Every now and again someone discovers that sharks’ migratory movements were changed by the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and they share it on social media. People in my community send it to me repeatedly because of my deep admiration of sharks, and maybe also because I research vampires within a racialised context, and sometimes I am not sure what people remember about my practice apart from it summoning images of blood, teeth, bites, skin and the macabre. To me, sharks and vampires sit together in a bloody messy pulp at the bottom of my heart. I like to think about the unknowable, and beings that are connected to an instinct that overrides social norms, disrupting performativity and bringing the undertow of viciousness into the centre of the conversation so no one can skirt around it. A group of sharks is called a shiver – and just when you think they could not be more perfect, you discover something like that. I think about all the times vampires give humans the creeps by using their preternatural speed to ‘appear’. The shiver is a collective noun, a bodily response to pleasure, fear, cold, dread. It can signal that something is not right – or that something is perfectly placed. 

To be honest, I feel absolutely furious about the treatment of sharks, and the red faced masochism that compels grown men to drag Great Hammerheads onto the beach in Florida at night so they can take a picture while getting sloshed on beer.² The sharks rarely survive and the picture lasts forever. I am curious about my righteous anger. I troll the accounts of men that take part, questioning them on their manlihood and then stalking the girlfriends they tag. I am strangely jealous of their connection to the sea, which feels like a way of life even if disfigured in my lefty lofty eyes. It feels an unlikely grouping, sharks and vampires and the transatlantic slave trade legacies, so I appreciate your patience and openness while I try again to put them in conversation with each other.

This essay is, indeed, not my first rodeo. I must admit, I have attempted to put sharks and vampires together before in an experimental film called What I Love Too Much Too Lose.³ The film interweaved young global majority activists fighting for sharks’ rights alongside images of queer joy, 00’s shark films, as well as clips of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and Princess of the Damned (2002). I hoped it was funny, as me and my friends are funny people. I tried to interlink all these topics to think about how I relate to ecological grief. Narrowing it to sharks, even though I live in an urban metropolis and mostly look at them through my phone screen, it helped me reflect on the question posed by Robin W. Kimmerer⁴ on what aspect of nature we love too much to lose to greed, capitalism and the exploitation of natural resources. In the making of the film I felt like they naturally fit – I was able to use visual techniques that worked the vampire explicitly as a vessel to project and show the rage attached to the cruel way sharks are treated in the fishing industry. This time, I want to know how sharks, vampires, and the transatlantic slave trade crash and meet, see if I can go a level lower, see if they can be reconciled and if so, to what end? What can be extracted, refigured, salted… soothed? 

A good place to start is perhaps by thinking about my favourite shark film – maybe you can also think of yours. Deep Blue Sea (1999) is a science-fiction horror which follows a group of scientists in an underwater research facility station. The marine scientists are experimenting on Mako sharks to find a cure for Alzheimer's. One of them, Susan, who is played by Saffron Burrows, goes rogue and secretly genetically enhances the sharks’ brain to extract more quantities of a protein complex, which unintentionally makes them incredibly smart. My favourite part of my favourite shark film is when this becomes clear; an engineer goes to check on the sharks and points a gun at them. They quickly swim backwards out of range. The engineer and the crew, who are watching the encounter via cameras, experience the uncanny and uncomfortable sensation of their place within the anthropocene shifting under their feet. “You’ve taken God’s oldest killing machine and given it will and desire. You’ve knocked us to the bottom of the goddamn food chain”.⁵

This fear is important because a significant change has happened: the imagined stability of a food chain, which I – and I think many others – imagine more like a pyramid, is loped off. It’s the pain of being stripped and ripped, and it’s the tense panic of whiteness biting its nails when thinking of what the Black consciousness⁶ could contain, and what cerebral onslaught they will have to weather next. In the slipping and sliding of irregular plates reconfiguring themselves, I align with the shark. This meaning, I also align with the monstrous.

The smart shark is important in a few ways: in its most symbolic and simplistic, it shatters a comfortable inertia that humans can have with animals, and acts as reflective space for an order that I recognise also does not serve me. The intelligence of these sharks produces possibilities of perspective and knowledge that I am unable to fathom, and that’s the only thing I know. But the smart shark also excites me with its tactical rage and violence. bell hooks talks about how the inheritance of slavery contributed to monstrous attributes being placed on Black people, specifically Black men: “Racist sexist iconography in Western culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicted black males as uncivilized brutes without the capacity to feel complex emotions or the ability to experience either fear or remorse”.⁷ Within this iconography, the monster is manufactured. It blots the fabric of society, leading to the common belief held by contemporary doctors that Black People don’t feel as much pain,⁸ have thicker skin, and blood that coagulates quicker than their white counterparts.⁹  

A Burial Free From Sharks, by the industrious Black thinker and poet Xandria Phillips, rounds up what I am trying to say in a few short lines:

‘how in the hull we worked we wormed at earth’s lack in we lives and in those deaths / and I say we / not collective not tongued the same and not kin and not in love / but in all of we pressed up against we heat and doings similar and reduced to sameness’.¹⁰

This reduction to sameness is exactly it: I think Blackness, sharks, and vampires are demoted to a menace, a mass, and in their monstrosity they are worked for the masses, in various dextrous ways that spin around the question of fear and its legitimacy. 

Back in Deep Blue Sea, Susan is understandably disliked amongst her crew (‘you stupid bitch’, they call her) as she is seen as the instigator of all this chaos. The sharks proceed to flood the station and herd the humans towards wherever they want them. Usually, the protagonists for these types of films are thin, muscular, white, blonde women with frantic legs who have done nothing to deserve their fate.¹¹ Here, I enter the complicated fantasy of being allowed permission to sit back and enjoy the gruesomeness of white femininity embodied being eaten alive by a shark, and there is something not so complicated about it –  it is something that, even if I was a white woman, I could probably also enjoy.

It’s too simple to flip that sensation of thrill to disgust when thinking about the enslaved people who were thrown overboard, either sick or already dead, to be fed to sharks. It’s too real and it’s too close. When I start researching anything to do with the Transatlantic Slave Trade it’s a tap I can’t turn off, the disbelief and disgust sits underneath my skin and I read until I collect all the drips. I feel like I have to know and I owe to know and I must know and I must imagine and breathe and feel sick and know I couldn’t stand it because I cut my finger on a serrated empty tin of tomatoes and I knew I was cutting myself but for some reason while I tried to stop I dragged it even more across the edges, I kept going until I thought the tin was more in my finger than out of it and it hurt so much and it bled and bled and everyone took the piss out of me because of how much I connected to the pain and how much it made me shiver but perhaps I would have connected with my breath and laid on my back and felt relief as the cold salt went in all my wounds at once knowing that I was off that ship and that was all that mattered and maybe there was no time to know a choice was made and its astonishing that someone I am connected to went through that and survived it and then had a child that had a child that had a child that had a child that had a child that had a child that had a child that had a child that flew to London during the Windrush and met my mum in Soho. 

Sharks had multiple entanglements with the slave ships:

‘Once the vessel was sailing in deep oceanic waters, it attracted, as a big floating object, a ‘‘moving reef’’ of sorts, fish of many kinds and sizes, which would congregate under it and travel with it, especially since ships sailed at a moderate speed. For its fellow travelers below, the ship provided shade, which was important in the tropics, but more importantly it provided food, and this in a place, the open ocean, where resources are more limited than on the coast. The fish and sharks beneath the ship in turn represented a constant food source for the slavers, as they could be caught almost all the way across the Atlantic.’¹²

In Marcus Rediker's book The Slave Ship: A Human History, the author goes on to talk about the most common sharks stalking the ships being the tiger shark, the bull shark, and the great white, along with smaller variations of sharks and also other types of fish. The fish and sharks fed the sailors and the captives, who then in turn fed the sharks and fish when the bodies of the captives who were ill, deceased and dying were thrown overboard. In a grotesque and almost cannibalistic fashion, human, fish, and shark participate in a symbiotic and grizzly entanglement. The enslaved people who were consumed by shivers of sharks and shoals of fish then enter into another (arguably more dignified) chain of events: the short food chain which negotiates a temporary contract with a definitive end. In fact, if sharks are present, the contract is reduced to mere minutes. ‘Stealing oneself away was a refusal of objectification, an unmooring of the relentless, necromantic machinations of a global order that demanded human beings be transformed into saleable commodities’.¹⁴ The locking chain of enslavement and production that demands that life give and give over and over again, claiming the present and the future(s). Sharks are, then, the technology of respite through vicious and monstrous means - they signify having an exit point from the limbo of doom in the middle passage.