Jan Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1615 – Mauritshuis

Me: The Garden of Eden & the Fall before hell broke loose and guilt, shame and repentance became a burden on mortal souls. The rest we all know. Full Stop.
« Roffey finished Mermaid in 2018 before either #MeToo or Black Lives Matter had come into wider consciousness. “But if you’re a writer from the Caribbean, these ideas are not new,” she says. “I think every writer – and particularly somebody with pale skin – understands that they are writing into these conversations. Always. Right back, we have the most firebrand of writers who have been saying black lives matter and being incredibly audacious in answering back to the established canon. So I come from that tradition of being conscious of a colonised world.” »
