Jasmin Graham on Understanding Sharks

Marine biologist Jasmin Graham joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her new book, Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist, which is about the beauty and diversity of sharks and her career studying them inside and outside of academia. Graham, who left a doctoral program and subsequently founded the community-based organization Minorities in Shark Science to make the field more accessible and inclusive, unpacks how Jaws–inspired fears about sharks fail to understand the species. She also talks about seeing similarities in how sharks and Black people are misrepresented, misunderstood, brutalized, and threatened. Graham reads from Sharks Don’t Sink.  

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Peter Benchley, who wrote Jaws, in some ways by creating this dominant cultural impression of who sharks are, gave people this way of thinking that attacking sharks was justified or something like that. And he actually went on to become a major ocean conservationist and regretted writing the book and was like, “No, sharks are great!” And he, like you, learned to love fishing and water from his father.

People revile and fear sharks in relation to this particular depiction and authoritarian leaders, who we talked about a little bit at the top of the show, either demonize them, like our wandering friend Trump, or identify with them for sketchy reasons. At the top of the show, I mentioned the former Sri Lankan president who keeps a shark tank, which seems to be some sort of gesture of identifying with sharks as being weird, dominant, and vicious. What is this characterization of sharks? Why does that have so much traction? And do you have any favorite representations of sharks in pop culture?

Jasmin Graham: Why does it have so much traction? That’s a good question. I think that it’s the perfect combination of— I mean, Peter Benchley wrote a very emotionally charging book, and you don’t realize the power of your words until you write it. And then also, sharks are predators, and they’re not like us. So there are other predators that are more similar to us, because they’re mammals that live in the ocean. So things like orcas and dolphins arguably are like in the same part of the food web as sharks, but because they’re mammals, and we have this sort of connection with them, and we’re like, “Ah, yes! They’re smiling!” No, that’s just the way their mouth was shaped. They’re not actually smiling. You know, we’ve just assigned these human traits to them, because they are similar to us, in that they are mammals, and they give live birth, and they do all these other things that are similar, and they take care of their young in a similar way. And so we have this connection with them, so we make movies where little kids befriend orcas and dolphins, and it’s all fun and games. But then sharks are fish, and they’re quite different from us. So someone’s got to be the bad guy, and we’ve decided that it’s sharks because they’re different from us.

So that’s, I think, a lot of it because you could say, “Oh, it’s because they’re predators,” while there are other predators that we don’t have these feelings about. Oh, it’s because they have sharp teeth. Well, orcas, dolphins, and sea turtles have sharp teeth. Fun fact: one of our co-founders studies both sharks and sea turtles, and she has been bitten by way more sea turtles than sharks. She’s never been bitten by a shark. She has been bitten by a lot of sea turtles. But sea turtles are like, “Oh, yay, turtles, they’re fun.” I think it’s that, and it’s who got the short end of the PR stick, and it was sharks, unfortunately.

In terms of the “Jaws effect,” it’s very interesting because yes, it created this phenomenon where people have this fear of sharks. It also kind of propelled them in charisma, like it’s negative publicity, but we still have this whole genre of shark movies, and it spawned Shark Week and SharkFest, and all these things. There’s a whole group of shark scientists that became shark scientists because they wanted to be Hooper. And all of these other things that happened off of Jaws. It’s sort of got these two dual effects. So it’s a very powerful book and movie that came together to make this phenomenon.

Whitney Terrell: So the shark movies work a little bit like war movies. So Anthony Swofford, a writer, said that there’s no such thing as an anti- war movie. He said people would watch Apocalypse Now and want to go to war. So for shark scientists, there’s no such thing as an anti-shark movie. Is that possible?

JG: Yeah, there are people that watched Jaws and, “Oh, wow, I want to go study sharks.” It’s just a weird phenomenon that happens, but people’s brains are interesting.

In terms of portrayals of sharks, I think that, so this is a silly example of my favorite portrayal of a shark, but if you’ve ever watched the movie Shark Tales, there is a character named Lenny that I think is adorable, and it’s the closest thing that we’ve ever gotten to a silly, friendly portrayal of a shark. Lenny is just a nervous, little shark that doesn’t really want to eat fish. He really wants to be a vegetarian, and he befriends Oscar, who’s a fish. He pretends to be a dolphin partly through the movie. He’s like, “People don’t like sharks, so I’m going to try to pretend to be a dolphin and act like a dolphin.” And he’s nervous, and he’s the outcast in his family because he’s not “sharky” enough. He just really wants to be loved, and I am like, “Aw, Lenny.” So that’s my favorite portrayal of a shark. That’s a cartoon, not a real shark, but it’s very cute.

VVG: It does seem like in animation and in comic fiction, you do often see this. It’s purportedly an incongruity, like “Oh, the shark is so nice. Bruce in Finding Nemo is also like, “Sharks are such nice guys!” Or “Baby Shark,” of course, was super popular.

So I was reading up about Jaws in preparation for this episode and was fascinated to find a bit of lore that I’d never known before, which is that it started out as a comic novel when he first turned it in. And he was ready to write a humorous novel and they gave it back to him and told him to stick with the tone of the first five pages, which were very serious. I can just imagine the whole fate of the species might be different if he had written a funny novel.

I would also like to point out for listeners who might not remember that the character of Matt Hooper—spoiler alert for this 50-year-old novel—Matt Hooper gets eaten. So the fact that people watch Jaws and want to become shark scientists is also not the most logical to me. But it is gory and dramatic and not representative, it seems, really at all.

So there are, in recent years, these other representations that seem to be providing comedy off of this incongruity, but it seems like it’s actually not an incongruity. As a kid, one of my favorite novels about the ocean was a Diane Duane book about little kid wizards in the sea, and a shark, like an ancient prehistoric shark, was one of the heroes of this book. And even that somehow did not totally overcome my Jaws feelings.

JG: Yeah, yeah, I mean, people’s brains are weird. You never know what people will connect and how they’re impacted by things. I think that’s why we have to be really mindful of the words and language that we use, especially people that have a platform, like news folks, and people that make documentaries and things like that. I mean, the music that you play behind a shark, the adjectives that you use to describe sharks, all of those things have an impact on how people interpret sharks. And so with my book, I really purposefully used adjectives that people don’t usually ascribe to sharks, like “cute” and “adorable” and things like that, because if people can connect sharks and “cute” in the same way that they connect dolphins and “cute,” that can counteract some of those feelings of sharks with blood dripping from their teeth and just out to eat poor, helpless people floating down the ocean, and that’s really important. Words have power, and we have to acknowledge that.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photo of Jasmin Graham by Sonia Szczesna.

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Jasmin Graham 

Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist • “How Japanese-American Scientist Eugenie Clark Spearheaded the Study of Sharks” | Literary Hub

Others:

“50 Years Ago, ‘Jaws’ Hit Bookstores, Capturing the Angst of a Generation” by Brian Raftery | The New York Times • Opinion | “What is Trump’s shark story really about?” by Eugene Robinson | The Washington Post • Opinion | “What is going on inside Trump’s mind?” by Eugene Robinson | The Washington Post • Jaws by Peter Benchley • Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane • Finding Nemo • Shark Tale • Shark Week • SharkFest • Apocalypse Now • Anthony Swofford • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 25: “Ivy Pochoda on Caitlin Clark and Women Athletes” • Nyad • “Donald Trump Mocked Over ‘Bizarre Rant’ About Sharks” | video | Newsweek