on Earth, to disappear.
How serious was I, I do not know. Did I go out there and killed any sharks? No. But I once tasted a shark out of curiosity which must have changed my relationship and storytelling quite a bit. Right after that in my late 20s, around 2010, I watched another movie in the United States, this time a documentary about sharks called Sharkwater. A dear friend, who was also a certified diver, brought a group of coworkers together to watch it. Throughout the documentary, I cried my eyes out for my old nemesis, the one I wished extinction upon, and realised how I had been projecting my fears, my anger, my shadows3 onto these beautiful apex predators. There, I came face to face with the nature of my species, I apologised from sharks and ever since I have been trying to repair my own damage.
One story may hurt a relationship, another may help repair it.
Humans kill about 80 million sharks each year, 25 million of which are threatened species.4
Sharks kill around five humans each year. I doubt any of them are a part of a threatened species or threatened race…
Imagine if sharks could tell stories about humans.
While we are fighting each other and destroying our web of life, time is running out for the most vulnerable. The ones who survived planetary scale mass extinction events are struggling with our species and their immature behaviours.
The amount of human-centric storytelling we have done is probably equal to the amount of story-repairing we must do.
There is something for all of us to repair, to heal in our relationship with wild teeth and wild kin.
Now, the relationship I have with sharks is an important planetary relationship. Through this portal, I have learnt so much about both my personal and collective shadows as a human, as well as how to connect and relate better. I may still be very scared of a great white, and I feel I should, but this is no excuse for disrespect and ill-wishes. Sharks swam in a treeless Earth for ninety million years. They survived five mass extinctions including the one that wiped out dinosaurs. They have my respect, my imagination and more.
Do you know that all vertebrate jaws, which includes human jaws, evolved from early fish jaws. The invention of jaws is considered one of the most profound and radical evolutionary steps in vertebrate history. Fish dreamt and created jaws with the waters, now I understand better why my imagination is running wild when I am in the water.
Human is a social mammal with messy relationships and wild imagination.
And what is more is that we, humans have access to symbolic language. Therefore, the stories we tell, the way we tell stories, have the capacity to alter the world and the relationships we create. The way we portray ourselves, our children, our men, our women, our people, our land, our world, our species, our wilderness in stories have the power of changing our world.
“Everybody’s scandalous flaw is mine.” writes Rumi and I do not wish my flaws to be projected on wilderness, and/or to harm them anymore.
I am not suggesting that we tidy up everything. Nor am I suggesting that we are the only ones with agency. In my humble opinion our tidying up, our human-centric and human-supreme organization, our over-simplification, our sterilisation, our separation, our self-aggrandising tales are the main problems. I will suggest though we invite more wild beings in our storytelling to learn from them and to respect them, not to antagonise, not to create villains out of them. They are our elders. I also suggest that we humbly trace back our fears, our entitlements, our projections, our shadows and locate them inside the stories we have been telling personally and collectively. If possible, we heal, we repair them. If not possible, we give them back to the soil and ask our planet to compost them. Some stories are long dead and rotting.
Sharks roam the waters. Sharks have teeth. So do humans and ours are sharper.
We must learn how to live together in a way that celebrates our planet’s creativity.
Let us honour the common ancestor we shared with sharks 500 million years ago, show more respect to our planetary cousins and do better, much much better.
Let the planetary stories be our guides.
© Gizem Gizegen, 2024 Istanbul, ☉ Pisces ☽ Pisces
The picture is a female Greenland shark who is about 400 years old.
Enchanted New Moon in Pisces, the zodiac sign of fishes.
Now it also seems like I needed to keep a connection with wilderness, no matter how twisted, alive in the midst of concrete world I was trapped in and perhaps someone to project my own wilderness and carnality. Who knows maybe sharks volunteered through imagination. And they have been protecting me and my connection to wilderness all along.
Jaws was nominated for the best picture at Academy Awards in America in 1976. The movie won the best sound, best editing, and best music Oscars. Its music is still giving me chills.
I like Bill Plotkin’s work and definition for the shadow. This is from his book THE WILD MIND: “The Shadow contains the elements of our psyches that our Egos have rejected and labeled ‘not me,’ ‘evil,’ ‘bad,’ or perhaps ‘divine’.” I recommend all his books.
Merci pour la poésie, l'ouverture du coeur et de l'esprit via tes écrits...tes stories sur insta... Puissance et douceur <3