Race also plays a role in the story. Most of the characters in the book are conscious of The Caribbean’s history of colonisers. At one point David Baptiste regrets that his surname is a French one. The only major white character, Arcadia Rain (the Americans only make brief appearances in the beginning and end) is more like her Caribbean neighbors as she speaks the dialect. Coming from an island that has been under many different occupations, I was able to relate to this aspect of the book. She is seen as property not as a person. Aycayia turns out to have thoughts and opinions of her own. Arcadia, the only white woman in the book tells her of local history and Aycayia responds:

This might sound like a run-of-the-mill, Splash-type story, but I can assure you it is not: “Aycayia sat down on a bench by the lookout on the curve of the road and nibbled on the mango skin. She tugged it down in one neat strip… If she said yes to marry, she could cook in a new way, in an oven. She had already learnt again what heat could do. She knew what fire could do to a potato, a yam, a pumpkin, or even bodi. She could wash the dishes with frothy green liquid…. But in her last life, men could have more than one wife; that was normal…. Would she have to share David one day?” Set in a tiny Caribbean village in the 1970s, this charming yet clear-eyed romance begins with a fisherman, David, lazily awaiting his catch only to snare a centuries-old mermaid, Aycayia, cursed by women jealous of her beauty. She’s drawn to the sound of the guitar he’s strumming; he wonders if he’s been smoking too many spliffs. The historical ramifications of colonisation and imperialism are vividly present even in 1976 with the present of a white woman who owns most of the residences on the island. She is a perfectly nice woman and gets on well with David, but the legacies of slavery and ownership of colonised land, property and people is glaringly present in the daily lives of the residents of St Constance. It’s a sobering reminder of the long-lasting scars of colonialism.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. Okay, anyone who knows me as a reader knows this book isn't going to be my cup of tea. I really don't like magical realism no matter how many awards the book has won. 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. 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 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:

And then when Aycayia reflects on the moments when she realized she was falling in love with David: Told in poetic, meticulous prose interspersed with oral storytelling verse, this novel is a love story between a mermaid and a fisherman. While this may seem like a tale often told, it is set apart by the rich materiality of the writing and of its Caribbean setting. While this is a true romance, a lush dance between two compelling characters, it is also about the logics and the violence of possession: how greed, envy, and the quest to own — land, money, people — hurts nature, people, and love itself. 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:David was strumming his guitar and singing to himself when she first raised her barnacled, seaweed-clotted head from the flat, grey sea, its stark hues of turquoise not yet stirred. Plain so, the mermaid popped up and watched him for some time before he glanced around and caught sight of her. 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.

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.” 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:

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This is a book about transformation and change. It's about how Aycayia changes and in her encounter with others (David Baptiste, a white woman, Arcadia Rain, and her deaf son Reggie, among others) transforms them. So in some ways it's about the transformative power and potential of myth and storytelling and love. This book is about many things: feminism and colonialism, love, possession and jealousy, and a kind of erotic love that threatens to undo every other aspect of the characters’ lives. Aycayia is so strong and caring that we feel as if the magical realism of the novel has taken the genre itself into new and exciting territory. Readers surely will fall in love with the love story that plays like Shakespeare in island patois. David’s voice is so heartbreaking and Aycayia’s thoughts are so modern that their desires may overwhelm you as they do to themselves.