Song as language

Song is the sea people’s language, carrying meaning through linked images, sensations, and emotional associations rather than spoken words. Its significance rests not only in what it communicates but in the effort required to hear it: Marie-Josèphe must learn to interpret a form of expression that cannot be reduced to ordinary speech or neatly captured in writing. Through her listening, song becomes both a bond across species and a means by which the sea people make their experiences known.

A language of images and associations

When Marie-Josèphe asks whether the sea monster speaks in words, the creature answers with a song that presents a tiny fish. The melody describes the fish, its surroundings, the sound of its swimming, and the taste of its flesh. Meaning arrives as an interconnection of details rather than a sentence: the song does not name an object and stop, but gathers its qualities and relations into an experience. The sea people’s language is thus neither simply musical decoration nor a coded version of human speech. It makes a world perceptible through sound.

The exchange also reveals how uneven communication initially is. Marie-Josèphe hums the fish’s melody, but the image she seems to send back is indistinct and disappears. She recognizes that her song must sound like a blur to the sea monster and promises to do better. In response, the creature offers a more elaborate melody describing herself, while also conveying joy, boldness, and youthful wisdom. The song communicates identity and feeling together: its subject is not separated from the qualities and relations that make that subject recognizable.

Listening, drawing, and learning

To preserve what she hears, Marie-Josèphe runs to the laboratory for scraps of paper and charcoal. She returns and sketches the songs as rough pictures, not as words or musical notes. Tears sometimes smudge the paper, yet the scenes remain clear to her because she hears them. Her drawings are therefore a practical record of an exchange whose meaning is vivid in listening but difficult to transfer into human notation.

The fountain scenes give that translation a concrete form. In the sea monster’s song, she swims alone through water dimmed by filth and algae, with litter and coins on the bottom. As the song changes, the water becomes sapphire; trash and coins give way to white sand and living shells, and iridescent fish turn together from blue to silver. The movement from polluted enclosure to an imagined living sea is not explained in words. It unfolds through changes in the song’s pictured world, making the creature’s isolation and the world she evokes available to Marie-Josèphe’s hearing.

The sketches remain an imperfect medium. When Marie-Josèphe interprets Sherzad’s song, she draws rapidly as she speaks, and the charcoal marks cannot do justice to the song’s beauty. Still, they document its story: servants display and pin up the finished images. Drawing does not replace singing or claim to reproduce it completely. It gives listeners who cannot follow the song a visible trace of what Sherzad has communicated.

Song as memory and testimony

Sherzad’s song can carry collective history as well as immediate feeling. In one account, its images begin with sea people sunbathing on a small island, surrounded by open sea and secure among their family. A child’s developing webbed hands and thickening, withdrawing toenails, and the delighted attention of relatives make the scene one of safety and belonging. Sherzad then tells Marie-Josèphe that her people believed their birth islands were safe, before the song turns to the knowledge that they were not.

A galleon appears on the horizon, its flag bearing a blazing cross; cannons emerge from its gunports, and the song breaks into discord. The shift in sound and image carries the movement from remembered security to attack. Later, Sherzad sings of her people’s first encounter with the golden cross and of the strategies by which they sought respite: fleeing, choosing birth islands far out in the ocean, and withdrawing to dense mats of seaweed that ships could not cross. Song makes this history communicable to Marie-Josèphe, who uses her limited sketches and speech to witness it before others. The account is not merely private recollection; it gives the sea people’s persecution a form that can be shown and heard.

A fragile channel between listeners

Communication through song depends on attention, and the surrounding sound can threaten it. During fireworks, Sherzad’s screams and the explosions fill the scene. Marie-Josèphe covers her ears and calls softly, trying to reach Sherzad through fear, anger, and the dense fabric of sound. Sherzad swims to her, and Marie-Josèphe holds her hands and gazes into her eyes; Sherzad touches her with her voice. Here, listening is not detached interpretation. It is part of a physical effort to reassure someone whose experience of the fireworks recalls the violence of guns and mortars.

The exchange before Pope Innocent makes the difference between the two languages especially clear. Marie-Josèphe can produce only single notes with her untrained voice; Sherzad answers with harmonies, fixes her gaze on the Pope, and begins her account. Marie-Josèphe can mediate the testimony, but the scene does not suggest that human speech or music reproduces Sherzad’s expressive range. The sea woman’s song remains her own means of telling, while Marie-Josèphe’s voice and sketches help carry that telling into a human audience.

The channel is also selective: not every listener hears what Marie-Josèphe hears. Later, aboard a rocking ship, pumps rumble as Louis XIV listens in skeptical silence. Beneath the noise, he hears Sherzad singing in a delicate, low register. Marie-Josèphe interprets the song as a promise that Sherzad will lead Louis to treasure, followed by a declaration of war on the men of land. Song has moved from intimate exchange and testimony to a message bearing political consequences. Its meaning still depends on a listener willing to attend and, in this instance, on an interpreter able to convey what the song says.

Meaning and limits

Across these encounters, song joins perception to relationship. The sea monster’s descriptions teach Marie-Josèphe how an image can be heard; Sherzad’s songs let her share private feeling, narrate communal history, and address powerful human witnesses. Marie-Josèphe’s drawings extend that communication, but their roughness and incompleteness preserve the distinction between the sea people’s language and the human record of it. The songs do not make every listener understand. They instead expose the work, vulnerability, and responsibility involved in listening—and give the sea people a way to speak as people rather than remain objects of human observation.