Her hair was the worst part, a mess of fire and ropes of this and that. Jellyfish had come up with her, clusters of long blue veins. Sea moss trailed from her shoulders like slithers of beard. Barnacles speckled the swell of her hips. Her torso was sturdy and muscular, finely scaled over, as if she wore a tunic of sharkskin. She was crawling with sea-lice. [p. 29]
A thousand years before the story opens, long before the arrival of the 'Castilian admiral', a young woman named Aycayia lived on a fish-shaped island in the Caribbean. She refused to marry, though the men of the village pursued her relentlessly: eventually, the women cursed her to become a mermaid.
The narrator of The Mermaid of Black Conch is David, an old man, recounting the story of when he was a young fisherman in 1976. One day he was fishing alone from his boat and met a mermaid who liked his bad guitar playing. Their mutual fascination could have led to more: but Aycayia, lulled into trust, is hooked and caught (in a harrowing scene with strong undertones of sexual violence) by an American sports fisherman and his son, and dragged back to the harbour at St Constance. There's talk of an exhibit in the Smithsonian, a photo on the cover of Time magazine. What can David do? Obviously, he has to rescue her. She ends up in his bathtub; her mermaid tail rots away; she learns to speak English, and to wear clothes, and to walk in David's green suede Adidas trainers.
Of course it's not that simple. The Americans, Thomas and his son Hank, want the mermaid back; David's neighbour, the rapacious Priscilla, is curious about his guest; Miss Rain, the white woman who owns much of the land, accepts Aycayia into her home, where she listens to bass-heavy reggae with Miss Rain's Deaf son Reggie and learns to read and speak English. David, who fell in love with her when he first saw her, imagines how they might build a life together. But the mermaid's arrival has exposed tensions old and new: Miss Rain and her slave-owning ancestors, the lack of opportunities for young black men, the different ways in which men and women are oppressed, the ecological damage caused by humans.
Roffey mixes idiomatic Caribbean English ('picong', 'steupse', 'tabanca') into David's narrative -- it's interesting to compare the prose in his 1970s journal and the narrative of forty years later -- and lyrical oral story-telling in the rhythmic blank verse of Aycayia's voice. Her outsider perspective on the people and the culture of Black Conch, as well as her sheer messy physicality, lift this lyrical novel above more typical mermaid stories. The ending is not wholly happy, but nobody is unchanged by Aycayia's time on land.
Fulfils the ‘By a Caribbean Author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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