“This tale is of my making”: empowering voices in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

Abstract

Andrea Levy’s The Long Song takes readers to pre- and post-Emancipation Jamaica through the voice of July, an old black woman who in the final years of the 19th century reminisces about her past. July is an intrusive narrator who throughout the narrative flaunts her control over her tale and sometimes calls attention to what is left unsaid, so that the horrors of slavery are mainly conveyed in her silences, while her humorous perspective articulates a story that focuses on the survival and agency of black subjects. This article analyses The Long Song in relation to other slavery fictions published in Britain in recent years and against the background of the 2007 bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. For all the lightness of its tone and the role of humour in the novel, the imaginative archaeology of The Long Song has a serious agenda: it recreates the historical past of the black British characters who populated Levy’s earlier fiction as it explores the interweaving of European and African lives that the slave trade produced.

Keywords:

• Andrea Levy
• black British writing
• Britishness
• slavery novel
• contemporary British fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Every Light in the House Burnin’ (Levy 1994), Never far from Nowhere (Levy 1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (Levy 1999), contemporary Caribbean British characters try to find a place as members of the imagined community of Britain. In Small Island (2004) Levy captures the life experiences of her parents’ generation in the late 1940s.

2. For a more detailed analysis of the development of neo-slave narratives in Britain, see Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso (2012).

3. Relevant in this context are Abigail Ward’s attempt to focus on “the ways in which their return to this past may shed light on current issues today” (2011, 1), and Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace’s (2006) book on the British slave trade, which includes a chapter devoted to fiction. See also Korte and Pirker (2011) for a good sense of the evolution of history and memory in relation to abolition and black identities.

4. Key critical texts in the study of slavery novels by British Caribbean authors are those by Eckstein (2006) and Ledent (1997, 2002, 2005).

5. In Dabydeen’s (2000) A Harlot’s Progress, Mungo’s rebellion against his editor leads to silence, so that what readers encounter is his mind’s kaleidoscopic recreation of his past.

6. Relevant studies of the novel in this context are Lima’s (2012) analysis of its neo-slave features, and Laursen’s (2014) consideration of the text as an example of postmemory and commemoration. An alternative reading by Fiona Tolan (2014) connects The Long Song with neo-Victorian fiction as well as Wide Sargasso Sea (and indirectly with Jane Eyre).

7. Echoes of Rhys’s protagonist and servant, Antoinette and Christophine, are sensed in Caroline Mortimer’s snobbish preference of the French name Marguerite for her slave maid July.

8. The strong humorous force in this novel is highlighted if we compare The Long Song with other recent fictions about Caribbean slavery such as The Book of Night Women by Marlon James (2009), a Jamaican writer established in the US. This novel also presents a story about Jamaican slavery (in the late 18th century) and is also about female empowerment.