Song as communication

Song is the sea people’s language, not merely a form of music. It carries images, associations, feeling, and knowledge across the divide between them and humans; for Marie-Josèphe, learning to listen turns an apparent spectacle into an exchange. That exchange remains difficult and imperfect, but it eventually lets her understand Sherzad’s words, answer her across the sea, and recognize a voice that others cannot hear.

A language of images and associations

When Marie-Josèphe asks whether the sea monster understands her and speaks in words, the reply comes through song rather than ordinary conversation. The first communication takes the form of a tiny fish in Marie-Josèphe’s vision: the melody describes the fish, its surroundings, the sound of its swimming, and the taste of its flesh. The sea monsters’ language joins things through images and interconnections instead of arranging them as human words do. A song can therefore convey not just an object but its relations and qualities.

The sea monster also communicates something of herself. Her name-song gives Marie-Josèphe an impression of joy, brashness, and youthful wisdom. The exchange is personal before it is fluent: Marie-Josèphe hums back the fish’s melody, but the image she sends is indistinct and disappears. She recognizes the imbalance between receiving a vivid song and producing only a blur in return. Communication is possible, but it requires learning how to listen and how to answer in a form the other can receive.

Marie-Josèphe’s response is to make a record without pretending the song is ordinary speech. She runs to the laboratory for scraps of paper and charcoal, then sketches the songs as rough pictures, not words or musical notes. Her tears sometimes smear the paper, while the scenes remain clear to her as she hears them. The act of drawing is an attempt to hold an experience that crosses sound and vision; it also shows how much interpretation depends on her attention. The sea monster’s song transforms the polluted fountain in the images Marie-Josèphe receives: its water becomes sapphire, litter and coins give way to white sand and living shells, and iridescent fish turn together from blue to silver. Song makes a different world perceptible without changing the actual fountain.

Understanding under captivity

The language’s limits and power become especially consequential when Marie-Josèphe interprets for Sherzad. After Sherzad sings furiously, with blood on her face, Marie-Josèphe hesitates before telling Louis XIV what she has said. The message mocks the King as a toothless shark and asks whether a fleet of treasure ships could buy Sherzad’s life. It is not a disembodied lyric: song carries insult, negotiation, and a demand for freedom in a moment when Sherzad is confined and the King controls her fate. Marie-Josèphe’s ability to understand makes her a necessary intermediary, while the hesitation shows the danger of speaking for someone whose words may provoke the ruler.

At sea, Sherzad’s songs also convey knowledge that humans cannot easily obtain by sight. Though suspended in a net and refusing to answer Marie-Josèphe for much of the afternoon, she eventually agrees to guide the ship to a cove. As the sun reaches the horizon, she listens to the shape of the seabed as best she can and sings. The wind shifts as dark falls; despite the captain’s objection to sailing blind near shore, Louis XIV orders the ship onward. Here the song is connected to Sherzad’s ability to navigate, and communication has immediate physical stakes: the humans must decide whether to trust the guidance they receive through her voice.

Song also travels through the ship and sea in ways that challenge the listeners’ assumptions about who can hear it. During the night Sherzad sings a lullaby sea people sing to their babies, and Marie-Josèphe matches her voice to it. A guard ordered to shoot Sherzad if she tries to escape repeatedly nods off. Later, when the ship has floated free, Sherzad’s voice passes through the water and touches the planks, resonating through the vessel. Marie-Josèphe answers; Sherzad begs her to respond, and the urgency of the exchange reaches her even while she is confined behind a bulkhead. The captain and crew’s physical proximity to Sherzad does not make them equal listeners. Understanding depends on a relationship with the singer as well as on the sound itself.

Translation, power, and mistrust

The treasure bargain makes the unevenness of interpretation explicit. Marie-Josèphe tells Louis XIV that Sherzad promises to reveal gold and jewels beneath the sand, offering them for Marie-Josèphe’s sake despite betrayals and broken promises. She also conveys Sherzad’s declaration of war on the men of land. Louis wonders whether Sherzad has declared war on him personally. Song lets Sherzad address the King through an interpreter, but it does not secure his trust or dictate his response. The same communication can promise wealth, acknowledge injury, and announce conflict; its meanings are political because the people who hear it have power over Sherzad’s life and freedom.

Marie-Josèphe’s position as interpreter carries its own risk. The King asks what Sherzad said, and Marie-Josèphe has to decide whether to relay a scornful message truthfully. Later, the King listens skeptically while the ship rocks and its pumps rumble. He cannot initially hear the delicate low register of Sherzad’s singing beneath those noises. Marie-Josèphe can. She renders the song’s promise and threat into human language, but the act of translation does not erase the difference between her understanding and the King’s suspicion. Song creates access without producing agreement.

Recognition and response

The final meeting in the Caribbean gives this language a reciprocal, intimate form. At the full moon, Marie-Josèphe hears a breath of song over the waves and runs from the sand toward the water. Ripples reach her toes; she feels the ocean’s life vibrating against her feet and sings Sherzad’s name-song. Sherzad answers. The exchange confirms recognition before the two meet physically: Marie-Josèphe calls through a melody tied to Sherzad, and Sherzad replies in kind. The sea people then swim toward Marie-Josèphe, with Sherzad leading them.

Across these scenes, song moves from a strange perception that Marie-Josèphe struggles to return to a means of interpreting danger, navigating the sea, and finding one another again. Its expressive range includes description, identity, lullaby, mockery, bargaining, warning, and welcome. Yet it does not dissolve the realities of captivity or make every listener receptive. Its force lies instead in the connections it enables: Marie-Josèphe can hear what others miss, convey Sherzad’s words to people who control her, and finally answer the song that announces their reunion.