THE MERMAID OF BLACK CONCH: Cultural Collisions/Convergence
Season 2, Episode 6 Transcript
(Note: Also check out our list of other books by Caribbean authors, which you may purchase through The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org)
V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up Podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this episode 6, we will discuss this sweeping, genre-bending, while at the same time intimately moving novel The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey.
Independent Peepal Tree Press, committed to writers and stories from the Caribbean diaspora, first published The Mermaid of Black Conch. Vintage Books acquired the paperback rights for the book in 2021. The Mermaid of Black Conch was shortlisted for the The Goldsmiths Prize for “fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” In 2020, it won both the Costa Novel Award and the Costa Book of the Year, literary awards which recognize English-language books by writers based in Britain and Ireland. In 2021, it was shortlisted for the Rathbones/Folio Prize, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the OCM Bocas Fiction Award. It was also longlisted for the The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ondaatje Prize for place writing in 2021. The Mermaid of Black Conch is scheduled to be a Radio 4 Book of the Week in August.
So, without further ado, let’s get right to it …
V: Hey, Tamara …
T: Hey Vina! How are you? It was so good to have a bit of a break ... I say that knowing I haven’t really had a break. I just tend to fill in the time with other things, like sewing or online classes or reading. But it’s been raining so much here in London, I haven’t really gone out to do much of anything. How about you, how has your summer been so far?
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 …
I know it’s only been a month, but I missed you, I missed talking about books with you!
T: Missed you too!
V: But, you know, I am glad we intentionally took a month off. Although, I think you and I are wired pretty similarly? So, apparently my idea of a break has been editing other people’s writing — some of our listeners know that I edit mostly poetry for the Asian American literary magazine Slant’d … But to bring it back to why we’re here today, I did enjoy reading this novel so much and taking the time to read it over our break. Monique Roffey is such a great storyteller, I couldn’t put this book down until I got to the end.
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.”
And then I read the summary and the author’s note about the events in the book being based on a historical event that happened after a fishing competition in Tobago in 2013 as well as the Taino folk tale of Aycayia and other mermaid lore of the Caribbean, and I became very intrigued!
So, what about you? How did you hear about the book, and what made you want to read it and recommend it for the podcast?
T: I heard about it from a couple of sources, actually … So, one of which was the Costa Book Awards Shortlist (before it won) — for folks outside the UK, Costa is a coffee chain here in the UK, but since 1971, they’ve also run an annual book awards for authors based in the UK and Ireland. So, I saw quite a bit of that here while it was shortlisted. And then, I also follow Peepal Tree Press on Instagram, and that’s thanks to the Brooklyn Caribbean Lit Festival, which joined virtually last year, as well as heard about it from a couple of bookstagramers that I also follow, like @bookofcinz, @rebelwomenlit, and @decentred_lit_ja.
Since we started this podcast, I’ve been able to find so much literature written by Caribbean authors, and it made me realize that the thing I had been seeking all along has always been out there, like right under my nose, right? And that perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough, or perhaps the past couple of years, and technology, and the impetus of doing this podcast have increased exposure. So, I know I have loved being able to incorporate fiction from various Caribbean perspectives into my library, and what grabbed me about this book is that it’s a love story centered on a mythical creature — a mermaid — that weaves in the complex story and history of the Caribbean and the resultant impact of colonization, but without centering on it.
V: Yeah, it’s so amazing how Roffey creates this sense of history, without, like you said, beating you over the head with it. I mean, even with something as simple as the characters listening to a Bob Marley record — which is significant in this case because this story takes place in the 1970s. You also make an important point about book Instagrammers in helping to connect readers and writers. And I do think that it was Roffey’s readers from the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora who were what got other readers and the publishing community in the UK to pay attention to this book in the first place.
And I find it so interesting that Roffey used to be a bookseller. So she had an awareness, as she explains in an interview with The Guardian, that a novel that’s written in Creole English; using forms from poetry to journal entries; and using elements of magical realism “would scare away most publishers.” It’s funny — she even anticipated the kind of reaction I initially had about the title, saying “You’re either going to read a novel about a mermaid or you aren’t.”
And yeah, despite all that, she stuck by her story, which did eventually find a home with Peepal Tree Press. And I love this story — she was basically able to hire a publicist to promote the book by raising like £5,000 in one month from over 100 readers and students (so, she’s a lecturer in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and she also established the St. James Writers’ Room to support emerging writers in her hometown of Port of Spain, Trinidad, which I thought was really cool!).
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:
It has been a hugely affirming experience to make a contribution to this newly emerging contemporary cannon. I recently attended The Bocas Litfest in Trinidad and got to meet many of my peers, writers and poets from Jamaica, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia, and elsewhere … we all got to lay eyes on each other. There is a boom in writing coming from the Caribbean region and I’m part of it. It feels like a new era.
T: Yeah …
V: So, going back to the book, there were a number of themes, I guess obsessions, and stylistic choices in The Mermaid of Black Conch that actually reminded me of other books and authors we’ve read on this podcast. For instance, the connections authors like Gina Apostol, Tommy Orange, Fernanda Melchor, Jacqueline Woodson, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, and Patricia Grace make between collective or colonial histories, and how they continue to haunt and shape the lives of characters in the present day.
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.
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:
I ask why everybody in Black Conch is black skinned
She told me how black people came
I ask her where are the red people like me
She told me they were mostly all dead and gone, murdered
I learn from Miss Rain
how the Castilian Admiral
MURDER all my people in a very short time
My people long dead
She told me many black people were murdered too
I ask if the Spanish Christians own everything now
She said not any more and turn red in her face …
My family own all of this part of the island she say
Land is not to be owned I tell her …
T: Yea, wow! I really like the way in which Roffey uses different forms to give each character a different voice, and it totally makes sense to me that Aycayia’s voice is expressed through verse. Her name means “she with a lovely voice,” and she says this in the book. But it also makes their voices distinctive, and moving between reflection and events kind of helps pull the story along as we get the benefit of hindsight and introspection.
Just going back to your points on the state of publishing — I couldn’t agree more about the disproportionate amount of work some writers have to undertake to get their work published, even as veterans within the industry. I really like the way that some of the bookstagrammers I mentioned before, like @rebelwomenlit and @decentred_lit_ja, are trying to spread awareness about that and challenge the ideas around who gets to decide what readers want to read, especially within the Global South. I know there are many others across the Global South with similar aims. That is why, as a result of what we have been trying to do here with The Lift Up, I have been trying to ensure I keep a mix of resources, like publishers, independent bookstores, reviewers, and so on as it relates to where I learn about and buy literature. As opposed to before where I would maybe just rely on your mainstream book publishers.
So, I think in a previous podcast episode, I mentioned that at one event at the Brooklyn Caribbean Festival in 2020 (and by the way Monique Roffey was a panelist on the Folklore in Caribbean Literature and Society event), one of the featured authors — I believe it was Ifeona Fulani — noted to the effect that that we cannot write our stories without acknowledging the elements of trauma that’s been inflicted on the Caribbean because the result of it still lingers both in the Caribbean and on its diaspora. And given this story is meant to take place in 1976, I noted this as an underlying theme. And there are two points in the book where its was very evident for me. The first was from David when he is invited by Arcadia to come to her house after he tells her about the mermaid. He says:
I felt real strange when I left Miss Rain’s home. I returned back many times after that, but it take a mermaid to get me invited inside. Cousins, she and I, and yet it never really feel that way till then, even though we pass each other many times. Many things kept us separate, call it slavery times, call it what you like, but it take a mermaid for me to mingle with my blood relative her in Black Conch Island.
And that passage made me think of how history has perpetuated this line of division between them, even though they’re family. Until Aycayia, David may have never been invited to her house, even when his Uncle Life is Reggie’s dad, and David and Arcadia are cousins. So, one can wonder why, for example, could it be historic guilt on Arcadia’s part why she never invited him? We know throughout the book that this is something she is aware of that she carries with her. But there is another of David’s reflections that hits it home:
There, at the table, in the grand room with wooden floors, sat an indigenous woman of the Caribbean, cursed to be a mermaid by her own sisterhood, whose people had all but died out, slaughtered by the Castilian Admiral and his kind; a woman who, as a mermaid, was pulled out of the sea by Yankee men who wanted to auction her off and if not that, stuff her and keep her as a trophy; a woman rescued by a Black Conch fisherman; a mermaid who has come back to live as a woman of the Caribbean again.
And this passage for me wrapped up very tightly but very powerfully this lasting and unchanging impact of colonialism. Aycayia in a way is a symbol of that for me — the impact of patriarchy, the impact of a people slaughtered, then found, just to be objectified and treated like property by these American fishermen in the Caribbean. For me, it was such a powerfully loaded passage.
V: Yeah. Again, it’s just so sensitively handled too. I never felt there was a sort of judgment or heaviness about that history, but it’s all in there. And that’s such a beautiful passage that you picked.
Actually, when I think about it, we’ve looked at a number of books that grapple with the legacy of colonialism from all over the world, right? There was Insurrecto, which centered on American colonization of the Philippines and more recently Potiki, which talked about the displacement and cultural subordination of the Māori people by British settler colonists. And so, it was interesting to notice similar themes that have come up in these books or that have been pointed out to us by the writers. So for instance, the appearance of untranslated Waray in Insurrecto and te reo Māori in Potiki not only gives cultural texture to our reading experience, but I think it also symbolizes an act of resistance against colonialism.
Then on the other hand, Gina Apostol has talked about this idea of the “multiplicity” of Filipinos and their ability to code switch from one language and way of seeing and thinking to another. And Roffey makes a similar observation about Creole English in an interview with BookBrowse:
Trinidad’s language is a fusion of English, African, and French and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary.
I am bilingual and can speak this other type of English when I want to. It’s in my ear and it is the language I grew up with all around me. Trinidadians love speaking their own English; it’s full of poetic forms and can be playful and lyrical and comical. Trinidadians are verbal acrobats, and I love being on the island just to hear the people speak …
Ah, I love this idea of verbal acrobatics as kind of like this superpower. I mean, colonizers often didn’t learn the language of the people they colonized; but in being forced to learn the language of their colonizers, the colonized learned to wield it like a weapon, I would say.
And in this other interview with the New Statesman, Roffey also talked about the hybrid form of the novel — where an omniscient narrator appears alongside Aycayia’s verses and David’s journal entries. She says:
Many of the world’s most famous literary writers — think Salman Rushdie, William Golding, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Jean Rhys — flout conventional narrative forms. Rhys even dares “write back” to an established canonical work [So for those who are unfamiliar, Rhys wrote Wide Saragasso Sea in response to Jane Eyre and the “mad Creole woman” in the attic trope] … We are bearers of culture and it’s our job to write how we wish, not how others think we need to write.
I just love that line about writers as bearers of culture. She goes on to say:
For me, life is made up of numerous influential voices and ideas: Buddhist dharma; the Caribbean lexicon; the tarot; text-speak; the secular world of London; the East End and its mosques and multiple immigrant histories, a part of London with its own vernacular… My life feels utterly fluid and diverse and yet works as a whole. So, everyday life shows me a non-linear form and that it’s utterly viable to compile a novel in the same way, to reflect this …
T: Interesting about Potiki, because in an article for The Guardian, Patricia Grace noted that in the criticisms she received on Potiki at the time, and I’ll just read a bit of it:
“One comment that I had was that I wrote it to cause social unrest and racial disharmony,” she says of Potiki. “I wasn’t a very politicised person at all.”
Besides, Grace says, laughing, those who levelled accusations at her of having made Māori “the good guys” of Potiki, and white New Zealanders “the bad guys”, did not realise she had never specified what race the greedy developers in the story were.
And so I find this quite interesting, to your point, and it’s interesting and telling that this is the conclusion people drew and, to a certain extent continue, to draw about who is displacing the Māori family in the book. We wouldn’t know that this wasn’t her intention if we hadn’t heard it from her in the article. But considering that we did find it too, we found those connections to events happening within our own communities. It’s definitely a point that we could probably spend a whole episode dissecting as it relates to this in literature and being culture bearers.
But just going back to your point about language, it also reminds me of the Jamaican Patois used in Dennis-Benn’s Patsy. It was a familiar reminder of times as a kid when some relatives would similarly switch back and forth depending on who they were talking to and the nature of the conversation, for example, talking to family or to strangers.
But pulling us forward a bit, what I also really loved about this book is how we are taken through the journey of these two love stories between David and Aycayia and Arcadia and Life. I love the way Roffey took us through this blossoming love affair between David and Aycayia, from love at first sight, to saving her life, to really learning to live and love each other slowly as Aycayia reconciles with turning back into a woman, and David finally learns what it means to love someone properly and wholeheartedly. And the encounter wakes up David’s heart, where at some point he reflects that:
She had inspired an outbreak of chivalry in his heart, something dangerous, if truth be told, should it run riot … She had cause his heart to wake up, to writhe free from its constraints of mistrust. Her radiance and her innocence showed him what he’d been longing for all his life …
And then when Aycayia reflects on the moments when she realized she was falling in love with David:
Things I think about now / long time later / how heart feeling is stronger than me / stronger than a human being / I was banished from humans / then given the chance / to understand the WHY of my curse / with this man from the village of Black Conch / when we make arms and legs and in out sexing in his bed / Sea was calling me / Guyanayoa was out there waiting / but I wanted to stay / Heart feeling last forever
And for me, it was beautiful to read, see them grow together whilst learning about themselves and becoming better versions of themselves. Additionally, we get to see the relationship between Arcadia and Life unfold and understand how it has made her as a woman, but also how their relationship had been negatively impacted by history. When Life comes back to Black Conch, we understand that he really loved Arcadia, but that his love for her is complicated by history, especially when they both became adults and she inherited the huge house and land from her family. Life recognized that for him to feel his place in the world, despite his love for Arcadia:
He had needed to get away from Black Conch, away from this white woman, and all that meant. He’d needed to make his mark, discover the possibilities out there in the world.
But then he comes back and they cannot resist their history, their love, and it once again threatens their happiness, to the point where after an argument between them Arcadia says:
“We can do better than this.” He looked her way, “This?” “History or love. One must win. I cannot fight history. I cannot. You win. I’m bad. I always will be. But we can do better letting history win out over love.”
I mean, it’s such a complex response to such a complex issue, right? For me this book was just amazing, this complex love story being shared about these two couples whose lives are intertwined. But that these relationships are both impacted by forces outside of their immediate impact and control, primarily the curse of those women centuries ago and the lingering impact of colonization, amongst other things.
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:
I lived in the kingdom of the sea for long long time
World of silence
but they talk down there in their own way
Radar speaking says Reggie
And so I learn a new way to talk …
In the Advantages of Age interview, Roffey is asked what her mermaid is a symbol of, and she responds, that they’re “the quintessential ‘other’, a chimera, the mermaid is womxn, as a symbol of the outsider, the outcast; often she has been blamed, shamed and exiled. My mermaid is a symbol of otherness, for sure.” I think their outsider or othered status is why Aycayia, Reggie, David, Arcadia, and Life are drawn to and can empathize with each other.
David is a simple, what we might call sensitive man, who plays the guitar, is a subsistence fisherman and takes only what he needs from the sea, and respects the boundaries that Aycayia sets in their relationship. So, he’s unlike the other men in the novel who want to get rich quick no matter the cost, who see women only as sexual objects and don’t think twice about abusing or even murdering them. Then as you mentioned, Life had left the island to try and make something of himself — but that “something” was that he wanted to be an artist. And again, as you mentioned, Arcadia — who is white, lives in a house built by enslaved people, owns most of the island and runs it like a defacto mayor — but has loved Life, a Black man, since childhood.
I do love how she confounds the Americans who came to the island for sport. This is how Hank Clayson, the young man who caught Aycayia with his fishing rod, described Arcadia:
Miss Rain was small, with honey-blonde curly hair cut short like a boy’s. It was also clear that she was respected like some kind of mayor. But when she opened her mouth, the same language flowed out, and this was a shock. She was like the Black Conch people, except white.
[He] had expected the overseer would be male and European. Instead, he had to deal with this abrupt, speckle-faced woman who spoke like everyone else.
In The Guardian interview, Roffey explains that she knew people like Arcadia Rain, who are “not bad people but they’re cursed with this legacy of horror.” She goes on to say that she comes from “that tradition of being conscious of a colonised world … It’s quite hard if you’re a pale-skinned Caribbean writer to really say what you think, for fear of being orphaned by your own kind. But we need to unpack and unpick so much. We’re all very conscious of history, and most of us are self-critical. We’re a tiny canon within a canon, and we deserve a voice.”
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.
T: Just going back to Aycayia and Reggie’s friendship … It’s true, the friendship between them is so sweet, and I’d agree that part of that connection comes from their being “othered” that they are drawn to each other and become friends. And Reggie has this opportunity now not only to communicate with someone new, but to teach someone who is new and innocent to the world he lives in. And in a way, they’re both children from that perspective.
You make a very interesting point about David as well. We get the sense in this book that the relationship with Aycayia forever changes him, teaches him how to be a better man, and he notes that in his conversation with Arcadia where he tells her:
“That mermaid woman is the first time I see clearly how to be a man. How to be myself, behave well. Is like she teach me how to be on the right side of good. You can’t play games with she. She so innocent.”
And this quote is bittersweet, for reasons that I won’t elaborate on as I want you all to go read the book for yourselves! But I also find interesting the points Arcadia makes right afterwards, which goes:
Miss Rain nodded. “Sometimes, we women not fair even in our own thoughts about ourselves. You men born from us, and yet you assume power. Is we who give you that power. You see that man, Life? That man make me wait, make me patient.”
And in keeping with the theme comparisons with other books we’ve read and mentioned in this podcast, I do feel this book is an interesting examination of the impact of patriarchal influence on what it means to be a woman, for example like we read in Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs, and how convention has it revolve around men — I mean, take Patricia’s jealousy in the book that mirrors the jealousy of the women who cursed Aycayia, just centuries later. All because of men, and it reminds me of a point Roffey makes in an Irish Times article, where it is noted:
It’s really not as simple as that, Roffey points out: “I think if you unravel female jealousy, you find the patriarchy. It’s a competition for the alpha male, and we’ve ever been thus. Our patriarchy is highly internalised.”
So, I find Arcadia is an interesting character and I agree with Roffey’s point given again the complexity of living in the result of a colonized world. I think a number of us are going through a great unpacking of our histories and how they are both intertwined and impacted, and it reminds me of a part in the book where Arcadia is thinking about Black Conch and her place and history in it which goes:
Black Conch was a helluva place, Miss Rain often said … The Rain land included some of the most ancient rainforest on earth … Hell had shadowy ghosts, too, the souls of thousands of slaughtered Caribs and kidnapped Africans, who had once toiled on what became Rain land, and died there too … Arcadia was what was left of the Rain family in St. Constance. She had been more or less given the broken-down estate to run as she pleased and she had more or less left it to the villagers … Tourists had trickled in to this end of the island, like those Yankee men the other day. Helluva place, yes, yes, then and still, and unlike other planters, she knew just how big a clump of land the Rains had bitten off: 2,000 acres of which 1,400 remained. It was land she knew intimately, girl to woman, land in which she had come to understand the heinous sins of the white men before her forefathers, and then their sins, the severe barbarity of their pious Christian souls, and the cruelty of the climate too. She had come to terms with the strange fact of being a white woman with a Creole song in her mouth.
And finally, I’d agree with your last point — I love how these books we’ve read explore complex issues but don’t center them, which I think is powerful way of reminding us that these issues are engrained and systematic.
V: Definitely, definitely. Ah, once again, I have to thank you for introducing me to another author and book that I probably never would have come across on my own. As a feminist, activist, and writer I’m just in awe as I learn more about Roffey as a person. And I’m so interested in reading her other books, including Archipelago, which she describes as an eco-novel. I’m going leave our listeners, some of whom may be writers as well, with something Roffey said that really resonated with me:
As writers we need to be developing new stories and a new language around climate change for the future. Writers, as culture bearers, can and should, inspire others, particularly the generations under us … Stories help heal humanity. I believe we writers need to be writing for the young, the old and for our planet.
T: I so agree with that quote! And what’s interesting is that nowadays, I find myself more drawn to that kind of literature that incorporates those kinds of themes …
V: Yeah … Well, this had to happen, but I think we’ve run out of time here. So, to close out, we do want to let you all know what we’re reading next. And actually, it’s a wonderful follow-up to this book that we just read. We will be talking about Island Queen by Vanessa Riley, and since it’s a bit of a long read (and hopefully, you’ll read it along with us), our next episode will air in October in celebration of Black History Month in the UK. You can purchase Island Queen, along with all the other books we’ve discussed on the show on bookshop.org/shop/theliftuppod. Feel free to send us questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, again @theliftuppod, and thanks so much again for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast.
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