“From over the Seven Seas the Empire’s sons came”: Addressing historical oblivion in Andrea Levy’s “Uriah’s War”

Abstract

The work of Andrea Levy has recurrently explored the historical connections between Britain and the Caribbean, and has contributed to the mapping of black British identities. Six Stories and an Essay (2014) continues this theme. In “Uriah’s War”, the final short story of the collection, Levy pursues her concern with the gaps in historical memory by revisiting the Great War at the significant historical time of the centennial anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict, in order to foreground the involvement of Caribbean colonial troops in the war effort. This article argues that “Uriah’s War” forces readers to question the collective memory of the Great War as a white man’s conflict, thus highlighting the fraught negotiations of memory and setting the historical record straight. It examines the ways in which “Uriah’s War” addresses three major historical episodes of the Great War involving the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR), mostly unacknowledged or devalued in western historiography of the conflict. “Uriah’s War” contributes to the rescue of Caribbean soldiers from historical oblivion and inscribes their voices in order to demonstrate their patriotic affiliation and denounce the racial discrimination suffered by soldiers of the BWIR during the Great War.

Keywords:

• Andrea Levy
• “Uriah’s War”
• historical storytelling
• British West Indies Regiment (BWIR)
• The Great War

Acknowledgements

The initial research for this article was conducted as part of “Back to Gallipoli and Beyond: The Great War under Postcolonial Scrutiny”, a seminar held at the University of Oviedo, April 22–24, 2015, which I co-organized with Dr Aurora García Fernández, whose enthusiasm and support throughout has been instrumental. I would like to thank her, as well as Dr Carolina Fernández Rodríguez and Dr M.S. Suárez Lafuente, for their insightful comments on an early draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In Levy’s first three novels, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), the past is addressed within the literary conventions of the Bildungsroman, but pushing into the realm of the postcolonial agenda, as the characters’ development and formation is narrated in parallel to the transformation of Britain as a multi-ethnic and multicultural nation (Stein 2004, 47; Gunning 2014). Levy’s fourth novel, Small Island (2004), likewise explores issues of identity and belonging in a multi-ethnic and multicultural location, yet in this case it does so by retracting in time to the aftermath of the Second World War and concentrating on the social changes taking place in a period when an apparently fixed and homogenous sense of “Britishness” was being put into question by the presence of Caribbean British citizens. Her fifth novel, The Long Song (2010), a metafictional slave narrative set in early-19th-century Jamaica, takes the writer’s historical exploration even further back since the novel revisits and rewrites the history of slavery and the Black Atlantic to locate the roots and routes (Gilroy 1993) of the historical connections of Britain and the Caribbean.

2. The other five stories in Six Stories and an Essay are “The Diary”, “Deborah”, “That Polite Way That English People Have”, “Loose Change” and “The Empty Pram” and all of them place the Caribbean at the centre of British history. Not just at the centre of history but also at the centre of (her)stories, since all them are directly informed by Levy’s mother’s autobiographical experiences in post-war Britain or loosely based on Levy’s own life episodes as a second-generation black British citizen. “The Diary” and “Deborah” are not based on historical events, but “Deborah” emanates from Levy’s work as a dresser for ballet dancers and, in the case of the former, from “something that [Levy] witnessed when [she] was a young girl growing up on an estate in the early 1960s” (Levy 2014a, 37). The remaining stories, however, deal directly with events of historical significance – in particular, the topic of Caribbean immigration to Britain in the early 1950s. In “That Polite Way That English People Have”, Levy takes inspiration from her mother’s journey by ship from Jamaica to England in 1948. Similarly, “Loose Change” is informed by an act of kindness experienced by her mother when a man offered her a sandwich to quench her hunger – thus reminding the reader of a similar situation experienced by the character Gilbert in Small Island: “How long did I stare at that sweet in my hand? Fool that I am, I took a handkerchief from my pocket to wrap it. I had no intention of eating that precious candy. For it was a salvation to me – not for the sugar but for the act of kindness” (Levy 2004, 328). “Empty Pram” bears witness to the shock of arrival, and to the racist prejudices Caribbean immigrants encountered in Britain, through an incident involving a black woman accused of stealing a white baby, when in fact she was trying to hand the baby back to the rightful mother after a white boy had stolen the infant from the pram. It could be argued that Hortense’s experiences in Small Island resonate vividly in these two short stories.

3. The participation of Australian and New Zealand (ANZAC) soldiers in the Gallipoli campaign has been more widely acknowledged than that of Caribbean soldiers. Numerous books have actually been published on this topic such as, for example, Thomson (2013) or Stanley (2014). There are books for children as well, like those of Harper ([2004] 2015).

4. The traditional historical novel as a genre has been defined mainly in relation to the work of György Lukács and his analysis of Walter Scott’s novels in The Historical Novel ([1937] 1962). Other critics such as Herbert Butterfield (1924), Avrom Fleishman (1971), Henry E. Shaw (1983) and more recently Jerome De Groot (2010) have also defined and theorized the historical novel and/or historical fiction. For Fleishman, “what makes a historical novel historical is the active presence of the concept of history as a shaping force” (1971, 15). In his analysis of these previous critics, Shaw affirms that “they [Lukács, Butterfield or Fleishman] are united in believing historical fiction to be fundamentally a form of knowledge” (1983, 28).

5. Such as, for example, Wilfred Gibson’s (1915) poem “Back”, a text which with its simple rhyming couplets and iambic meter portrays the realistic experience of ordinary soldiers in a powerful and direct language that aims at stirring the civilian conscience: “They asked me where I’ve been/And what I’ve done and seen. /But what can I reply/Who know it wasn’t I, /But someone just like me, /Who went across the sea/And with my head and hands/Killed men in foreign lands . . ./Though I must bear the blame /Because he bore my name” (243).

6. Levy has also metaphorically referred to this disassociation by the powerful use of the mother-turned-witch trope in her acclaimed novel Small Island, which poignantly depicts the interracial encounters of Jamaican immigrants and the British native population during and after the Second World War. London reveals itself to the eyes of the Mother Country’s Jamaican son, Gilbert, as: “Can this be that fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary woman. This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort after the journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’” (Levy 2004, 139).

7. Howe (1998) notes in his article how the recruitment standards became less restricted as the conflict continued, allowing for the enlistment of soldiers with venereal diseases or dental problems, provided treatment was undertaken at the soldiers’ depot.