back to my own country an essay summary

Back to My Own Country Summary

Summary & analysis of andrea levy's back to my own country .

‘ Back to My Own Country ’ is an essay written by Andrea Levy, a British author renowned for her exploration of themes related to identity, race, and immigration. The essay reflects Levy’s personal experiences growing up as a second-generation British person of Caribbean descent and her journey to embrace her cultural heritage. Andrea Levy was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents who immigrated to the UK. Levy’s writing often delves into the complexities of multiculturalism, belonging, and the legacy of the British Empire.

Back to My Own Country  | Summary & Analysis 

The narrator’s parents immigrated from Jamaica to Britain in the post-World War II era seeking better opportunities. Despite being middle-class in Jamaica, they faced challenges in England, struggling to find adequate housing and jobs. The narrator’s father worked for the Post Office, while their mother, unable to use her Jamaican teaching qualification, took up sewing. Despite their hardships, the parents believed in assimilating, keeping a low profile, and being respectful to make a life in the UK.The family’s fair skin made them feel superior due to the color-based class system in Jamaica. This resulted in their isolation from darker-skinned Caribbean immigrants in England. The narrator was expected to avoid associating with darker-skinned individuals, and skin color became a significant factor in their upbringing.

The family experienced racial prejudice, with people questioning their right to be in the country, ridiculing their culture, appearance, and smell. Despite the mistreatment, the narrator initially sought acceptance from those who discriminated against them. Over time, they came to realize the importance of standing up against racial discrimination. The text highlights the challenges and complexities of immigrant life in post-war Britain, including the struggle for acceptance and the internalized biases within the narrator’s own family.

The narrator experienced pervasive but subtle racism during their life in Britain, leading to feelings of self-hatred and shame about their Caribbean heritage. They made efforts to assimilate and be as British as possible, disregarding their Jamaican background. Growing up, their friends knew little about the Caribbean and showed no curiosity, which made the narrator feel like an outsider. This feeling intensified as they encountered more middle-class people during their time at art college and attempted to hide their working-class origins.

Through writing, they began to understand that their experiences as a black person in a majority white country were part of the broader black experience. Writing also led them to a life-changing visit to Jamaica, where they discovered family and heritage they had never known, inspiring them to embrace their Caribbean background and identity.

The British involvement in the Caribbean, particularly in sugar production with the labor of enslaved Africans, contributed significantly to the country’s wealth and the growth of cities like Bristol, Liverpool, and London. The profits from Caribbean slavery were reinvested in Britain’s industry and infrastructure, fueling the expansion of the British Empire. The British government compensate slave owners with a substantial sum of twenty million pounds when slavery ended in 1833. This payment was for the perceived loss of their ‘property,’ portraying the slave owners as the victims in this historical context.

However, the Caribbean islands hold a far more complex history beyond just slavery. Many people, including indentured servants, impoverished individuals from various regions of Britain, press-ganged sailors, convicts, Sephardic Jews, Middle Eastern merchants, and later indentured laborers from India and China, came to the Caribbean under duress or seeking a new life. This resulted in a diverse and unique social mix, leading to the development of Creole cultures and a complex hierarchy based on skin color. Even after slavery formally ended, the British continued to implement a policy of racial apartheid in the Caribbean until the 1960s, maintaining a racial divide. The absence of this history from British mainstream education has led to a significant knowledge gap, contributing to the feeling of otherness experienced by individuals like the black man on the bus.

The Caribbean holds a unique place in Britain’s imperial history, as one of the earliest and longest-lasting parts of the British Empire. Its population mix and the creation of distinctive societies make it stand out. While other parts of the empire debate their British legacies in terms of railways, bureaucracies, or governance systems, the Caribbean’s legacy is intertwined with everything, including its towns, cities, landscapes, and most importantly, the people themselves. The Caribbean’s influence on modern Britain, from its rise as a world power to its attitudes on race, is undeniable. Stuart Hall’s perspective emphasizes that the very concept of British ‘greatness’ is connected to the empire.

Back to My Own Country  | Socio-Historical Context 

The text also reflects on the racial prejudices and discrimination faced by Caribbean immigrants and their descendants in post-war Britain. Prejudice was deeply rooted in British society and extended to various aspects of life, including housing, employment, and social interactions. The author mentions the alienation experienced by the black man on the London bus, illustrating how racial stereotypes and biases affected everyday interactions. The prevailing view at the time often portrayed people of Caribbean descent as outsiders or ‘aliens’ in their own country. Racial prejudice was systemic, and institutions, including the workplace and public services, often upheld discriminatory practices. Black individuals frequently faced limited opportunities and unequal treatment, despite being British subjects. The essay illustrates the challenges of race relations and racial prejudice faced by Caribbean immigrants in post-war Britain. These historical contexts are essential to understanding the experiences and perspectives of individuals like the author and her family.

Changes in immigration laws and a lack of documentation led to many facing the threat of deportation, despite having lived in Britain for decades. This issue brought significant public attention to the contributions and challenges faced by this generation.

Back to My Own Country  | Rhetorical and Literary Devices  

Levy employs   imagery  throughout the essay to help readers vividly imagine the scenes and situations she describes. 

Throughout the essay, Levy shares anecdotes from her family’s background, such as her father’s arrival on the Empire Windrush and her mother’s journey on a Jamaica Banana Producers boat. She also mentions various other anecdotes such as about her mother finding money, about visiting Jamaica, about media interviews etc

Logos  refers to the logical appeal, which involves using reasoning and evidence to persuade the audience. Levy incorporates historical facts and information about the British Empire, Caribbean history, and immigration to support her arguments. She discusses the history of British plantation slavery and its economic impact, providing a logical basis for understanding the legacy of Caribbean immigration in Britain. The author offers observations and insights into the social and cultural dynamics of her time, such as the racial prejudices, assimilation challenges, and the changing landscape of multicultural London. These observations contribute to a logical understanding of the issues at hand. These persuasive elements work together to make her narrative compelling and thought-provoking.

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Back to My Own Country: An essay by the late Andrea Levy

In this reflective essay the Late Andrea Levy who sadly died of cancer on 14th February 2019 aged just 62 delves deep into notions of racism and pinpoints events which compelled her to use writing as a tool to explore and understand her Caribbean heritage.

I remember a journey I took on a London bus when I was a young girl. It was in the early 1960s. The bus was full of people and one of them was a black man. That was not a common sight in those days. I could tell from his accent that, like my parents, he was from somewhere in the Caribbean. He was talkative, smiling politely at people and trying to engage them in chat. But all the other people on the bus were white and they were looking at him askance. Nobody would be drawn into conversation; they clearly wanted nothing to do with him. But he carried on trying anyway.

I was embarrassed by him, but also overcome with pity for his hopeless attempt to be friendly on a London bus. I was sure that he was a nice man and that if those people on the bus could just get to know him then they would like him. My family also came from the Caribbean. I identified with him. He somehow became my mum and dad , my sisters, me. But to the other people on the bus he was more than a stranger, he was an alien. I felt a longing to make some introductions. I could sense the misunderstandings that were taking place, but I didn’t know why, or what I could do. The man was different. He looked different and he sounded different. But how come people in England did not know him? Why was he, and why were all black people from Britain’s old empire, so completely alien to them? This encounter is something I will never forget.

The same thing would not happen today in quite that way. Everyone is used to a mix of cultures and London buses are full of Londoners from all over the world. But still there are silences and gaps in our knowledge and understanding. What are the links that made Britain a natural destination for that Caribbean man on the bus, 50 years ago? How and why did Britain forge those links in the first place? These are questions that have come to fascinate me, because they reveal what amounts to a lost history for many of us. It was certainly lost to me for much of my early life, and it was a loss that caused me some problems.

At the time of my bus ride I lived on a council estate in north London. I went to a local school. Spoke like a good cockney. I played outside with all the white kids who lived around my way – rounders, skipping and hide and seek. I ate a lot of sweets. Watched a lot of television: Coronation Street , Emergency Ward 10 . Loved the Arsenal. Hated Tottenham Hotspur. I lived the life of an ordinary London working-class girl.

But my parents had come to this country from Jamaica. And in the area of London where we lived, that made my family very odd. We were immigrants. Outsiders. My dad had been a passenger on the Empire Windrush ship when it famously sailed into Tilbury in June 1948 and, according to many, changed the face of Britain for ever. My mum came to England on a Jamaica Banana Producer’s boat. It sailed into West India dock on Guy Fawkes Night in the same year, under a shower of fireworks that my mum believed were to welcome her.

My dad was an accounting clerk in Jamaica for, among other companies, Tate & Lyle. My mum was a teacher. They were middle class. They grew up in large houses. They even had servants. They came to Britain on British Empire passports in order to find more opportunities for work and advancement. But once here they struggled to find good housing. They had to live in one room for many years. They had a period of being homeless and then living in half-way housing where my dad was not allowed to stay with his wife and his three children. Eventually they were housed in the council flat in Highbury where I was born, and where I grew up.

My dad did not have trouble finding work. He was employed by the Post Office. But my mum was not allowed to use her Jamaican teaching qualification to teach in England. She needed to re-train. So she took in sewing throughout my childhood. But she still nursed her dream of becoming a teacher again.

In England, the fabled Mother Country that they had learned so much about at school in Jamaica, my parents were poor and working class.

They believed that in order to get on in this country they should live quietly and not make a fuss. They should assimilate and be as respectable as they possibly could. Clean the front step every week. Go to church on Sundays. Keep their children well dressed and scrubbed behind the ears.

On one occasion my mum did not have money to buy food for our dinner. None at all. She worried that she might be forced into the humiliation of asking someone, a neighbour perhaps, for a loan. She walked out into the street praying for a solution, and found a one-pound note lying on the pavement. In my mum’s eyes that was not a stroke of luck, that was a strategy.

My parents believed that, with no real entitlement to anything, they must accept what this country was willing to give. They were, after all, immigrants. As long as they didn’t do anything too unusual that might upset the people of England, then they could get on. My mum was desperate for my dad to lose his accent and stop saying ‘nah man’ and ‘cha’ in every sentence. They never discussed Jamaica with anyone. My mum would get embarrassed if she saw a black person drawing attention to themselves. It drew attention to her as well, and she hated that.

My family is fair-skinned. In Jamaica this had had a big effect on my parents’ upbringing, because of the class system, inherited from British colonial times, people took the colour of your skin very seriously. My parents had grown up to believe themselves to be of a higher class than any darker-skinned person. This isolated them from other black Caribbeans who came to live here – they wanted nothing to do with them.

My mum once told me how, back in Jamaica, her father would not let her play with children darker than her. She said wistfully, ‘But I had to, or I would have had no one to play with’. So when she came to England she was pleased to be bringing her children up amongst white children. We would always have lighter-skinned children to play with. I was expected to isolate myself from darker-skinned people too, and it seemed perfectly normal to me that the colour of your skin was one of the most important things about you. White people of course never had to think about it. But if you were not white, well then, how black were you? I accepted all of this as logical. That was how I would be judged.

Light-skinned or not, still we were asked, ‘When are you going back to your own country?’, ‘Why are you here?’, ‘Why is your food so funny?’, ‘Why does your hair stick up?’, ‘Why do you smell?’ The clear message was that our family was foreign and had no right to be here. When a member of the far-right group the National Front waved one of their leaflets in my face and started laughing, I felt I owed them some sort of apology. I wanted them to like me. It would be years before I realised I could be angry with them.

The racism I encountered was rarely violent, or extreme, but it was insidious and ever present and it had a profound effect on me. I hated myself. I was ashamed of my family, and embarrassed that they came from the Caribbean.

In my efforts to be as British as I could be, I was completely indifferent to Jamaica. None of my friends knew anything about the Caribbean. They didn’t know where it was, or who lived there, or why. And they had no curiosity about it beyond asking why black people were in this country. It was too foreign and therefore not worth knowing.

As I got older my feeling of outsiderness became more marked, as did the feeling that nothing in my background – my class or my ethnicity – was really worth having. At art college I encountered middle-class people for the first time. Proper middle class – debutantes with ponies, that sort of thing. Keeping those origins of mine a secret became paramount. Few people at my college knew I lived on a council estate. Once, when given a lift home, I got my friends to drop me at the gate of a proper house. I walked up the path waving them off. Then as soon as they were out of view I walked back to my flat.

I got a degree in textile design and worked as a designer for about ten minutes before I realised it was not for me. After that I worked for a brief while as a shop assistant, a dresser at the BBC and the Royal Opera House, and a receptionist at a family-planning clinic.

Then something happened. I was working part-time for a sex-education project for young people in Islington. One day the staff had to take part in a racism awareness course. We were asked to split into two groups, black and white. I walked over to the white side of the room. It was, ironically, where I felt most at home – all my friends, my boyfriend, my flatmates, were white. But my fellow workers had other ideas and I found myself being beckoned over by people on the black side. With some hesitation I crossed the floor. It was a rude awakening. It sent me to bed for a week.

By this time I was scared to call myself a black person. I didn’t feel I had the right qualifications. Didn’t you have to have grown up in a ‘black community’? Didn’t you need to go to the Caribbean a lot? Didn’t your parents need to be proud of being black? Didn’t my friends need to be black? My upbringing was so far removed from all of that, I felt sure I would be found out as an imposter. I was not part of the black experience, surely?

It was a life-changing moment.

Fortunately I had recently enrolled on an afternoon-a-week writing course at the City Lit in London, just as a hobby. Writing came to my rescue. The course had an emphasis on writing about what you know. So, nervously I began to explore what I knew – my family upbringing and background, and my complicated relationship with colour. Thinking about what I knew, and exploring my background with words, began to open it up for me as never before. I soon came to realise that my experience of growing up in this country was part of what it meant to be black. All those agonies over skin shade. Those silences about where we had come from. The shame. The denial. In fact I came to see that every black person’s life, no matter what it is, is part of the black experience. Because being black in a majority white country comes with a myriad of complications and contradictions. It was writing that helped me to understand that.

A few months into the course I had the urge to visit Jamaica for the very first time and stay with the family I had never met. I went for Christmas. It was an amazing experience. I discovered a family I had never really known I had. I realised that I meant something to people who lived on the other side of the world. I met my aunt and cousins and saw where my mum grew up. I realised for the first time that I had a background and an ancestry that was fascinating and worth exploring. Not only that, but I had the means to do it – through writing.

I am now happy to be called a black British writer, and the fiction I have written has all been about my Caribbean heritage in some way or another. It is a very rich seam for a writer and it is, quite simply, the reason that I write. Toni Morrison was once asked if she felt constrained by her being seen as a black writer. She replied: ‘ being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. ’ That is how I feel.

The more I began to delve into my Caribbean heritage the more interesting Britain’s Caribbean story became for me. The story of the Caribbean is a white story too and one that goes back a long way. The region was right at the very heart of Europe’s early experiments in colonising the world. In the 1500s it was the Spanish who first exploited those newly found islands, displacing the indigenous people. The Dutch, the French and the British came soon after. The island claimed earliest for Britain was Barbados, in 1625. But soon Britain was a major coloniser in the region. A whole string of islands became ‘British’. Islands that for a long time were seen as our most lucrative overseas possessions. Sugar was the main crop, as important to Britain then as oil is today. It was planted, harvested and processed by the slave labour of black Africans. That slave trade from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas was the largest forced migration in human history. Those islands soon became brutal island-factories helping to fuel and to fund the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Huge family fortunes were made. Major cities like Bristol, Liverpool and London grew wealthy on the proceeds. The money that slavery in the Caribbean generated was reinvested in Britain’s industry and infrastructure. Britain’s empire grew as a result.

When British slavery finally ended in 1833, compensation was paid by the British government. It amounted to 20 million pounds (many billions in today’s money). It was paid to the slave owners for the loss of their property. They were seen as the injured party.

But there is more to those Caribbean islands than just the history of slavery. Many white people went, if not in chains, then under duress: indentured servants and poor people from all corners of Britain who were trying to escape hardship at home or to build a new life. Many were press-ganged sailors, or convict labour. There were Sephardic Jews from Iberia, merchants from the Middle East and, later, indentured labourers from India and China. A social mix was created like in no other place on earth. Creole cultures developed with a wide range of skin colours that were elaborately classified (mulatto, quadroon, octoroon and so on) as a divide-and-rule tactic by the British plantocracy. Racial difference and racial value developed into a ‘science’. After the end of slavery in the Caribbean the British continued to rule their islands through a policy of racial apartheid right up until they finally left in the 1960s.

But all this happened 3,000 miles away from Britain, and as a result it has been possible for it to quietly disappear from British mainstream history. This is the absence, the gap in knowledge, the amnesia of the British that made the black man on the bus such an alien. It is unthinkable that a book on American history could leave out plantation slavery in the southern states. But in British history books the equivalent is the case, or at least the importance of those centuries of British slavery in the Caribbean is underplayed. That British plantation slavery has no lasting legacy for this country is absurd, but it is a claim that is made implicitly by this silence. It was so very long ago, it seems to say, we don’t need to dredge it up.

I remember what I was taught at school about Britain in the Caribbean. I had one lesson on the transatlantic slave trade. We looked at illustrations of slaves in ships. But that was all. I learned much more about William Wilberforce and the campaign for the abolition of slavery than anything about the life of a slave. We know more about slavery in the American South than in the British Caribbean. We are familiar with the struggles of African Americans from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. But American slavery was different from Caribbean slavery. In the Caribbean, slaves far outnumbered the white owners, and that mix of isolation, fear and dependency produced very different societies from those of the American South. America’s story will not do for us. Our legacy of slavery is unique, and we need to understand what it is.

I wrote a novel, The Long Song , set in the time of slavery in the Caribbean, and when I was promoting the book I had numerous media interviews. On two separate occasions the interviewers – bright, university-educated people in each case – admitted to me that they had not known that Britain had used slaves in the Caribbean. Slavery they thought had only been in America. Going around the country doing readings I was surprised at the ignorance of people about where the islands were, or of how many of them there were. Many people I met believed all people from the Caribbean came from Jamaica.

And what of the period after slavery? What about the century of ‘racial apartheid’ that grew up in the colonial era, the time when my mum and dad learned to know their racial place and to keep themselves separate? The history of the black people of the Caribbean is missing.

Apart from being an exotic holiday destination the islands have now become an irrelevance here. They are no longer wealthy. They are not rich with natural resources. They no longer have the power they enjoyed when some of the most famous families in Britain were there. It is too easy to forget what happened and how it has affected our lives today. But it is as much a part of British history as the Norman Conquest, or the Tudors.

No one would claim that out of Britain’s many stories of empire the Caribbean is the most important. But it is one of the earliest, one of the longest in duration, and certainly one of the most unusual in terms of population mix and the creation of unique societies. In other parts of Britain’s old empire, such as India or Africa, we can debate what fading legacy the British have left, whether it is railways, bureaucracies or parliamentary systems. In the Caribbean the legacy is, in one sense, everything. Not just the towns, the cities and the landscape, but the very people themselves; their origins, their ethnic mix, their hybrid cultures, all result from what the British did on those islands before they finally left them. And conversely, Britain growing to become a world power, its attitudes to race, and even how it sees itself today, these things are in no small part the legacy that the British Caribbean has left for modern Britain. ‘The very notion of Great Britain’s “greatness” is bound up with Empire’ , the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: ‘Euro-scepticism and little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood, and rotted English teeth’.

What this means of course is that I, and my family, are products of Britain just as much as the white kids I grew up with in Highbury. Given Britain’s history in the Caribbean it was almost inevitable that people like my dad and his fellow passengers on the Windrush would end up here. They belonged, whether Britain realised it or not. One of the consequences of having an empire, of being a cultural hub, is that the world ultimately comes to you. That’s how hubs work.

Britons of Caribbean heritage have been in this country in significant numbers for 65 years now. We are three or four generations on from the man on the London bus. Immigration to Britain since the end of the Second World War has been a final, unexpected gift to Britain from its old empire. The benefits that the labour and the enterprise of immigrants, like those from the Caribbean, have brought to Britain are incalculable. Their ideas, their creativity and their ways of life have helped turn this country into a sophisticated multi-culture. This windfall of talent and variety is one of the great unforeseen benefits to Britain.

But there are still countless young Britons today of Afro-Caribbean descent who have as little understanding of their ancestry and have as little evidence of their worth as I did when I was growing up. And there are countless white Britons who are unaware of the histories that bind us together. Britain made the Caribbean that my parents came from. It provided the people – black and white – who make up my ancestry. In return my ancestors, through their forced labour and their enterprise, contributed greatly to the development of modern Britain. My heritage is Britain’s story too. It is time to put the Caribbean back where it belongs – in the main narrative

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Tinder Press 

Illustrations by Hannah Ekua Buckman Written by The Late Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy died on 14th February 2019 ages just 62 after living with Cancer for 15 years. She was born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948. After attending writing workshops when she was in her mid-thirties, Levy began to write the novels that she, as a young woman, had always wanted to read – entertaining novels that reflect the experiences of black Britons, which look at Britain and its changing population and at the intimacies that bind British history with that of the Caribbean. She has written six books, including Small Island , which was the unique winner of both the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread book of the Year, in addition to the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Orange Prize ‘Best of the Best’. Her most recent novel, The Long Song , won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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Connected Cultures

• Eddie Hewitt
• Oct 31, 2015

Six Stories and an Essay by Andrea Levy - a review, part one.

Updated: Nov 11, 2020

Back to My Own Country (an essay)

Today, “Everyone is used to a mixture of cultures”, Andrea Levy asserts. In contrast, again according to the author, many of us just don’t know about British black history and how a big part of our combined culture and society have been formed. Levy claims that “The history of the black people of the Caribbean is missing” and clearly wants to set out this history and to right some wrongs. This entails a detailed explanation of why Caribbeans came to Britain and why Britain forged links with the region in the first place. She felt the need to explore this issue when she was growing up, and still feels the need to explain it now.

The essay is also personal, and deals with her own story amongst the stories of the many. Britain is her own country. Jamaica is also her own country. Details of her family’s adaptation to London life, the way that her dual sense of belonging developed and how she became a writer are among the many fascinating insights provided.

Much of this essay is retrospective, but understanding this history is the key to a better present, to moving forward, to making sure that racism is left firmly in the past.

Levy has previously written about the sugar plantations and slavery in her brilliant novel The Long Song. She is quite simply one of the finest writers of realist fiction, and is equally compelling in this essay. Referring to the “The British Plantocracy”, Levy reflects on the impact of British government rule as well as wide-spread attitudes based on “a policy of racial apartheid” which continued into the nineteen sixties. The impact of the British was more complex and diverse than many may realise. Levy informs us that there were plenty of poor white people in the Caribbean, and hence “A social mix was created like no other place on earth”. In return, and with reference to the days and years following the arrival in London of the Empire Windrush in 1948, Levy points out how Britain has benefitted from the incalculable labour, enterprise, and creativity of black people. All of this has contributed to the development of Britain as a “sophisticated multiculture”.

The Empire Windrush, photo via Getty

So, why do people not know about Caribbean history ?

Levy is convinced that this is “A lost history for many of us”. This is, she believes, partly because it happened 3000 miles away, but more so because we are not taught enough in schools about slavery. We are taught more about William Wilberforce and abolition. There is still a need to understand what took place and what it meant. Even “bright, university educated people” have interviewed Levy and shown ignorance of Britain’s use of slaves in the Caribbean. Levy thinks this ignorance is commonplace, and that it is just too easy (presumably for white British people) to forget.

Racism and colour

This ignorance of history became apparent to Levy at an early stage in her life. She recalls one of the most basic forms of racism in being asked the question “why are you here ?” Levy adds that at the time she felt she owed an apology to the National Front, and that this led to self-hate. But Britain was her home. This was where she was born. Levy also refers to England as the Mother Country. There are echoes of Small Island here.

Levy talks a lot in this essay about the colour of skin and particularly the different shades of black, though notably avoids using the American term “colorism”. Early on in life, Levy was scared to call herself black and saw herself as white, continuing to do so until a surprisingly advanced age, when she was shocked and hurt on being obliged to join the black half of the room during a race awareness class. This is reminiscent of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s comments on not knowing that she was black until she went to America.

Writing and self-discovery

Having identified her complex relationship with colour as a problem that was stopping her from understanding herself and her place in society, Levy found a channel for self-development. “Writing came to my rescue”. Initially she benefited from writing about what she knew (i.e. her life in Britain) and exploring her background with words. But she also knew that “Being black in a majority white country comes with a myriad of complications and contradictions”.

Levy was helped here by visiting Jamaica and discovering more of her family and her roots, and feeling at home there too. Through this, she developed a greater understanding of her skin, her race and her culture. With this increased knowledge of her ancestry and the mixing of peoples, Levy became able to say “I can now happily be called a black British writer.” She knows that she and her family are “products of Britain” just as much as the white people in Britain are, and states “My heritage is Britain’s story too.” This is her story, and one that she draws on in her novels, stories, and essays.

Through her writing, Levy responds to the need to both express herself and to inform others. She is on a mission. “It is time to put the Caribbean back where it belongs – in the main narrative of British history”. In this essay and beyond, Levy affirms and celebrates the fundamental links between peoples and nations, and firmly sets out what it means to live together, however difficult their joint history has been.

Andrea Levy, photo via The Independent

Implications for Britain today

Quite simply, there is so much for modern Britain to consider. Perhaps the best place for us to start is for all of us to seek to better understand how dependent we are, and have been, on others. We also need to know how this dependence has led to insularism and cruelty. Levy calls on the historian Stuart Hall to make this plain : “Euro-scepticism and Little England nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth”. Disturbingly, not only do certain groups of people in England / Britain not know about Black British Caribbean history, they do not want to know. This ongoing, often deliberate ignorance is damaging within society and across the globe. The truth must come out.

Reflections

Like millions of other British black people of Caribbean extract, Andrea Levy has more than one country to call her own. The journey suggested in the title does not have to be made. The journey, instead, has been one of learning and self-discovery. A journey to find and claim one’s rightful place in society in the face of challenging and oppressive circumstances. Levy calls on us all to realise that we are both the contributors to history and the products of history.

Important questions remain. Exactly how do we move on from here ? Knowing where we come from and establishing what links us together is not the same as eradicating racism. It is part of that process, and frustratingly we are not as advanced here as we need to be. Moreover, how do we measure progress ?

Levy is reflective and self-analytical in this essay, and combines the personal with the universal. In telling us about her own story and the story of her family, she also relates to millions of other people and to their experiences of Britain and the Caribbean. So many of these experiences have been shared, and there is so much that will help to join us together still.

© Eddie Hewitt 2015

Part two of Six Stories and An Essay - A Review : The Stories

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Identity Crisis in Andrea Levi's 'Back to My Own Country (An Essay)' – A View from West to East

International Journal of Recent Technology and Engineering (IJRTE), 2019

3 Pages Posted: 2 Sep 2020

Jayajothilakshmi V.

Vyasa Arts and Science Women's College

Date Written: December 20, 2019

A man without identity is nothing in this world. Identity gives human a sense of belongingness. A person suppressed by others in the name of racial discrimination may feel inferior. This inferiority complex leads him to dig his history and know his originality. The people of the colonized land may undergo this kind of complexity. Their complexity makes them either to keep away from the society or hide their originality. A person feeling inferior may at a certain point protest and stabilizes his/her identity. Black writers from various colonized places express their emotions and feelings through various stories in writing.

Keywords: black, colonized, identity, inferior, originality, racial discrimination

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Andrea Levy: her important body of work set out what it is to be black and British

Reader & Associate Professor in English & Postcolonial Literatures, York St John University

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Sarah Lawson Welsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Prize-winning British novelist Andrea Levy, who died on February 14, will be remembered affectionately for raising awareness of black British writing and the closely intertwined histories of Britain and the Caribbean more than any other British writer of recent times (save perhaps Zadie Smith). In a career spanning 25 years, during which she published five novels (two of which were successfully adapted for television) and a luminous collection of short stories and essays – a significant legacy in itself – Levy garnered an unusually wide readership which crossed literary, popular and academic lines.

Like Angela, the protagonist of her first, semi-autobiographical novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Levy was of Jamaican parentage, her father being one of the original Windrush passengers arriving in Britain in 1948, her mother following shortly after. Levy herself grew up in a working-class household with few books, recalling in characteristically frank terms that “being a working-class girl I mainly watched telly”.

Like Faith, the protagonist of her third novel, Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Levy knew little about her heritage and took little interest in Caribbean history and culture until a startling experience in a Racism Awareness training session at work launched her on a journey of rediscovery. As Faith’s mother says: “Child, everyone should know where they come from.”

Levy’s meticulously researched fictions interrogate the human experience of migration to and from the Caribbean in different periods. In Small Island (2004), Levy explores the ways in which Caribbean people were racially “othered” and made to feel unwelcome outsiders in Britain, despite being invited to migrate as British subjects in the post-1945 period.

In her final novel, The Long Song (2010), Levy harnesses fiction to, in her words, “go farther” – imaginatively excavating the human experiences of slavery from a variety of perspectives. Later on, in a twist stranger than fiction, Levy discovered that she herself, like her fictional character Miss July, was descended from a mixed-race liaison between a slave and a white overseer.

Although happy to be termed a black British writer, Levy importantly always saw the long historical connection between Britain and the Caribbean as a profoundly British concern, rather than a niche interest only relevant to those of Caribbean heritage. Indeed, reading her nuanced and inclusive explorations of what it is to be British and of Caribbean heritage might be seen as more urgent than ever in these heated times of Brexit and the Windrush scandal.

A British story

Levy started to write only in her 30s – but her writing achieved that rare thing: critical acclaim and commercial success (notably after Small Island which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize). Her texts now have a place on academic curricula across the globe but also – crucially – a huge popular readership as her books fill a permanent place on ordinary peoples’ bookshelves.

As the many tributes from her readers, those who worked with her and from prominent black British figures such as Sir Lenny Henry testify, it is clear that Levy’s writing played a hugely important role in helping many readers learn about, connect to and make sense of the complex, brutal and often hidden nature of Britain’s slave history and its lasting legacies. As Levy always made clear: the history of her heritage was also a British story.

Small Island is Levy’s hugely significant contribution to the fictional retelling and exploration of West Indians’ migration to Britain in the Windrush era. Levy’s compelling neo-slave novel, The Long Song, is a historiographic metafiction, a playfully self-conscious probing of the nature of narrative and the telling of history, this time from a slave perspective in an attempt to imaginatively reenter the harsh world of plantation society and give voice, agency and humanity to the enslaved.

Levy’s earliest novels, Every Light in the House Burning (1994), set in 1960s London; Never far from Nowhere (1996), set on a North London council estate in the 1970s; and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), set in the Thatcherite Britain of the 1980s (as well as Jamaica), document domestic experiences of black British life and the particular manifestations of racism – National Front attacks, skinhead violence – prominent in British society during these periods. Later short texts, such as the short story Uriah’s War (2014), return to an earlier period and remind us that Britain and the Caribbean have long been closely connected and that West Indians – as British colonial subjects – also fought valiantly for “King and Country” in both world wars.

Growing up black

Levy seems to have been driven by a strong ethical imperative to tell these stories of West Indian arrival in Britain, of later generations “growing up black under the Union Jack”, to address the widespread British amnesia about its colonial history and the relative silence about Caribbean slavery in so many British institutions, including the school system.

The Small Island of Levy’s title is, of course, both Jamaica and Britain, two islands intimately and often violently yoked together by more than 300 years of shared history and culture. While Levy’s novels are set during different periods, they are all part of a longstanding, shared British-Caribbean history.

Thus, Small Island shows how the experience of the Windrush generation was marked by many of the same attitudes, inequalities and tensions found in the earlier period of plantation slavery in Jamaica, as explored in The Long Song. Levy’s 2014 essay Back to My Own Country , meanwhile, is a moving and powerful account of family, racism and her turn to writing. All are part of the largely forgotten history of Britain’s deep relationship with the Caribbean – a history which Levy’s texts show us is not just “out there” but “here (in Britain) too”.

Ultimately, what links all Levy’s texts is their deep humanity. Fittingly, Levy herself said that: “None of my books is just about race … They’re about people and history.” She described Miss July, the protagonist and chief narrator of The Long Song as “human, very smart, feisty”. There could be no better way of describing Levy as a writer.

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