Catch and Release

In Monique Roffey's latest novel, the Costa Award-winning The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story, a thousand-year old Taino mermaid named Aycayia resurfaces to indict the logics of possession and extraction that have shaped the Caribbean since colonial contact. Having swum afoul of a sportfishing derby off the rural island of Black Conch in 1976, Aycayia is hooked-quite literally-by "white men from Florida [who] came to fish for marlin and instead pulled a mermaid out of the sea" (7). The ensuing novel, which follows its eponymous mermaid's rescue and slow, temporary transformation from "barnacled, seaweed-clotted mermaid" to womanhood, explores Aycayia's awakening sexuality and foregrounds the transgressive-perhaps even queer-nature of love itself (7). Subtitled "a love story", The Mermaid of Black Conch is actually a story about love. This distinction is less semantic than it might initially seem. As the novel juxtaposes relationships founded upon power, possession and extraction with the genuine loves and frustrations-erotic and otherwise-of the characters who participate in Aycayia's rescue and wonder aloud about the curse that binds her to the sea, it suggests, following Angelique Nixon and Antonio Benitez-Rojo, that in queerness of gender, sexuality, and literary form, one finds a Caribbeanness as fluid and expansive as the sea itself. 1 The author of six novels, four of which are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean, Roffey is a Senior Lecturer on the MA/MFA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a tutor at the Norwich Writers Centre. Her work has consistently been recognized for major awards in British and Caribbean fiction and in environmental literature. The Mermaid of Black Conch, for instance, has won the Costa Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted

Art · Biology · Conch · Fishery · Humanities · African studies and sociopolitical issues