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One of the characters I couldn’t help but adore, called Reggie, is so open and curious about the world. He is the one to fall into such an easy and close friendship with Aycayia, with such an open-mindedness that I loved their bond together. but there are still a few people round St Constance who remember him as a young man and his part in the events in 1976, when those white men from Florida came to fish for marlin and instead pulled a mermaid out of the sea
It took me a little while to get used to the style of this book. Some parts are poems and much of it is written in dialect which always takes me a while to get used to. However, once I’d got the hang of it I fell completely in love. I honestly did not want to put this book down and found myself staying up late to read it. The chapters are longer than I usually like, although they were broken into sections which helped. The sections jump between different points of view which helped to tell the tale from different perspectives. There’s this one section in the middle of the book that I want to read, where Aycayia is learning Creole English from Arcadia Rain, who is this white Creole woman who’s a descendent of plantation owners and whose decaying mansion she lives in with her deaf, mixed-race son Reggie. Aycayia says: Arriving on land in 1976, Aycayia finds friendship with the spliff-smoking David, and Arcadia Rain, a white woman who owns most of the island’s property and lives in a mansion on the hill with her deaf son. Between them, they teach Aycayia to speak Creole, American sign language and “the English that is written in books”. David upon hearing about the capture of the Mermaid heads to the jetty, cuts her down and takes her home. He doesn’t have a plan, but he knows he cannot let the Mermaid come to ruin, he also knows doing this may lead to his ruin, but he takes the chance.V: Yeah, it’s been kind of rainy in New York too, actually. But of course, it’s getting warm again at the end of summer. So we may have some summer days ahead of us … And we see this with all the characters in this book, but I thought it was especially clever to have the mermaid Aycayia speak in verse, which is how cultures and stories used to be passed down. In terms of crafting the story, it’s also an efficient way to give readers a sense of history without getting bogged down in it.
This could have illuminated the narcissism-born blindspots of the explorers and their successors. This could have been a subversive commentary on the damage colonialism has done to generations of Indigenous and Afro Carribean people; lost knowledge, culture, faith, science, etc. This could have been an examination of the fear and exploitation of young women's sexuality, and male entitlement to feminine bodies. This could have been a parable for the effects unfettered capitalism has had on tropical regions, which have been hit head-on with the consequences of climate change already. This could have torn the whole Manifest Destiny idea a new one.This same boy communicating through American Sign Language, which the mermaid understands immediately and describes as "language of the time before time". In the dead of night, under a full and waxing moon... Oh, goody: it's already full but about to get even bigger. Deep down, in his balls, he knew he'd done something unjust. I personally don't think of this region as the seat of justice, despite the origins of the word "testify". This novel is often insultingly bad. I wanted to believe that it couldn't possibly have gone through any editing, but the Afterword clearly singles out Jeremy Poynting, Managing Editor of Peepal Tree Press, "for making this a better book". While it is conceivable Mr. Poynting helped to bring about some improvements, that doesn't mean this was ready for publication. I have to mention that this mermaid had been a young performer who was cursed with a mermaid tail by jealous women of her community because they feared their husbands wouldn't be able to resist their desires for her. Put a pin in that.
As I said to my book group, anytime a character encounters a fearsome, mythic sea creature and their first thought is basically, "I'd like to get with that," the entire novel should then be devoted to what exactly is going on with that character. Loneliness? Hedonism? Need to please? Need to conquer everything one sees? It's not a setup for the love story of the century, is what I'm saying. Now shortlisted (the fabulous) 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize as well as winner of the (rather better known) 2020 Costa Book of The Year prize and previously shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize and 2021 Folio Prize. Although it’s funny — I have to say that when I didn’t know anything about the book except for its title, I was a little skeptical that it would be something I’d enjoy. But then I saw the cover art by artist Harriet Shillito for the Peepal Tree edition. And so, it depicts how the Taino mermaid named Aycayia is described in the story: “something ancient … the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past”; “her tail … yards and yards of musty silver … She must weigh four or five hundred pounds”; her tattoos “looked like spirals, and the spirals looked like the moon and the sun,” she must have been “a woman from the tribes that lived in these islands when everything was still a garden.” Every sentence in Monique Roffey’s extraordinary book is alive with fluming, amphibious intelligence and alert to the blessing, and the curse, of love in a life of flux. A new sea hymnal to challenge, and change, the old dark songs that humans know by heart.” —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Orange World and Other Stories And I do find it fascinating how so many other authors we’ve read — Mexican author Fernanda Melchor who wrote Hurricane Season; Jamaican-born Nicole Dennis-Benn who wrote Patsy; Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, who wrote Breasts and Eggs; and now Monique Roffey — have all created outsider/othered characters, other women characters, to explore complex social issues, from misogyny, to femicide, to homophobia and transphobia, to colorism and racism.In a stunning fusion of story and voice, this is told in a lyrical manner which uses Caribbean cadences and rhythm alongside Aycayia's free verse narrative, foregrounding language as one of the contested issues here: the 'standard' harsh American of the men from Florida contrasted with variations of accent and communications from sign language to singing. I listened to the audiobook and benefited from the authentic reading - I don't think this is a book which should be read in 'received pronunciation' English! On one hand, it can feel discouraging, the amount of work — largely uncompensated “labors of love” — that writers of color and small or independent publishers like Peepal Tree Press have to do to get their work out there. But clearly, the readership is there. And I just love Roffey’s excitement about the contemporary Caribbean and diasporic writing scene, which you kind of talked about too in discovering all these writers. In one of her interviews with Advantages of Age, she says:
In fact, chapter 2, entitled "Dauntless" was one incredible piece of writing. In it, Roffey really shows her strengths which I would characterize as terrific descriptions coupled with the ability to escalate tension. If I were teaching a writing class, I would use this chapter. If the whole book echoed this chapter, it would be certainly been five stars for me. V: I love this unconventional love story, and also the friendship that develops between the two couples, and between Aycayia and Arcadia and Life’s deaf son Reggie. Reggie, who learned American Sign Language, is actually the first person Aycayia has a conversation with. She calls it their “hand language/Language of the time before time,” which I love. And there’s a beautiful scene that takes place during Reggie’s 10th birthday when he introduces her to the music of Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals — when he turns the volume on the record player, he can hear and dance to the beat of the bass. There’s this part where Aycayia says: Sentence by sensuous sentence, Roffey builds a verdant, complicated world that is a pleasure to live inside…. You might start to believe in the existence of mermaids.”— The New York TimesFor all the issues, this never becomes a book which forgets its story or characters - there is a unique love story here, and one which is inflected through myth and legend - which are themselves fragments of previous cultures washing through time.
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