The mermaids have gone extinct

Abstract

These poems emerge from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Maroantsetra, Madagascar in the summer of 2025, where I was studying the Betsimisaraka dialect. During this time, I befriended “R,” a yogurt‐seller from the countryside and fellow outsider, with whom I spent much of my time exchanging lessons in English for lessons in Betsimisaraka. These poems trace the reciprocal intimacies of linguistic exchange, translation, and fieldwork companionship, and in doing so open up broader questions of belief, naming, and truth. In a city marked by rhythms of rain, flooding, and birdsong, these poems also attend to the layered human and nonhuman rhythms of daily life in northeastern Madagascar. Surrounded by rapidly shrinking rainforests, they are framed by ecological precarity—an anxiety which evaded daily conversations but underlaid my everyday observations. Formally, the poems experiment with endings that become beginnings, in an attempt to evoke the circular temporality of Malagasy storytelling.