Abstract: The aim of this paper is to examine how the British author of Jamaican origin Andrea Levy deconstructs racially exclusivist configurations of Britishness in her novel "Small Island" (2004). Looking back at the Windrush era and the Second World War, with the benefit of temporal distance, she reconceptualises the British nation as a plural and inclusive site of multicultural convergence, thus exposing the constructedness of cultural and national identities.
Keywords: counter-discourse, cultural hybridity, nationhood, transculturalism, transnational approach
1. Introduction: Narrating nationhood
From the late 1970s onwards, postcolonial theory has offered new critical insights into the nature of the identity of the postcolonial subject, along with critical revisions of modem European identity. The colonial discourse theory has dismantled the whole project of modernity as a Eurocentric construction based on the totalizing and hegemonic principles of the Enlightenment, whose teleology is bound up with imperialism and leads "inexorably to an episteme associated with the West" (Carey, Festa 2009:8). At the same time, poststmcturalist views of antiessential subjectivity have contributed to displacing the Enlightenment subject from its status as "the central category of Modernity" (Burger 1992:12). Inevitably, this criticism has been extended to the institution through which modem individual subjectivity achieved a sense of identity, namely, the nation-state as the modern construction par excellence.
In philosophical terms, the unified and stable self of the Cartesian or Enlightenment subject is founded on the political and cultural unity of the nation to which it belongs, so that the rhetoric of nationhood emerges as a rhetoric of wholeness and uniformity. Conceived as an organic whole which excludes cultural differences and denies nationhood to the racial/ethnic Other, the nation results then inseparable from the imperial project. As Paul Gilroy (2000) argued, the fatal implication of the complex interaction between race and nation is that the national frontiers come to coincide with the limits of race and culture.
Starting with the end of the 1980s, one of the strategic interventions of the project of Black British Cultural Studies has been precisely to deconstruct the naturalization of the link between race, ethnicity and nation (read: white race, ethnic identity of Englishness and the British nation), which has been responsible for the hegemonic articulation of national identity and national culture in exclusionary terms (Baker, Best, Linderborg 1996:1-15). The nexus between ethnic identity and the national character is shown to be merely a cultural construction conveyed in discourse and, as such, liable to be deconstructed, and it is this that lies at the core of Black British critique. Stuart Hall (1992:292), for instance, has described nations as "system[s] of cultural representations" by which national identities are discursively constructed and continually re-produced through the narrative of nationhood:
A national culture is a discourse - a way of constructing meanings which influences and organizes both our actions and our conception of ourselves [...] National culture constructs identities by producing meaning about 'the nation' with which we can identify, these are contained in stories which are told about it, memories which connect its present with its past and images which are constructed of it. (Hall 1992:293)
In his discussion of narrative and the nation, Homi Bhabha also posed the question of nationhood as a cultural construction and articulated the nation itself as "a narrative strategy" (1990a: 292). Yet, the grand narrative of the nation turns out to be inherently ambiguous and "incomplete in its signification" (1990b: 1). Indeed, the untenability of the seemingly authoritative and homogeneous narrative of the nation and the culturally constructed boundaries of the national "imagined communities" (Anderson 1991) are made clear in the following statement:
Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalising boundaries - both actual and conceptual - [and that] disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities. (Bhabha 1990:300)
In line with these theoretical developments, and also in line with a tendency that seems to have emerged in British literature over the last two decades of the twentieth century and that Suzanne Keen (2006:167) aptly defined as "the historical tum in contemporary British fiction", contemporary black British writers have engaged with history and historically grounded fiction in order to write their counter-discourses of the nation. Among these novelists, who were born mostly in Britain of black or mixed parents, are the Anglo-Nigérian Bernardine Evaristo, the Anglo-Caribbean Caryl Phillips and the two Anglo-Guyanese David Dabydeen and Fred D'Aguiar, to name but a few. In their historical novels, they expose the crimes of the past and re-narrate the stories of the African diaspora from the alternative perspective of the black slaves and the unrecorded so that theirs are "[counter] stories about the past that point to multiple truths or the overturning of an old received Truth" (Keen 2006:171).
In this context, the London-born writer of Jamaican origin Andrea Levy deserves special mention, for she looks back at the Windrush era with a transnational approach, so developing her critique against racially exclusivist configurations of Britishness. In her book Small Island (2004), Levy cleverly returns to 1948 not to bring to the fore Black British history, but to depict how inextricably linked it is to the development of the British nation and how it is an integral part of the British national identity. She thus dismantles the constructed correspondence between whiteness and the British nation and British identity and, in so doing, participates in the re-delineation of present-day British national discourse about belonging and citizenship on a transnational, if not global, scale.
2. The Windrush era: The black invasion of the Albion fortress
Small Island is a story of multiple, inextricable connections and affiliations, which goes beyond the logic of polarities. Levy's declared aim is, in fact, to show that "England has never been an exclusive club, but rather a hybrid nation [...] plural and inclusive" (Levy 2000).
In a productive relationship between history, memory and the imagination, the novel connects Britain, the centre of the empire, to its periphery, the Caribbean, thus bringing the readers into "the heart of a story [and a long past] that Jamaica and Britain share" and that has reshaped black and white subjectivities alike and, ultimately, Britain's sense of self (Levy 2000). At the core of the novel lies the encounter with the racial Other that has generated that irreversible process of cultural hybridization which has transformed Great Britain into a multicultural and hybrid society, a powerful process that has led the British nation "to recognize, albeit with considerable hesitation and setbacks, that the other is a necessary component of its identity" (Balibar 2003:325).
Symbolically seen as the moment that marks the rise of multicultural and multiracial Britain, (although black people had been in Britain for centuries), the arrival in 1948 of the Caribbean immigrants on board the SS Empire Windrush ship represents a crucial event in British post-war history. Nevertheless, Levy's attitude towards the Windrush era and her decision to go back to 1948 are not to be seen as a mere recovery of the past, but rather as a successful attempt to re-inscribe that historical moment and its complexity in a transnational, even global, context which transcends both racial and national constraints. By offering a critical re-reading of a monumental chapter in Britain's memory, that of the second World War - from which the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush is inseparable - Levy challenges the centrality accorded to that global event as a mythic moment immediately before the country lost its homogeneity, and a defining moment of national identity. To put it differently, Levy offers a counter-history which contributes to undermining the validity of the selective memory that has produced what Gilroy terms as Britain's melancholic national consciousness and its
... error of imagining that [migrant] people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political or cultural connection to the collective life of their fellow subjects. (Gilroy 2004:98)
Regarded in this light, Small Island portrays the nation as an open space connected to the rest of the world, on which international and global affairs converge, thereby influencing the lives of its people and challenging processes of identity (re)formation.
The novel has a complex structure. The narrative perspective oscillates between 1924 and 1948 and, at the same time, moves across multiple geographic locations: London, rural England, Jamaica, India and the United States. With the first-person narratives of its four protagonists overlapping, Small Island follows the inextricably interwoven experiences of Gilbert Joseph, a black Jamaican who joins the RAF during the Second World War and eventually in 1948 arrives in London as an immigrant aboard the Windrush, Hortense Roberts, Gilbert's Jamaican wife, Queenie Bligh, their white landlady, and Bernard, Queenie's racist husband who also joined the RAF and is still missing three years after the war.
In a microcosm which prefigures multiracial Britain, they act out the complex dynamics that underlie interracial encounters ranging from hostility to hospitality and cooperation. Indeed, Levy's counter-narrative aims at calling into question monolithic representations of national identity and rejecting Eurocentric descriptions of British imperialism. Significantly, the novel opens with a Prologue in which Levy inverts the hegemonic order of imperialism, and shows up a new map of the Empire that no longer has Great Britain at its centre. Described in the Prologue through the eyes of Queenie as a child, the 1924 British Empire Exhibition - a would-be celebration of imperial dominance - becomes in fact a powerful metaphor for the black invasion of the Albion fortress, that is for the relocation of the periphery within the colonial centre. Paradoxically, in this inverted and unfamiliar world it is the Western colonizer who is out of place; it is Queenie who feels uncomfortable and loses her sense of direction:
I went to Africa when it came to Wembley. [While visiting with my family the various pavilions ..] we got lost in Africa. [...] we found ourselves in an African village [...] We were in the jungle. (1-5).
Moreover, constructed by Levy as the space which allows the colonial encounter with the Other, the imperial exhibition reveals itself to be an ambivalent "Third Space" of cultural interpenetration (Bhabha 1994:37-38). The pavilions of the Wembley exhibition, which created an African landscape in the heart of London, lack authenticity and turn out to be but a partial imitation of the African jungle. Mirroring neither Great Britain nor Africa but the intermingling of the two, the African pavilion emerges as a contradictory space of representation which fails to perfectly reproduce the original, thus undermining colonial authority. But it is in Queenie's encounter with the African man that the ambivalence which underlies the logic of imperial discourse is epitomized. By depicting the African simultaneously and incongruously as a subject both familiar and alien, human and animal, domestic and foreign and, above all, African and English, Queenie's description proves to be a stereotypical representation of black otherness, in Bhabha's sense (1994:57-93):
A black man. [...] A monkey man sweating a smell of mothballs. Blacker than when you smudge your face with a sooty cork. [...] His lips were brown, not pink like they should be, [...] His nose, squashed flat had two nostrils big as train tunnels. And he looking down at me. [...] I could feel the blood rising in my face, turning me crimson, as he smiled a perfect set of pure blinding white teeth. [...] His face was coming closer and closer to mine. He could have swallowed me up, this big nigger man. But instead he said in clear English: 'Perhaps we could shake hands instead? (Levy 2004:6)
Thus, from the very beginning, Levy frames the novel within an intrinsically hybrid national context which reveals "the internality of blacks to the West" (Gilroy 1993:5) and transcends both cultural difference and national borders. Nevertheless, Levy's major challenge to exclusionary representations of British national identity in favour of transnational modes of belonging comes with the climax at the end of the novel, when, in 1948, Queenie gives birth to a mixed-race child conceived with Michael Roberts, a Jamaican member of the RAF, with whom she has had a brief affair. The figure of the mixed-race child is aptly deployed by the author to embody the convergence of transracial histories in a national context and, consequently, to call into question its cultural homogeneity. So, the baby symbolizes Levy's hope for a new generation marked by new transcultural forms of subjectivity and belonging. Yet, in order to dismantle racial configurations of national identity, cooperation between the races is required: this seems to be Levy's message. Indeed, the fact that Queenie's small-minded husband, Bernard, is unwilling to raise the child (who eventually will be given up for adoption to Joseph and Hortense) metaphorically suggests that Levy's aim is, in John McLeod's words,
[to make us] understand 1948 as a moment of missed opportunity for the emergence of a very different vision of Britain, one which could be retrospectively [...] restated as a way of reinventing the UK's present and future in progressive, democratising ways. (McLeod 2010:47)
3. A new rhetoric of belonging
In giving her transnational account of (imperial) British history, Levy reformulates the concepts of nation and identity in transcultural terms. The nation is seen as an open space, a "contact zone" (Pratt 1991), where cultures can meet and merge and multiple identities are being incessantly formed and reformed, thus blurring the dichotomy of insider/outsider. By demonstrating the hybrid character of British history and the porous nature of the boundaries of Britain, Small Island destabilizes the sovereignty of national identity, as Bernard, the most explicitly racist character in the novel, claims: "all these coloured [are] swamping the place. Hardly like our own country any more" (2004:436).
Indeed, the nation becomes a space which is highly disputed over by both the Windrush migrants, who claim their British citizenship, and the British host population, which sees itself in danger of being displaced and pushed out. What emerges is a new rhetoric of belonging, which forces all individuals, whether black or white, to re-consider and re-negotiate both their sense of identity and the space they occupy. The global event of the war, and the subsequent experience of migration, in fact, have impacted upon the lives of all the characters in the novel and, more importantly, have shaken their certainties and convictions once and for all.
On their return from the war, for example, Gilbert and Bernard question their vision of their respective homelands. Paradoxically enough, both of them feel like strangers on their islands:
With alarm I [Gilbert] became aware that the island of Jamaica was no universe. [...] I was shocked by the awful realisation that, man, we Jamaicans are small islanders too. (2004:196)
In a parallel fashion, Bernard has to admit that his beloved
England had shrunk. It was smaller than the place I left. [...] I had to stare out at the sea just to catch a breath. (2004:424)
and, incredulous and alienated when he faces London's decay and his almost ruined home, he can but say:
Hard to believe this had been my home for most of my life. Nothing was familiar. Had it always looked so exhausted? So friable? Buildings decaying and run down. Rotting sashes. Cracked plaster. [...] Got closer and closer. But still approaching as a stranger. (2004:427-428)
Throughout the novel, all the characters undergo an incessant process of identity (re)formation, which for all its plurality and fluidity, underlies the positional, provisional and negotiated nature of cultural identities (Hall 1992). Hortense, for instance, arrives in England convinced that thanks to her complexion which is
the colour of warm honey [and not] the bitter chocolate hue of [many other Jamaicans], with such a countenance there was a chance of golden life for [me in England], (2004:38)
Yet, the image of the Mother Country as a place of opportunity where she is entitled to reside fades when, once there, she becomes aware that England is a land of exclusion; a land where although she is a qualified teacher in Jamaica and a British citizen, she is told: "You can't teach in this country. You're not qualified to teach here in England" (2004:454). As examples of diasporic identities, both Hortense and Gilbert's shifting perceptions of themselves and the reality around them are reshaped by the experience of migrancy. They are both forced to renegotiate their idea of the Mother Country which, in their colonial imaginary, was waiting for all the sons of the empire: "T never dreamed England would be like this. So cheerless', Hortense admits" (2004:225). Instead, they find themselves being socially constructed as the Other. Thus, echoes of disillusionment and disappointment reverberate in Gilbert's words:
She [the Mother Country] offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, 'Who the bloody hell are you?'(2004:139).
Indeed, once in London, Gilbert has to face the racist hostility of British society towards black immigrants and the consequent difficulty in finding lodgings:
So how many gates I swing open? How many houses I knock on? Let me count the doors that opened and shut quick without even me breath managing to get inside. Man, these English landlords and ladies could come up with excuses. (2004:215)
Yet, Queenie and Gilbert's position appears no less problematic. They, too, are forced to make adjustments and redefine their national identity and sense of belonging to the place they live in. So, Bernard's feeling of displacement in the social space he inhabits, by implicitly contesting essentialist notions of identity, obliges him to dismantle his whole system of nationalist beliefs according to which
Everyone ha[s] a place. England for the English and the West Indies for these coloured people. [...] I've nothing against them in their place. But their place isn't here. [...] It would be a kindness to return them to the backward place they come from. (2004:469).
Queenie, for her part, has to go through the war on her own, forced to find a way to survive the hard times and the new social order the war brought with it. Thus, against any nationalist credo, and despite her neighbours' protests, she decides to rent rooms to the unwelcome black immigrants. In this sense, Queenie's house on Nevern Street, as a space shared between blacks and whites, a place of convergence of multiple, interrelated, international stories and, ultimately, the place of the conception and birth of the mixed-race baby, can be interpreted as a metaphor for Levy's re-conceptualization of the British nation as a whole and of what it means to be British.
By putting emphasis on the diasporic and transnational connections intrinsic to British national history and identity, Levy does not want to deny British identity but, rather, seeks to demonstrate the original hybrid character of both that history and that identity. The polyphonic structure of the text, with its overlapping narratives, also contributes to a sense of British identity as being heterogeneous and diverse. Indeed, each character is British in his/her own way with a personal heritage and story and the characters all go to make up the British nation. Moreover, by exposing the cultural and national identities of the characters as socially constructed, dynamic and open to change (Hall 1992), Levy shows the fictive character of nationhood and how the British "ethnoscape" can no longer be conceived "as tightly territorialised, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous" (Appadurai 2008:48).
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, in her polyphonic novel Small Island, Andrea Levy questions a homogeneous view of British history and British identity. In so doing, she looks back at two crucial, interrelated moments of British history, the Second World War and the Windrush era, the latter traditionally recognized as the moment that marks the rise of multicultural Britain. Levy re-writes those fundamental chapters of British history in transnational, even global, terms thus exposing Black British history as integral to the history of the British nation. In her transnational and transcultural approach, she depicts the nation as the hub of global interconnectedness where the encounter with the racial Other takes place. As a result, the novel deconstructs the correspondence between whiteness and the British nation and questions the hegemonic articulation of national identity. Far from being eternally fixed, the cultural and national identities of all four protagonists undergo constant transformation: they meet and merge and are incessantly created and recreated. It is precisely this constructed nature of their cultural and national identities which challenges the rhetoric of nationhood itself as one based on visions of ethnic homogeneity or racial purity.
References
Anderson, B. 1991 (1983). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Appadurai, A. 2008 (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Baker, H. A. Jr., St.Best and R. H. Linderborg. 1996. 'Representing Blackness/Representing Britain: Cultural studies and the Politics of Knowledge' in A.H. Baker Jr., St. Best and R. H. Linderborg (eds.). Black British Cultural Studies. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 1-15.
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Burger, P. 1992. The Decline of Modernity. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press.
Carey, D. and L. Festa. 2009. 'Some Answers to the Questions: What is Postcolonial Enlightenment?' in D. Carey and L. Festa (eds.). The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-22.
Gilroy, P. 1993 The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso.
Gilroy, P. 2000. Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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Hall, S. 1992. 'The Question of Cultural Identity' in S. Hall, D. Held and T. McGrew (eds.). Modernity and its Futures. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 273-316.
Keen, S. 2006. 'The Historical Tum in British Fiction' in J. F. English (ed.). A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 167-187.
Levy, A. 2000. 'This is My England' in The Guardian Weekend, Feb. 19 [Online], Available: www.theguardian.com/books/2000/feb/19/societyl. [Accessed 2014, February 5].
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VALERIA POLOPOLI
University of Catania
Valeria Polopoli is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Humanistic Sciences of the University of Catania, Italy. She received her doctorate in Anglo-American Studies from Catania University in 2011. She is currently working on a monograph on black British writing.
E-mail address: [email protected]
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Copyright West University of Timisoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology 2015
Abstract
[While visiting with my family the various pavilions ..] we got lost in Africa. [...] we found ourselves in an African village [...] [...]constructed by Levy as the space which allows the colonial encounter with the Other, the imperial exhibition reveals itself to be an ambivalent "Third Space" of cultural interpenetration (Bhabha 1994:37-38). Queenie, for her part, has to go through the war on her own, forced to find a way to survive the hard times and the new social order the war brought with it. [...]against any nationalist credo, and despite her neighbours' protests, she decides to rent rooms to the unwelcome black immigrants. [...]each character is British in his/her own way with a personal heritage and story and the characters all go to make up the British nation. [...]by exposing the cultural and national identities of the characters as socially constructed, dynamic and open to change (Hall 1992), Levy shows the fictive character of nationhood and how the British "ethnoscape" can no longer be conceived "as tightly territorialised, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogeneous" (Appadurai 2008:48). [...]the novel deconstructs the correspondence between whiteness and the British nation and questions the hegemonic articulation of national identity.
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