Conflicting Models of Agency in Andrea Levy's the Long Song

Conflicting Models of Agency in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010)

JANA GOHRISCH

Introduction: The Long Song in Context ITH HER FIFTH NOVEL, THE LONG SONG, published in 2010 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Andrea Levy continues to W explore decisive moments of entangled Caribbean and British histories. She began her career as a writer in the 1990s with three novels on growing up black and female in Britain, a theme pioneered by Joan Riley’s grimly realistic The Unbelonging (1985). The public recognition of Levy as a distinctive voice came with the publication of Small Island (2004), which won her many prestigious prizes.1 Her status as a literary celebrity was considerably augmented when, in 2007, libraries and political activists organized the ‘Small Island Read’ to celebrate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.2 They selected Small Island so as “to generate understanding around multiculturalism and the historical roots of racism in modern Brit- ain.”3 During this unique, large-scale community reading project,

1 Small Island is a realist novel that employs mild irony and multiperspectivity to contrast the lives of Jamaican soldiers in the British army during World War Two and the experiences of the Windrush generation of immigrants with those of lower-middle- class Londoners before, during, and after the war. 2 Anouk Lang, “‘Enthralling but at the Same Time Disturbing’: Challenging the Readers of Small Island,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (June 2009): 124. 3 Anouk Lang, “Reading Race in Small Island: Discourse Deviation, Schemata and the Textual Encounter,” Language and Literature 18.3 (August 2009): 319. 414 JANA GOHRISCH

50,000 copies of the novel Small Island were distributed across the UK, along with 80,000 readers’ guides which provided information about Levy and on the topics of slavery and migration.4 More than a hundred events, such as talks and discussions, exhibitions, com- petitions, and workshops, took place and were widely reported in the local and national press. Anouk Lang has used the project records to demonstrate how Small Island changed the readers’ perceptions of slavery and migration. She cautions academics not to dismiss Small Island as mainstream but to acknowledge the power of its straightforward narrative structure. The book encourages readers to question “the legacy of Empire and their own British heritage and identity.”5 The Long Song takes up from here – inviting its readers even deeper into the matter of Empire by setting its action against the key economic and political periods of plantation slavery and abolition in nineteenth-century Jamaica. Levy’s novel is one in a long line of revisionist6 historical novels that have been exploring the legacies of Empire for an anglo- phone readership since the 1980s. They provide the reader with counter- memories from the perspective of the colonized and/or enslaved juxtaposed with individualized insights into the workings of colonial ideology. The criti- cal analysis of the Empire and its effects has won Salman Rushdie (1981), Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth (jointly in 1992) the Booker Prize, for which Caryl Phillips was shortlisted in 1993. The Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison has done similar work from an African- American point of view, combining feminist politics with literary innovation. Why, then, should Andrea Levy want to traverse ground that has already been covered so impressively and successfully? What, in general, does Levy add aesthetically to these literary negotiations of Empire, and particularly to plantation slavery? Similar to the previous British postmodern novels dealing with slavery in the Caribbean, The Long Song uses recent historiography to imagine its

4 Lang, “‘Enthralling but at the Same Time Disturbing’,” 124. 5 “‘Enthralling but at the Same Time Disturbing’,” 138. 6 For my use of ‘revisionist,’ I rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines the term as follows: “(of a proposition, argument, or work) that revises, or promotes revision of, an accepted or established version of historical phenomena and events. Now the most common sense”; Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. Catherine Soanes & Angus Stevenson (1998; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005).