Black women novelists of the postcolonial era have concentrated on sharing their experiences of exploitation—political, racial, sexual, and emotional—for the uplift and emancipation of their race. Years of suffering have molded them to endure the rebuffs with the flame of rancor which they preserve in their writings and speeches. It was a march against odds too hazardous to be overcome. Slavery and its legacy, migration, and quest for belonging are recurring motifs in their works. On the whole, we can say that search for identity is a major theme in their works, which tends to highlight the ways in which migrants and their children have often been marginalized in the British society. Black women writers are aware of their status and are always on guard against further subjugation, and therefore, these self-revelations which give voice to their sufferings and suffocation are at times pungent with remorse and regret. As Sengupta (1998) observes,Black women novelists of the twentieth century have openly portrayed in their works their experiences of exploitations—political, racial, sexual, and emotional. Driven by an overriding impulse towards self-assertion, which can be traced back to the cultural ethos of the 1960s, they have later succeeded in turning their identity into a source of strength.
Andrea Levy seems to follow this literary tradition of black women writers. Her early novels, written in the genre of female bildungsroman, show the influence of black women’s writing with its emphasis on black-British representation. Levy’s works are panoramic as she is one of the sufferers. This is not surprising, given that this black British writer’s life and writings have been shaped by histories of migration that preceded her birth, notably through her parents’ emigration from Jamaica to England during the Windrush era as well as through her genealogical connections to the Middle Passage, slavery, and wider circulations throughout the black Atlantic. While Levy’s literary forefathers George Lamming and Sam Selvon made the transatlantic journey in 1950 and fictionalized their lived experiences, their hardships, and dreams as West Indian male immigrants, Levy belongs to a younger generation of female writers who, as Wambu (1999, 28) observed, “began, uniquely, to map out the contours of their own identity as black British people, not as rejected outsiders, but critical insiders.” Writing from a different perspective and with the benefit of temporal distance, Levy reconsiders the impact of this first wave of migration on Britain’s national sense of self. Given her understanding of this crucial event and its ramifications in present-day multicultural London, being herself a member of the urban African diaspora, Levy intends to rewrite the history of the capital city, thereby responding imaginatively to Gilroy’s (1999) call for a critical rereading of London’s colonial past: “We will have to adjust the threshold of our contemporaneity and rethink the ways in which the history of this metropolis has been periodized.”
In bringing up the immigrant identity, she even faced a lot of difficulty, for instance, when searching for an agent and publisher for her early work. We might consider why this was the case. Levy (2009, 328) suggests that “publishers didn’t quite know what to do with a North London working-class girl talking about an ordinary family.” Her early works—Every Light in the House Burnin’, Never Far from Nowhere, and Fruit of the Lemon—offer bleak, yet humorous, accounts from a black British female perspective. Donnell (2006, 8) also agrees that “‘double colonization’ . . . has arguably served to figure women’s writing before the 1970s and the 1980s as voiceless and invisible.” For Levy, it seems that the legacies of earlier marginalization persisted still in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the same is reflected in her work in the form of identity search and self-revelation. As Allardice (2005, 18) points out:
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