“This tale is of my making”: empowering voices in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

Abstract

Andrea Levy’s The Long Song takes readers to pre- and post-Emancipation Jamaica through the voice of July, an old black woman who in the final years of the 19th century reminisces about her past. July is an intrusive narrator who throughout the narrative flaunts her control over her tale and sometimes calls attention to what is left unsaid, so that the horrors of slavery are mainly conveyed in her silences, while her humorous perspective articulates a story that focuses on the survival and agency of black subjects. This article analyses The Long Song in relation to other slavery fictions published in Britain in recent years and against the background of the 2007 bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. For all the lightness of its tone and the role of humour in the novel, the imaginative archaeology of The Long Song has a serious agenda: it recreates the historical past of the black British characters who populated Levy’s earlier fiction as it explores the interweaving of European and African lives that the slave trade produced.