Clean sweep: Andrea Levy defines what it is to be black, British and a literary lioness

Black Issues Book Review, July-August, 2005 by Robert Fleming

Last year, Andrea Levy saw her luck begin to turn after publishing her fourth novel, Small Island (February 2004) in England, racking up sales of more than 430,000 copies worldwide. Following her previous three critically acclaimed but commercially flat novels, the officials of Levy's British publisher, Headline, were stunned by the speedy word-of-mouth response to the popular book, bolstered by supportive reviews on the Internet, standing-room-only readings and a media blitz. Now Levy is the rage of the English literary world, with her current work garnering several major writing awards. The book was published in April in America by Picador USA.

Small Island, the story of two couples, one Jamaican and one English, confronts black and white "points of contact" with the spheres of race, gender, class and identity during the critical period of the late 1940s and '50s. It was through the immigration experience that she uncovered the core of these characters in this small island of England. "Immigration is a dynamic process" Levy says. "The people who come are as changed by it as the people and land they come to."

Levy, a 48-year-old Londoner, wrote her earlier fiction using her experiences as a child of Jamaican immigrants growing up in the seat of power of the British Empire. But she struck gold following her imaginary chronicle drawing on the actual stories of her parents, a part of the post-war "Windrush" generation, thus termed for the SS Empire Windrush, a decommissioned troop ship that sailed from Jamaica to Britain in 1948, ferrying hundreds of West Indian migrants.

Levy's father was among those on the Windrush, and that generation of black colonials, like her parents, endured the white racism in their quest for a better existence than they had before on the former tropical island home. For these new black immigrants, the life they found there was not unlike the closed society black Americans discovered under the rigid grip of Jim Crow.

"No blacks, No Irish, No Dogs"

"At the time Small Island was set, in 1948, there was no race relations legislation in Britain,' Levy says to BIBR, as she continues on her American book tour from New York City. "It was possible to look someone in the face and tell them you won't give them a job or whatever because they are black. In housing, there were the now infamous signs that were out in the windows to deter black people and other undesirables that read: 'No Blacks, No Irish, No dogs.' That sort of racism is no longer tolerated in Britain. The racism we have now is less overt but in some ways more insidious. Everyone, I think, knows it is still there."

The researching of black Britain was very enticing to Levy, especially with the richness and durability of her own family tree of the post-war generation. Levy's father and his twin brother served among the thousands of West Indians in the wartime Royal Air Force and were among the first to come to the Mother Country after the war. Her mother joined them six months later. Despite the social injustice and prejudice, her parents succeeded on their own terms. Her mother, who was a teacher in Jamaica, took a sewing job and eventually went back to college. She wanted to go back home, but she soon discovered that Levy's father had fallen in love with his adopted country; a love he felt until his death in 1987.

Levy's research for writing Small Island lasted nearly live years. "It was a labor of love;' Levy adds, noting long hours spent in various museums and archives. "I wanted to find areas that hadn't been explored in depth. One of the reasons for that--it needed a lot of research. With my first two novels, 'although they were fictionalized, I did nevertheless write them from my own experience.

"I grew up believing that my family history somehow began when my dad stepped off a ship in England. I realized that my heritage is full and rich. I never learned anything about the history of the Caribbean at school. I was brought up to think that my heritage was worthless in some way because it was not part of the mainstream story of British history."

A Gift for Dialogue

In the current novel, Levy highlights that heritage, celebrating the stories and making them a part of British literary history. Small Island is an artful piece of storytelling, with the writer juggling a quartet of voices to illustrate her narrative. In 1948, Gilbert and Hortense, a pair of Jamaican newlyweds with big-city stardust in their eyes, find their way to a crumbling room in a house owned by Queenie Bligh and her husband, Bernard, who spent the war in India with the air force. Queenie is accepting of the black couple, but her husband is not and makes trouble for them every chance he gets.

Critics have touted Levy's superior gift for dialogue and voices. In interviews about her characters, she has said she could have written an entire book about Bernard, a white racist, which she saw as a challenge in plotting the story.

"It was important to me that all four characters had distinct voices from one another. Getting the voice right was very much integral to understanding the characters. I would sort of hear their voices in my head as I wrote. Each character needed a voice that reflected their lives, upbringings and beliefs. I wrote them in the first person so that the process for me became a little like acting. I would think myself into the character and then see the world totally through their eyes."