The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
“Womanhood was a dangerous business if you didn’t get it right.”
“History or love. One must win... But we can do better than letting history win out over love.”
Written in Creole English (we had to use a Caribbean dictionary to get the meaning of a few words) the novel shifts between different times and voices using a mixture of forms: poetry for the mermaid (Aycaya), journal entries for the fisherman (David) who falls in love with her, and an omniscient narrator who permeates the other characters’ thoughts.
Oppression can take different shapes but it’s always “feelings of being insecure that make someone want to take from others.” Both female protagonists have been cursed, one by jealous women and the other by history, and only love and speech can make them free.
LRB
Critical perspective:
The mermaid metaphor is applied to gender, disability and oppression throughout the book. They’re filed under “curse,” described as loneliness.
Sexual tension is constant throughout a story that, perversely, loses steam as it nears its climax. Roffey, however, makes up for a lackluster ending with the strong storytelling up to that point.
Vivid imagery, discussion-worthy themes, Creole verbiage and a melding of history and magic make “The Mermaid of the Black Conch” come to life. It’s a confluence of lore in which subtle details change depending on who is telling the story. Each has their own idea of what it is to be a man, a woman, the oppressor, the oppressed, or something in between worlds.
In representing so many so roundly, Roffey maintains a fine balancing act portraying identities that are not her own while connecting them to ones that are by their shared relationship: the push and pull that Aycayia comes to learn transcends the ocean, the bedroom and the human race to encapsulate nature as a whole.
The novel itself exhibits the same in-betweenness as its characters and author — who was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, but lives in London — though “The Mermaid of the Black Conch” is far from cursed for it.
https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-caribbean-book-b77b95df26ba5b10ea7ea32f91c49c17
Told in poetic, meticulous prose interspersed with oral storytelling verse, this novel is a love story between a mermaid and a fisherman. While this may seem like a tale often told, it is set apart by the rich materiality of the writing and of its Caribbean setting. While this is a true romance, a lush dance between two compelling characters, it is also about the logics and the violence of possession: how greed, envy, and the quest to own — land, money, people — hurts nature, people, and love itself ... Aligning with the novel’s feminist critique, the love affair between David and Aycayia reverses and upends many of the familiar narratives and stock imagery of Western mermaid lore ... Roffey’s language, somehow simultaneously quiet and highly sensory, gives her mermaid depth, wildness, rawness, and texture. Aycayia feels more natural than supernatural, her body inextricable from nature. She moves with muscular power, gleams with sharp appendages, and writhes with other creatures of the sea ... Roffey takes on the themes of genocide, colonialism, and enslavement — which, in a novel concerned with ownership and possession, is rarely mentioned — with a strangely gentle touch...
Biography:
https://caribbean.loopnews.com/content/tt-writer-cops-ps30000-costa-book-year-award-4
I’m a writer, lecturer and environmental activist and have been writing for over twenty years. In this time, I’ve published eight books, (a memoir and seven novels), some short fiction, many essays and some literary journalism.
Some of my books have been awarded prizes, or been nominated for prizes, such as, the Costa Fiction Award, 2020, and the Costa Book of the Year, 2020, for The Mermaid of Black Conch. In 2013, Archipelago won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. The White Woman on the Green Bicycle was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 2010.
I also teach on the MA in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’m currently there as Professor of Contemporary Fiction. I love being on staff at a busy writing school; teaching emerging writers gives me much pleasure and is very rewarding.
I was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and my family, and many friends live in Trinidad. I go back and forth often. I’m bi-cultural. London is home and so is Port of Spain.
https://moniqueroffey.com/about/
Reviews by our book club members:
“I think the writer's merit is having inserted a myth into a current story and making it totally believable. With well-defined characters in a real environment. The story goes beyond a fairy tale. A glimpse of social criticism of the historical colonialism of the Caribbean and a staging of its legends. I found it to be a tender love story that was very easy to read.”
PRR
“This novel shows the weight of slavery and colonialism on an imaginary Caribbean Island and, what is even worse, on its inhabitants who defend tradition and nature.
David, a young local fisherman, meets a mermaid and feels immediately attracted by her. He meets her every now and then playing music, until an American boat catches her while a fishing competition. They take her to the jetty and hang her on the deck, giving the symbol of Jesus on the cross coming to make people better. David takes her down and that is the beginning of a love story full of opposite feelings for both.
The secondary female characters Miss Rain and Priscilla give the reader the situation of independent women on the island, but having totally different behaviours, while Aycayia, the mermaid was cursed many years ago by other women who could not stand her beauty. Relationship between men and women might always be improved, too. As well as the racial clash.
We must not forget money as another element moving people to get the chance of going away from the place and its hard Isolating conditions but being able of taking the worst out.
Aycayia is the symbolic victim of all those negative points and had to go back to the sea and to her magical condition.”
CJ
“The novel tells the story of a mermaid who is rescued by a young fisherman on a small Caribbean Island (Black Conch) after being pulled from the sea by American tourists. Into his 320 rich pages, the author (Monique Roffey) packs a series of love and a picture of ancient hatreds that cascade down from a history of colonization.
It´s a captivating book that blends elements of magical realism with profound social comment: racism, gender, colonialism, and environmentalism. With rich and strong characters and distinct narrative voices (diary entries, omniscient narrator, and voice in verse).
Powerful, radical, and wholly original, The Mermaid of Black Conch will love. I enjoyed reading it a lot. It´s certainly remarkable how the novel addresses a wide range of topics originally and creatively balancing between fantasy and social critique and inviting to reflect on the complexity of the human condition.
I encourage you to read the book. You will enjoy!”
JLJG
Praise:
“Bittersweet ... What makes the novel sing is how Roffey fleshes out these mythical goings-on with pin-sharp detail from the real world ... This is the archetypal story of a disruptive outsider whose arrival alters a community by revealing it to itself, not always happily ... The Mermaid of Black Conch is no fairytale and there’s a limit to how well Aycayia’s story can end.”
Anthony Cummins, The Observer (UK)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/11/the-mermaid-of-black-conch-by-monique-roffey-review-a-fishy-tale-of-doomed-womanhood
“Picture in your mind a book about mermaids. Now turn that image upside down, set it on fire and pee all over it. That’s what Monique Roffey does in The Mermaid of Black Conch with her playful disregard for our conventional expectations ...”
Jade Cuttle, The Times (UK)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-mermaid-of-black-conch-by-monique-roffey-review-k9nxcwlfb
“Achingly evocative, the Black Conch mermaid’s story and the people she meets after her return from the sea powerfully capture the nature of longing and belonging.”
Bridget Thoreson, Booklist.
https://www.booklistonline.com/The-Mermaid-of-Black-Conch/pid=9760815
'Not your standard mermaid. No comb and glass, no Lorelei hair. No catch and release...'
Margaret Atwood
https://twitter.com/MargaretAtwood/status/1203747945855610880
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