Andrea Levy FRSL

Andrea Levy FRSL

Andrea Levy was born in London, England in 1956 to Jamaican parents. She is the author of five novels, each of which explore - from different perspectives - the problems faced by black British-born children of Jamaican emigrants. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994), is the story of a Jamaican family living in London in the 1960s. Her second, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is set during the 1970s and tells the story of two very different sisters living on a London council estate. In Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Faith Jackson, a young black Londoner, visits Jamaica after suffering a nervous breakdown and discovers a previously unknown personal history. Small Island (2004), set in 1948, explores the interaction between a black couple, Gilbert, a former RAF recruit, who has returned to Britain on the SS Windrush, and his Jamaican wife Hortense, and a white couple: Queenie, their landlady, and her recently demobbed husband, Bernard. It won the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Book of the Year, and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Small Island was adapted for BBC television and broadcast in 2009. Born in London in 1956, Levy drew on the postwar period more broadly within her fictional work. Andrea Levy's parents travelled from Jamaica to England on the now famous SS Empire Windrush in 1948. It is a journey Levy fictionalises in her first novel, Every light in the House Burnin'. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as 'An extremely powerful novel, a striking and promising debut', the book opens, not with the expected transatlantic journey from the West Indies, but with a family trip from London to Pontin's Holiday Camp. While the scene may be anecdotal in terms of the novel as a whole, it is by 'provincialising' the trope of travel, that Levy begins to draw attention to some of the discrepancies and differences (in term Questions of English-ness and of Diaspora are also central to Levy’s novel, Small Island. The book moves between England and Jamaica before and after World War II, and is narrated by four characters: the Jamaican Gilbert, his new wife Hortense, their English landlady, Queenie, and her husband, Bernard. As this structure suggests, Small Island operates through the establishment of a series of parallels: between London and Kingston, between husbands and wives, between past and present. This symmetrical structure, in which ‘small island’ refers to both Britain and Jamaica, allows Levy to both announce and undermine a series of differences between English-ness and West Indian-ness. It is in this way that Small Island reveals both the tragedy of mutual ignorance and the possibilities of cross-cultural intimacy, overlap, and interaction. Critics have praised the novel’s refusal of easy racial binaries and its nuanced characterization in this respect. For example, Hortense’s confident sense of superiority undermines a simple sense of the black British immigrant as passive victim, and implies that snobbery and prejudice were also aspects of West Indian characters (of class, gender and generation) that cut across the received histories of Black Britain.

stories,westindians

1956-06-07

Person

6198

TEXT

Andrea

Levy

2019-02-14