THE WOMAN OF THE STONE SEA - Meg Vandermerwe.pdf

The Woman of the Stone Sea seeks to reinvent the archetypal Western literary trope of fisherman and mermaid, through my Coloured 'kreef' fisherman protagonist, Hendrik, and the mamlambo he finds washed up on a beach. Set within the Coloured fishing community of an unnamed West Coast fishing village, the story uses myth to expose our turbulent racial present and past whilst at the same time pushing the boundaries of magic realism within the South African literary canon. Indeed, for the majority of South Africa's indigeneous populations, the boundaries between what the post-Enlightenment Western world might call the 'real world' and the supposedly fictitious world of spirit and the supernatural, are less clear; less dogmatically defined and less absolute. Woman seeks to explore this through its form and magic real(ism) approach. At the same time it seeks to give voice to the Coloured fishing communities which have largely been excluded from the South African literary canon.