Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
This book doesn’t ‘seem’ like anything that I would have normally chosen by myself. In fact I’m sure of it. 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: The old Yankee man stood and shouted, "For Christ sake, can someone arrest this man, Life, or whatever his goddamn name is. You people and your goddamn stupid names." Keep in mind that these two men have never met before and that Life is not introduced or referred to by name in this scene.
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: However, with the exception of two rainstorms (fish and like, jellyfish, raining down from the sky), Roffey manages to make this story of a mermaid believable. So it wasn't my skepticism that kept me from fully embracing this story.
Select a format:
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.” It’s hard if you’re a pale-skinned Caribbean writer to say what you think, for fear of being orphaned by your own kind He was used to the St Constance women, who knew him too well, who already had his merits and failings marked out, who liked to cuss and criticise and used more direct and earthy ways to seduce his loins. All the men knew all the women around here — in all the ways there was to know. 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.” Her own depictions have ranged from French Creoles to the protagonist of her 2009 novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle. Shortlisted for the Orange prize, it was a story of ex-colonial immigrants like Roffey’s own mother, who became well-known for cycling around the island on a green bike that she had been given as a wedding present.
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. 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 …One can’t help admiring the boldness of Roffey’s vision. . . . Sentence by sensuous sentence, Roffey builds a verdant, complicated world that is a pleasure to live inside. . . . Aycayia is a magical creature, though rendered so physically you might start to believe in the existence of mermaids.” —Shruti Swamy, The New York Times David’s care and his resistance to trying to contain Aycayia provide a healing redress to the patriarchal and ecological violence of her capture earlier in the novel. The capture of the mermaid by a white tourist and his son in town for a fishing tournament is narrated as a vicious sexual assault. Upon first seeing her, the men marvel initially at the feminine parts of her body, “Did you see her tits? […] Did you see her … pussy bone?” After pulling her into the boat, they are aroused by her strange, injured, feminine form:
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.Freedom is another theme. Acyayia’s transformation frees her of the curse. Arcadia is free from her connections with white people when her house, built by slaves, is destroyed. Arcadia’s deaf and dumb son, Reggie cannot really experience the nastier elements of the world so he free from evil. David, by documenting his side of the story is finally letting his emotions escape so partly this book is a form of release. 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: The mermaid is a real character in the myth that we are all living in—a 400-year story where we think we can own or control one another, where power is currency, and where this delusion is driving us to a kind of Armageddon, that may be a requirement of rebirth. 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 enchanting tale of a cursed mythical creature and the lonely fisherman who falls in love with her is "a daring, mesmerizing novel … single-handedly bringing magic realism up-to-date (Maggie O'Farrell, best-selling author of Hamnet).
Great Deal 
New Comment