Islands to Get Away From: Postcolonial Islands and Emancipation in Novels by Monica Ali, Andrea Levy and Caryl Phillips

Abstract

Postcolonial fiction dealing with the experience of migration often focuses on both the place left behind and the new home. In the case of British fiction, both of these spaces can be islands not only emblematizing centre-periphery relations but also unsettling colonial history. As Paul Smethurst shows in his study of postmodern texts such as Michel Toumier's Friday, J.M. Coetzee's Foe, Caryl Phillips' Cambridge and Marina Warner's Indigo, the Caribbean islands, in particular, have been used as postcolonial chronotopes.1 With these considerations in mind, the present essay will concentrate on postcolonial texts which are set both on the left behind and in the motherland, yet new homeland, of Great Britain, and which examine the movements between the two from a feminine perspective.The islands in the novels Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy and The Final Passage (1985) by Caryl Phillips are highly significant, both in terms of the structure of the texts whose chapters alternate between the old home and the new, and in terms of their comparability on various levels: social interactions, societal structures, colonial past and postcolonial present, climate, geography, fauna and flora, food, etc., which all serve to create a contrast between the two worlds of and country.2 Although islands in Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) are not present in a geographical sense, the concept of the as interpretative figure is central to the novel. The title of the book indeed refers to an island within the city of London, an area mostly populated by Bangladeshi immigrants. In the three novels to be discussed, we observe a movement away from islands which, in different ways, represents a process of female emancipation.Islands ... and islandsLevy and Phillips situate their novels in the British West Indies, whose islands are naturally small compared to Great Britain, the largest European island. In Ali's text, Britain is the only actual present in the book. Islands are therefore defined here not only in a geographical sense, but also as spaces of confinement, with borders that are difficult to cross for the protagonists. These limits take many forms: they can be natural and physical, such as oceans or constructions, but also social and personal, such as rules, traditions, economic circumstances, or even inhibitions. Such restrictions are acceptable to some of the characters, while others have the desire to overcome them.In Levy's and Phillips' novels, the motif of islands and the movements between them are already alluded to in the titles: Small Island and The Final Passage. Small Island refers to Jamaica where two of the main protagonists, Hortense and Gilbert, come from. For Gilbert, as for many other young men after their experiences abroad during voluntary service for the RAF in the Second World War, the has become too small: Oh, there were plenty men like me, wandering this small island, their head cluttered with the sights they had once looked on/ Although he is aware that English streets are not paved with gold, Gilbert decides to go back to Great Britain. The Final Passage refers to the colonial connections between the Caribbean and Great Britain, to the various passages (first, middle and final) which denominated the journeys within the triangle of the slave trade between Great Britain, Africa and the Caribbean.3 4 These historical and cultural relations are essential to understand the problems faced by the protagonists in both novels.In his first novel, The Final Passage, Caryl Phillips tells the story of Leila, a young woman who, in the 1950s, leaves a small in the Caribbean (which remains anonymous) with her son Calvin and her husband Michael in order to settle in London, where Leila's mother has been living for some time (in this way, the mother country becomes a literal reference to her mother's country too). However, following her mother's death and after five months in London, Leila takes the decision to go back to her Caribbean island. …