Postcolonial Fiction Dealing with the Experience of Migration Often Focuses on Both the Place Left Behind and the New Home
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ISLANDS TO GET AWAY FROM: POSTCOLONIAL ISLANDS AND EMANCIPATION IN NOVELS BY MONICA ALI, ANDREA LEVY AND CARYL PHILLIPS SANDRA VLASTA Postcolonial fiction dealing with the experience of migration often focuses on both the place left behind and the new home. In the case of British fiction, both of these spaces can be islands. This essay concentrates on the novels Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy, The Final Passage (1985) by Caryl Phillips and Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali. In the first two books islands are highly significant, both in terms of the structure of the texts and in terms of the motifs, such as social interactions, colonial past and postcolonial present, climate, food, etc. In Brick Lane the concept of the island as interpretative figure is central. The title of the book refers to an “island” within the city of London, an area mostly populated by Bangladeshi immigrants. In the three novels, we observe a movement away from islands which, in different ways, represents a process of female emancipation. Postcolonial fiction dealing with the experience of migration often focuses on both the place left behind and the new home. In the case of British fiction, both of these spaces can be islands not only emblematizing centre-periphery relations but also unsettling colonial history. As Paul Smethurst shows in his study of postmodern texts such as Michel Tournier’s Friday, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Caryl Phillips’ Cambridge and Marina Warner’s Indigo, the Caribbean islands, in particular, have been used as postcolonial island chronotopes.1 With these considerations in mind, the present essay will concentrate on postcolonial texts which are set both on the island left behind and in the old motherland, yet new homeland, of Great Britain, and which examine the movements between the two from a feminine perspective. 1 Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000, 219-66. 234 Sandra Vlasta The islands in the novels Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy and The Final Passage (1985) by Caryl Phillips are highly significant, both in terms of the structure of the texts whose chapters alternate between the “old” home and the “new”, and in terms of their comparability on various levels: social interactions, societal structures, colonial past and postcolonial present, climate, geography, fauna and flora, food, etc., which all serve to create a contrast between the two worlds of island and “mother country”.2 Although islands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) are not present in a geographical sense, the concept of the island as interpretative figure is central to the novel. The title of the book indeed refers to an “island” within the city of London, an area mostly populated by Bangladeshi immigrants. In the three novels to be discussed, we observe a movement away from islands which, in different ways, represents a process of female emancipation. Islands … and islands Levy and Phillips situate their novels in the British West Indies, whose islands are naturally small compared to Great Britain, the largest European island. In Ali’s text, Britain is the only actual island present in the book. Islands are therefore defined here not only in a geographical sense, but also as spaces of confinement, with borders that are difficult to cross for the protagonists. These limits take many forms: they can be natural and physical, such as oceans or constructions, but also social and personal, such as rules, traditions, economic circumstances, or even inhibitions. Such restrictions are acceptable to some of the characters, while others have the desire to overcome them. In Levy’s and Phillips’ novels, the motif of islands and the movements between them are already alluded to in the titles: Small Island and The Final Passage. Small Island refers to Jamaica where two of the main protagonists, Hortense and Gilbert, come from. For Gilbert, as for many other young men after their experiences abroad during voluntary service for the RAF in the Second World War, the 2 In reports from immigrants from the West-Indies, similar issues, such as the weather, the climate, the landscape but also racism are mentioned as making it difficult to get used to the life in Great Britain: see Robert Winder, Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain, London: Little, Brown, 2004..