This Halloween let's celebrate
with a 100% Canadian monster, namely -
GOUGOU
Transylvania gets too much publicity. Canada has its creepy share of ghoulies and ghosties. Thing is, they are just not as old as Dracula. They're new fiends, but they're hard workers. Consider Gougou.
Sasquatch and Ogopogo? Bunch of wimps, dude! This Halloween, let's go searching for Gougou, she who dwells on a very mysterious island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Gougou is a colossal woman, roughly 40 feet tall, whose chief pastime is wading through the waters off Canada's east coast, specifically the New Brunswick shoreline, where she catches unwary mariners, plucking them from their boats and canoes, stuffing them into a big leather pemmican pouch, and then later when she's peckish, yanking them out and gnawing on them as children might a Christmas candy cane. Gougou prefers to crunch a plump leg first. Pretty scary, eh, boys?
Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635 CE ) was a French geographer, draftsman, explorer, and founder of Quebec City in 1608. After his first trip to America, he published one of the first descriptions of a Canadian monster. Here is a translation of Champlain’s entry, published in “Des Sauvages” in 1603 after his return to France in September of that year.
“There is, moreover, a strange matter, worthy of being related, which several savages have assured me was true; namely, near the Bay of Chaleurs, towards the south, there is an island where a terrible monster resides, which the savages call Gougou, and which they told me had the form of a woman, though very frightful, and of such a size that they told me the tops of the masts of our vessel would not reach to her middle, so great do they picture her; and they say that she has often devoured and still continues to devour many savages; these she puts, when she can catch them, into a great pocket , and afterwards eats them; and those who had escaped the jaws of this wretched creature said that its pocket was so great that it could have put our vessel into it. This monster makes horrible noises in this island, which the savages call the Gougou; and when they speak of her, it is with the greatest possible fear, and several have assured me that they have seen her. Even the above-mentioned Prevert from St. Malo told me that, while going in search of mines, as mentioned in the previous chapter, he passed so near the dwelling-place of this frightful creature, that he and all those on board his vessel heard strange hissings from the noise it made, and that the savages with him told him it was the same creature, and that they were so afraid that they hid themselves wherever they could, for fear that it would come and carry them off. What makes me believe what they say is the fact that all the savages in general fear it, and tell such strange things about it that, if I were to record all they say, it would be regarded as a myth; but I hold that this is the dwelling-place of some devil that torments them in the above-mentioned manner. This is what I have learned about this Gougou.”
------Samuel de Champlain, Des sauvages, 1603
Note: I changed the sex of some of Champlain’s pronouns. After stating that Gougou is female, he then refers to her in the French original text using masculine adjectives and pronouns. I have taken that as a small writing error, perhaps presumptuously.
Some drawings show Gougou as a giant woman with human legs but her entire body is covered in pleasingly patterned fish scales. She carries jauntily her large leather pemmican bag for storing uneaten canoeists and Mi’kmaq fishermen. Other Gougouesque depictions show milady monster as a creepy mermaid. And perhaps Gougou is a ghoulish mermaid, a horrified fisherman’s memory of hauling something ungodly into his net one lonely day fishing solo far out at sea?
Mer-people have swum through humankind’s imagination, doing the satanic dog-paddle, for eons. 7000 years ago in Babylonian mythology, there was a god, Ea (who later would be called Oannes by the Greeks), who was a water god. Ea was depicted as having the upper body of a man, and the lower body of a fish. From our beginnings then, merfolk have slipped deceptively through the dark waters of our night minds.
If one were offering a psychoanalytic approach to the origins of Gougou, and if one were—to quote one of James Joyce's more egregious puns from Finnegans Wake—"jung and easily freudened", one might say Gougou represents the archetype of the female sea monster, the vast, vengeful, devouring uterus that waits to reclaim what she has earlier spewed forth in the act of birth. The oral aggression of the female monster is, of course, a psychic stand-in for the vulval and labial aggression that males both desire and fear, the literally unfathomable Ur-pudendum of male nightmare.
Or maybe Gougou is just a big, spooky, misunderstood giantess, like Madge at the back of the computer room who sits at those three desks.
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Please email me at wordguy@shaw.ca