She moves with muscular power, gleams with sharp appendages, and writhes with other creatures of the sea. Aycayia feels more natural than supernatural, her body inextricable from nature. Roffey’s language, somehow simultaneously quiet and highly sensory, gives her mermaid depth, wildness, rawness, and texture. Her spine spikes were flat, like the spokes of a folded umbrella, but when they flared and spread, they revealed a mighty dorsal. They saw that when her diaphragm heaved, it revealed wide slits which were gills and they looked sharp enough to slice a finger off. Her torso was sturdy and muscular, finely scaled over, as if she wore a tunic of sharkskin. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. I think, then, that this fish-woman must be heavy as a mule. It gave she a look of power, like she grow out of the tail itself. Then there was her tail Yards and yards of musty silver.
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Her hair was full of seaweed too, black black and long and alive with stinging creatures - like she carry a crown on her head of electricity wires. I saw webbed fingers and how they dripped with sargassum seaweed. I saw she breasts, under the fine scaly suit. I saw the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past, shining at me.
She face was young and not pretty at all, and I recognise something ancient there too. She looking like a woman from long ago, like old-time Taino people I saw in a history book at school. Roffey’s descriptions of Aycayia are strikingly different from the girlish, suspiciously well-groomed mermaids of popular culture and animated films: The mermaid feels grounded in her surroundings, rather than alien or fantastic. Rather than the mermaid luring the fisherman with her siren song, it is David who tempts Aycayia to him with music: “David was strumming his guitar and singing to himself when she first raised her barnacled, seaweed-clotted head from the flat, grey sea, its stark hues of turquoise not yet stirred.” This quiet moment, a mermaid surfacing from gray water, captures the mixture of wonder and the mundane that is Roffey’s hallmark throughout the novel. The women’s possessiveness of their husbands leads them to curse her, putting her out of their men’s reach forever by sealing her bottom half inside a giant tail and banishing her to the sea.Īligning 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. A thousand years before the main action of the novel, Aycayia was a young, human virgin who resisted marriage: “She didn’t want to be married: a wedding would kill a part of her, so she’d not accepted any man.” While Aycayia’s insistence that marriage might “kill” her could be referring to the high likelihood of death in childbirth, it is actually a loss of autonomy: “Men only wanted to take hold of her freedom and keep it for themselves.” Her refusal to marry makes her a rival for the other women in the village, as their husbands continue to pursue her. Aycayia comes from Taíno lore, that of the Indigenous people of the Caribbean. Some of the characters even call Aycayia, the titular mermaid of the novel, “Mami Wata” (a powerful African water deity), reflecting the synergy between African diasporic and Indigenous water spirits and beings.
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Set in the small town of St Constance on a fictional island in the Caribbean called Black Conch, The Mermaid of Black Conch is one of several recent mermaid novels, like Rivers Solomon’s The Deep or Natasha Bowen’s Skin of the Sea, that explore origins for mermaid lore outside of dominant European-Western narratives. 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.
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. Told in poetic, meticulous prose interspersed with oral storytelling verse, this novel is a love story between a mermaid and a fisherman. MONIQUE ROFFEY’S The Mermaid of Black Conch begins with a sentence crafted with remarkable efficiency, lyricism, and intrigue:ĭavid Baptiste’s dreads are grey and his body wizened to twigs of hard black coral, but there are still a few people around St Constance who remember him as a young man and his part in the events of 1976, when those white men from Florida came to fish for marlin and instead pulled a mermaid out of the sea.
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