The blog category ‘Student Essays’ collects a selection of excellent student contributions which emerged from classes taught by our Potsdam Postcolonial Chairs. This essay was written in Prof. Katrina Schlunke’s class Extinction in the Anthropocene (winter semester 2021/22). In this seminar, students engaged with how cultural texts (such as literature, film, art) grapple with the ethical and political questions raised by extinction in the Anthropocene, and they followed the lives of particular extinct or endangered animals and their remains in museums or through the visual and textual archive of their loss.

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When in the first session of this seminar I was asked what the reasons were for me having a Yangtze dolphin (also called baiji) tattooed on my arm and in what ways I was entangled with this animal, I was somewhat overwhelmed by this question and had a hard time giving a lucid answer. I didn’t know where to start with the story that I am carrying – in the truest sense – under my skin.

To be precise, the baiji shares the space on my left arm with a sketched sperm whale. I recall Melville’s words in Moby Dick, describing Queequeg’s tattoos as “a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth”. As a matter of fact, the “hieroglyphic marks” on his body depict a riddle, “a complete theory of the heavens and the earth” that even Queequeg himself does not know and cannot decipher (Melville 492). One can say that Ishmael’s whole journey on the whaling boat Pequod, sailing the ocean in search for the great and ‘dreadful’ sperm whale, is a quest to solve that riddle; a quest to find meaning and truth as well as “man’s relation to the universe” (Knopf 150). I do not claim this ascription to be an interpretation or motivation behind my tattoos. However, in my personal quest to find meaning in the ocean of this universe, one stream certainly leads to the whales.

When I was a child, I had a recurring dream in which I found myself inside a whale’s stomach (probably initially influenced by a Pinocchio episode). With time, it evolved into a nightmare of being helplessly trapped in a dark, organic cave – without orientation, only perceiving a hazy dance of light through a mucous membrane.

The more I learned about cetaceans, the more I realized that there is something about these creatures that transcends the rational human mind. They are like us. They have lungs and breathe air; they nurse their calves and live in complex social structures. And yet, the whale represents the ultimate unknowable – one of nature’s most enigmatic entities that humans simply cannot grasp or scientifically explain. We know by now that they follow invisible magnetic fields, they see and orient themselves with acoustic sound waves, and some can communicate with each other over distances of several thousand kilometers. We can tell that whales have a distinct (self-)consciousness; that they are capable of “complex cognitive abilities”; and feel emotions like empathy and grief (WDC). Scientists even discovered extraordinary brain structures that could challenge our estimation of human exceptionalism. However, as soon as humans became actively aware of the animal a few centuries ago – driven by greed and fear of “such a portentous and mysterious monster” (Melville 5) – they began to hunt, capture, kill, and reduce their population tremendously.

Today, the first cetacean is considered to be extinct as a result of human activities. The baiji was one of seven river dolphins which began their lineage from the oceans into rivers around 20 million years ago (Turvey 18). Fondly called “the Goddess of the Yangtze” in Chinese culture the dolphin was said to be the reincarnation of a drowned princess (Turvey 5). Although the baiji had already “been described in the Erya, the oldest surviving Chinese dictionary, dating back to 200 BC” (Ding 25), due to a lack of communication between local people and scientists, “the baiji first formally entered zoological literature […] in 1918” (Pyenson 716). Lipotes vexillifer is the chosen Latin name for the dolphin which literally means “the flag-bearer who was left behind” (Ding 25). Sadly, this designation gets to the heart of the baiji’s story. Within less than a century, the river’s condition deteriorated so drastically that “[w]hen the first scientific surveys of the baiji were conducted […] in the late 1970s”, there were only a few specimens left. The main reasons for the decline and the biggest threats were “fishing bycatch, habitat deterioration from dam construction, and heavy river traffic” (Pyenson 714). Completely relying on echolocation while living in China’s busiest waterway, being blinded, poisoned, deafened, and maimed, the dolphin’s home gradually turned into a maddening and deadly torture house. I keep thinking about my childhood nightmare and conclude that my fear and disorientation inside the whale’s abdominal cavity was a gentle state of comfort and protection by comparison.

Genetic research has also identified “the uniqueness of this species based on its taxonomic rank”. In 2006 when the animal was declared functionally extinct (714), it was soon realized that nature had lost a whole “unit of cetacean taxonomy (i.e., the Familiy Lipotidae)” (Pyenson 715). It appears that it took almost the entire history of humankind to take notice of cetaceans in our oceans and only one century to wipe out an entire marine mammal family.

The disappearance of the baiji in the Yangtze river had severely negative impacts on the surrounding area, including animals, plants, and humans. River dolphins are the prime indicator of the river’s condition. They play a crucial role in keeping the whole ecosystem in balance. At this point, Donna Haraway’s Tentacular Thinking comes to my mind. Similar to the smallest protagonists, like plankton and worms, the biggest (whales) are composting: “their undulating bodies ingest and reach, and their feces fertilize worlds” (Haraway 34-35). Within “collectively-producing systems” (Demspster in Haraway 33), whales are the farmers of the ocean – defecating and thereby fertilizing the biggest oxygen supplying garden on this planet. But the extinction of the baiji does not only affect the local ecosystem. Above all, it forces nature to send off invaluably precious, ‘left behind’ wayfarers and with them, their mysterious secrets and riddles. However, “[t]heir tentacles ma[d]e string figures” (35).  A liquid silhouette of a creature that once floated in a distant river found its way into the streams of my skin. There, it can swim a little while longer and nourishes new vibrant streams in this universal ocean.

I figure that another string was threaded when Ishmael takes on Queequeg’s riddle which he scratched into his coffin. Thinking of Haraway’s proposal of the Chthulucene, I believe in the “not-yet-finished, ongoing, abyssal” forces and mysteries to pass on. Though, indeed “the story must change” (40). Certainly, it is less about finding out humans’ ‘relation to the universe’ but rather their “alignment” (41) within it. Otherwise, more and more valuable riddles will forever disappear in the infinite depths of the abyss.

With the baiji on my arm, I was starting an attempt to align, to merge streams, and when I will be asked about my motives behind the tattoo the next time, I will have a quicker answer and start with: “I am mourning-with.”

Marla Helling

Works Cited

Ding, Wang. “Protecting Cetaceans in the Yangtze.” The UNESCO Courier, vol. 2021, no. 3, 2021, pp. 25-27.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Knopf, Kerstin. “‘An interminable Cretan labyrint’: Tattoos as Text in Herman Melville’s Sea Fiction.” Probing the Skin: Cultural Representations of our Contact Zone. Eds. Caroline Rosenthal and Dirk Vanderbeke. Newcastle upon Tyne; Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 122-57.
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Harper Press 2013.
Pyenson, Nicholas D. “Requiem for Lipotes: An evolutionary perspective on marine mammal extinction.” Marine Mammal Science, vol. 25, no. 3, 2009, pp. 714-724.
Turvey, Samuel. Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin. Oxford University Press, 2008.
WDC. “Scientific Evidence for Whale and Dolphin Rights.” Whales and Dolphins Conservation, https://us.whales.org/whale-culture/scientific-evidence-for-whale-and-dolphin-rights/. Accessed 17 December 2021.

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