Songs of Salt and Ruinate Sugar: Ecofeminism, Magical Realism and Post-Plantation Resistance in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch

Abstract

This article offers the first full-length, theory-driven reading of Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) at the nexus of post-colonial ecofeminism and Caribbean magical realism. Mobilizing Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchal ownership, Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Stephen Slemon’s model of magical realism as post-colonial discourse, the essay argues that Roffey’s mermaid romance re-members Taíno genocide, plantation slavery and neo-colonial extraction through a single hybrid body. Aycayia’s declaration — ‘Land is not to be owned’ — unhinges residual planter hierarchies, while David Baptiste’s epiphanic shift from possession to care rehearses an alternative, relational masculinity. Polyphonic form (Creole diary, Taíno verse, third-person chronicle) constitutes a counter-archive that restores Indigenous and more-than-human voices to Caribbean historiography. The novel’s open ending, in which the merwoman returns to a recuperating reef, models Donna Haraway’s ‘making-kin’ ethics and imagines coral regeneration as a metaphor for social repair. By entwining gendered defiance, ecological memory and mythic method, Roffey crafts an ‘ethic of regenerative refusal’ that reframes Caribbean futures beyond plantation modernity.