TAIL OF THE UNEXPECTED
COSTA AWARD WINNER MONIQUE ROFFEY ON WHY HER MERMAID IS A WEIRD FISH.
REMEMBER Ariel, that perky little red-haired mermaid from the eponymous Disney film? Of course you do – so pervasive is the power of Disney that cutesy, beaming Ariel is one of the first images that comes to mind whenever we think of women of the sea. Never mind that history has seen mermaids cast as tragic, cursed and oppressed, or that the Disney film is a family-friendly version of the original, much darker story by Hans Christian Andersen.
‘This little red-haired girl with her nipped-in waist has become way too powerful,’ says Monique Roffey (right), who has just won the Costa Novel Of
The Year award for her seventh novel, The Mermaid Of Black Conch. ‘Every culture has a mermaid – she exists the world over. My job was to reimagine her in some of her earliest forms.’
And there is nothing Disney about Roffey’s novel, which loosely reworks the Taino myth of a cursed mermaid against the backdrop of a Caribbean island in 1976. A sea woman with matted black hair, exiled to the sea centuries ago by jealous housewives, is pulled from the water by a couple of white Florida fisherman, who tie her up, planning on selling her to the highest bidder. A local fisherman rescues her and, as the mermaid discovers language and starts shedding her scales, the pair fall in love. The novel, written partly in Creole and rich in descriptions of small-town Creole life, dances with ancient mythic allusions but also rewrites the mermaid story from a feminist perspective, challenging problematic ideas regarding female sexuality and the male gaze.
Roffey, who lives in London but was born in Trinidad and visits the island regularly, published Black Conch with the Leeds-based independent press Peepal Tree, the UK’s leading publisher of Caribbean and diaspora writing and, unusually, crowdfunded the novel’s publicity campaign herself. Her novel is the second of two by Trinidadian writers acknowledged by this year’s Costa Awards – Ingrid Persaud won the debut novel category for Love After Love. Persaud is published by Faber and for many years Roffey was published by Simon & Schuster – but Roffey says mainstream publishing in the UK is still, to put it bluntly, far too white.
‘Marginalised black voices are going to have to kick the door down in the way women writers did,’ she says. ‘Yes, there are black publishing initiatives such as Dialogue Books and Merky Books [Stormzy’s imprint], but all black activists need allies in the white mainstream publishing world.’
Roffey knows she is in a privileged position – she is the first to say she is a middle-class, paleskinned woman and, indeed, has been writing successfully for 20 years. Yet she admits sustaining a career as a novelist in the 21st century is a challenge.
‘Society is very ageist,’ she says. ‘I am very envious of writers like Ingrid or Zadie Smith, who write a bloody good novel with their first book. But I am wiser now and, I think, a better writer. We just have to keep ploughing our furrow.’
The Mermaid Of Black Conch (Peepal Press) is out now. The winner of the overall Costa Award is announced Thursday