This essay benefits from the collaboration of the research project “Tales from the Border”: Global Change and Identity in Contemporary British Short Fiction (Agencia Estatal de Investigación, PID2021-122433NB-I00) and the research group “Discourse and Identity” (Xunta de Galicia, ED431C2023/15).
1Born in London to Jamaican parents arrived in London on board of the legendary Empire Windrush, Andrea Levy has penned works that are characterised by a critical negotiation with notions pertaining to ethnicity, national identity and culture of the Jamaican diaspora in the UK, the nation which she defines as the “fabled Mother Country” (Six Stories 6). Six Stories & An Essay (2014), Levy’s only collection of short stories, opens with the author’s critical reflections on her hybrid identity, her family’s encounter with the Mother Land, their frustrated expectations of an improved life and the social ostracism they experienced on account of racist attitudes. As Levy recalls: “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” (Six Stories 9).
2In Six Stories & An Essay, Levy fictionalises her urge to come to terms with her family heritage and, in so doing, with the necessity to properly acknowledge what she terms as “Britain’s Caribbean history,” violently and unjustly blotted out from “the main narrative of British history” however integral to the “greatness” of the British Empire. These short stories not only embody Levy’s attempt to “put the Caribbean back where it belongs—in the main narrative of British history” (19). Levy’s struggle for racial and cultural recognition is here articulated as a literary response to cultural oblivion in terms of a literary collective history in a series of imaginative samples of Britain’s Caribbean history at different moments in time, which also testify to Levy’s main motivation to write: “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” (12).
3Levy’s hyphenated identity, posed in an interstitial position with respect to her Jamaican and British cultural background—not fully an outsider yet not quite belonging to either category—is metaphorically signalled in the narrative through the choice of liminal, interstitial spaces placed at the margins of culture: the backstage of a London West End theatre (“The Diary”), a children’s playground outside a council block of flats (“Deborah” and “The Empty Pram”), a boat voyaging from Jamaica to the UK (“That Polite Way English People Have”), the public toilets of the London National Gallery (“Loose Change”) or a battlefront placed in territories in dispute (“Uriah’s War”). Such liminal positions relating to spatial categories also extend to the characters’ identity in terms of ethnicity and cultural hybridity and to the formal qualities of the short story itself, a “liminal genre per excellence” whose interstitial position stems from its brevity, indeterminacy and engagement with its readers’ responses, developing between the “structures of the textual world and the reader’s expectations with regards to his or her own world. Filling in the gaps of the text or resolving its dissonances, the reader develops never entirely fixed, liminal connections between what the story offers and what he or she in reality is involved in” (Achilles and Bergmann 12).
4The short story’s marginal position with respect to other more canonical narrative genres—famously signalled by Frank O’Connor in his seminal study The Lonely Voice (1962)—has also served the purpose of articulating a position of resistance emerging from racial, social, sexual or cultural minority groups out of tune with mainstream culture. Adrian Hunter and, after him, Paul March-Russell—both following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s disquisitions in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975)—have seen in the short story an example of “minor literature,” or the expression of that which a minority articulates in a major language by abusing “the discursive structures of the ‘major’ language to its own creative ends” (Hunter 139). Hunter and March-Russell’s considerations, more in tune with Jochen Achilles and Ina Bergmann’s concept of “liminality” as the short story’s structural principle, undermine prior considerations of the genre as the literary expression of otherness and marginality, and thus allow for more productive reflections on the genre which readjust its relevant position within the literary canon by foregrounding its fictional, aesthetic and political possibilities along with its subversive potential rather than its shortcomings. Within the conceptual framework of liminality, the short story is redefined in terms of its formal freedom, resistance to norms and generic boundaries and from its articulation as a flexible literary product, its immediacy to articulate literary responses with urgency and topicality, either in conventional printed form or in new digital possibilities. In the blending of locations illustrative of oppositional normative orientations, Achilles and Bergmann argue, a third space emerges, which allows for the articulation of the “liminal cognitive, emotional and ethical reflection” (12).
5The possibility of opening up a third space to question and counterwrite hegemonic discourses becomes especially pertinent in the case of short stories produced by black women writers, where the complex intersections between ethnicity, gender and genre are often explored. In the case of Levy, doubly marginalised on account of gender and ethnicity, fiction becomes the most “powerful political weapon you can have in your armoury” (Interview 261), which allowed her to reverse the feeling that “nothing in my background—my class or ethnicity—was really worth having” (Six Stories 9). Excepting “Uriah’s War”—Levy’s homage to the forgotten Jamaican contribution to the Great War in general, and to her grandfather in particular—all the stories in the collection problematise women’s encounters with social rejection and ostracism, racism, bigotry or injustice, covertly suggested by the narrative’s “silences and gaps,” which become, however, essential in “our knowledge and understanding” (4) of particular stories.
6Levy’s characters seem to be constantly “on the move” in a personal and collective search to find a place to fit in society: “Everything I have written is a journey . . . . It’s my own journey of understanding who I am, because when you grow up British, away from the Caribbean, you have no sense of who you are” (Interview 264). The personal and psychological journeys of these characters, as well as the encounters they depict, mirror Levy’s own sense of identity, her ex-centric position as an outsider and the means to come to terms with what she described as “a burgeoning interest in finding out about my family heritage and about who I was and how we fitted into this society” (Interview 259).
7As a result, in Six Stories & An Essay, Levy articulates an exploration—from a variety of angles and situations—of the survival strategies which British Jamaicans have historically used to “fit in” the metropolis and of the social consequences they encountered. The first story under examination here, “The Polite Way That English People Have,” connects Levy’s own family history—arrival in Britain on the legendary Windrush in 1948—with the collective history of the Jamaican diaspora. On the other hand, “Uriah’s War,” the closing short story of Levy’s collection, intertwines personal memories, ancestry and ethnicity with British national identity, a “political issue” not to be decided “at the whim of the individual,” but one that has to be contemplated within a larger project of “plural and inclusive nations” (Levy, “My England”). Levy’s “Uriah’s War” is a story that challenges received notions of national identity and historical narratives, while also questioning dominant ideologies that intervene in the making of a historical past. The unacknowledged narratives of World War I unearth the presence of black people and the seminal role of colonial subjects in a defining myth of British culture: as will be argued, “Uriah’s War” springs of an urge to remember the past and, in so doing, to acknowledge the contribution of those ex-centric, Jamaican subjects who volunteered to fight under British flag during the Great War.
8This first-person narrative is Levy’s first approach to the main character of Hortense in her award-winning novel Small Island (2004) and explores the expectations of the young female Jamaican as she journeys from the Caribbean to England, where she will settle to train as a nurse. The narrative primarily focuses on the character’s naïve expectations of the imagined mother country as learned from official and romanticised narratives, but it also foretells the harsh reality that the protagonist will encounter after her arrival in Britain. In the narrative, Hortense’s “innocent perspective” is, as Stuart Hall has argued (“Reconstruction Work” 84), double-edged: on the one hand, her innocence signals the character’s identification with a particular construction of England as the already familiar motherland that will welcome her as a daughter, where Hortense will enjoy the pleasures of an idealised “British” lifestyle: “I will live in a nice house with a garden smelling of sweet roses. And I will take tea in the finest teahouses in London where they drink from china cups and eat cake by slicing it with the side of a fork” (Levy, Six Stories 61). On the other hand, Hortense’s innocence also refers to the “waiting” prior to arrival, “the moment . . . just before you stepped off the end of the earth into . . . another life, in a Britain where the ingrained, embattled nature of racism you do not yet know (that is, of which you are still ‘innocent’) because it hasn’t yet hit you between the eyes” (Hall, “Reconstruction Work” 84).
9Levy’s story focuses on the innocent “waiting,” on Hortense’s journey from Kingston to the promised land which entails the protagonist’s rite of passage from innocence to experience. The journey also signals the character’s preparatory rites to accommodate in the British way of life by emulating “the polite way English people have,” which for her means assuming certain behavioural codes, accent and dress to fit into her own particular conception of “Englishness.” As a liminal place of otherness or heterotopia, life on the boat also means for Hortense a temporary suspension of social strictures, which gives the naïve girl a short-lived illusion of a harmonious communion with the British: in her determination to “travel to England in style,” Hortense buys, after years of saving, an expensive first-class passage which secures her a place “amongst English travellers” (63) and which would make her “one of them,” and refuses the cheaper 10-shilling-passage on the SS Windrush, as her mother suggests. Because she is not “one of those people who comes to England unprepared” (74), Hortense also buys from her English employer at Kingston a coat to spare her the inclement English weather: “I was sure my coat would be the finest coat in England. Oh, everyone would stare—everyone would admire my long black coat and my black hat with its netting trim set at an angle on my head. There, they would say, there is a high-class woman from Jamaica. She is a woman who has one of the finest coats” (Six Stories 59). Hortense’s coat becomes her object of desire throughout the narrative, insofar as it represents “Englishness” and national identity through the sartorial, evoking the powerful city, London, where the wealthy and educated gather, which she imagines expectant to receive her as a daughter in search for “better opportunity” (61).
10In his enlightening exploration of the photographs published in photojournalistic magazine Picture Post—published in the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1957—Stuart Hall focuses on those representing the arrival of Jamaicans at High Street Station in London. In his critical analysis, Hall addresses the significance of sartorial codes in the pictures: Jamaicans arrived “dressed up” for the longest journey of their lives, wearing their “Sunday bests” and determined to make an impression on where they were going, which Hall ultimately reads as a “sign of their self-respect” (“Reconstruction Work” 84). In this context, dress may also function as a means to conceal the anxieties of migration, while simultaneously revealing the pleasure of travelling to England (Tulloch 61). In buying herself a coat, Hortense is also purchasing a particular conception of “Englishness” which her colonial education may have propelled, yet, in so doing, she also rejects her Jamaican upbringing, metaphorically signalled in the narrative in Hortense’s refusal to join her countrymen and women on board on the Windrush, her criticism of Jamaican weather or the deprecation of her mother’s ignorance: “Mamma was a country girl. She was not what English people would call refined. She had not been educated as I. She had not had the benefit of living for almost ten years in the household of one of the foremost English families in Jamaica. She had not seen how high life can be” (Levy, Six Stories 62).
11Already on board of the liner, and when asked by a handsome Englishman about her name, the character decides against using the affectionate name of her childhood, family and homeland, thus blotting out the last and deepest root that tied her up to her familiar world: “I decided Blossom was not a name to carry to England. Blossom was a name that was yelled from doorways in the hot sun. Women called Blossom fanned themselves with banana leaves and drank coconut milk straight from the nut. No, I decided I would use my real name. The name I was christened with—a name which would allow me to blend with teatime and croquet on the lawn” (Levy, Six Stories 66).
12In accepting an assumed identity as Hortense Hunter, the character also tries to negotiate her own unexpressed anxieties relating both to class and ethnicity and is unable to come to terms with the connotations which her name, Blossom, raises up and which represents her as a working-class Jamaican immigrant. Significantly, Hortense “performs” a particular identitary position in terms of what Hall calls “compulsory Eurocentrism” (“Introduction” 14, 16) or, to the case in point, compulsory Britishness, by accommodating to the normative rules which will regulate herself from now onwards. Unacknowledged anxieties relating to class and ethnicity lead Hortense to reject the acquaintance of the one Jamaican among first-class British passengers, a low-class woman “as black as night” called Petal who insisted on calling her “sister” and who immediately recognises Hortense for what she is, a “country girl” (Levy, Six Stories 69, 70). Instead, Hortense prefers the polite conversation of Philip Keyes, a handsome English man who seeks her company (probably for more obscure reasons than Hortense is able to see), and who seems rather amused at Hortense’s picturesque depiction of the imagined homeland: “I told him that I was looking forward to seeing daffodils when I got to England. A host of golden daffodils swaying bright yellow in the breeze in one of the parks—maybe Hyde Park or Regent’s Park or Richmond Park. He smiled—he could see I knew about England.” The Wordsworthian overtones of Hortense’s description appear in sharp contrast with the irony in her interlocutor’s abrupt answer—“Yes, you certainly know about England, Hortense,” which the character naively misses (68-69).
13In her introduction to the collection, Levy herself explains how in her “efforts to be as British as I could be, I was completely indifferent to Jamaica . . . . As I got older, my feeling of outsiderness became more marked, as did the feeling that nothing in my background—my class or ethnicity—was really worth having” (9). However, the narrative’s significant gaps and silences, which point at all those traits and elements that Hortense represses or refuses to express, haunt the narrative from its inception, pointing at Hortense’s progressive loss of innocence, awakening to reality and to her eventual moment of illumination, with which the narrative closes. Hortense’s naïve narrative, characterised by her dreams of ethnic integration with the British, is, nonetheless, interspersed with ominous encounters, which signal the harsh reality the character will certainly experience upon her arrival, but which she fails to grasp in their full significance.
14Hortense is driven to the docks by a “rough and uncouth” man, who warns her: “Remember you’re a nigger.” Still, Hortense interprets the man’s advice as jealousy of “the high class of us [who] have a chance to better ourselves in England while they are left in the sun scratching out a living and waiting for the pumpkins to grow after the hurricane” (64). During the course of the journey, Hortense sees on board a former acquaintance, a friend of her former employer, whom she approaches for polite conversation. However, the English woman pretends not to know her, and walks straight past Hortense, who “realised then that I may have been mistaken” (72). Through the course of the journey, Hortense takes great pains in avoiding Petal’s company, who certainly reminds her of where she comes from. Petal perceives how out of touch with reality Hortense is, and insists on helping her upon her arrival: “‘You should know where you are going to stay. It will be difficult for you.’ I informed her firmly that I would be staying at the lodgings that were supplied for trainee nurses once I presented myself at the hospital” (73). Petal offers Hortense to stay with her sister in Notting Hill which, in the context of the story, ironically recalls the 1958 race riots, working as a blunt reminder of Hortense’s ignorance about problems of ethnic integration in England.
15Hortense’s ominous encounters, which relate to her unrecognised class and racial identity, pave the way for the narrative’s conclusion as she arrives at her destination in England. Hortense confidently takes out the coat she had bought from her former British employer, but when Petal sees Hortense’s coat, she points at the inadequacy of the garment:
“But this is an ugly coat,” Petal whispered to me. So I told her that I had paid a great deal of money for this coat and that my employer had assured me that this was one of the finest quality coats money could buy. But Petal just looked in my face then held her head back and laughed. “Your employer has sold you a very old-fashioned coat,” she told me . . . “Hortense,” she said, “the English woman rob you. There is nothing fine about this coat.” (Levy, Six Stories 75)
16Hortense’s picturesque myth of harmony shatters to pieces at this realisation as the story abruptly closes. Hortense’s coat—which acquires a particular significance in the story as token of her “imagined community” which England represents—functions in the narrative as the material link between the migrant’s place of origin and the quest for a new home in Britain (Tulloch 66). On the one hand, the coat represents difference from Hortense’s native Jamaica; on the other, and despite the chilly English weather, the coat stands for warm economic hope awaiting Hortense at the end of her journey, thus becoming symbolic of a particular conception of nationhood and of what it takes to be “British.” As Stuart Hall has suggested: “We come to know its [the nation’s] meaning partly through its objects and artefacts which have been made to stand for and symbolise its essential values. Its meaning is constructed within, not above or outside representation. It is through identifying with these representations that we come to be ‘its subjects’—by ‘subjecting’ ourselves to dominant meanings” (“Whose Heritage?” 5). In this sense, Hortense’s realisation that her former employer had actually cheated her in selling her the coat also signals, metaphorically speaking, her subsequent disenchantment with England as the promised land. The inadequacy of her coat mirrors that of the objects, artefacts and ideas which Hortense has believed to constitute British identity, such as Buckingham Palace, afternoon tea, cakes or daffodils, which represent dominant meanings echoing received notions of national identity and Britishness, while also conspicuously deviating from down-to-earth experiences of real life in Britain. In fact, the inadequacy of Hortense’s coat not only signals the inaccuracy of her picture of British lifestyle, but also advances a fearful picture of her possible fate in Britain.
17In the previously mentioned discussion of Picture Post pictures, Hall discusses the structure of “presences” in the practice of the High Street photographers, but also the significance of “absences,” of what is unrepresentable, unsayable or contradicts representation (“Reconstruction Work” 86). Unlike the Picture Post photographers, who foregrounded the experience of Jamaican immigrants upon their arrival in London, Levy has her narrative abruptly stops before the protagonist’s arrival, focusing instead on the journey itself, during the course of which Hortense enjoys the facilities of a first-class English passenger in an illusion of congenial coexistence in harmony, sharply put to an end when the liner arrives at her expected destination. In this way, the narrative leaves unanswered whether Hortense’s dreams of improvement will meet her expectations, or whether, as the narrative obliquely suggests, the absences, gaps and silences interspersed with Hortense’s encounters during the journey actually become ominous of the character’s prospective ostracism as a result of the “insidious” racism “ever present” in her new homeland (Levy, Six Stories 9).
18The narrative’s reluctance to closure leaves the reader suspended as to Hortense’s final destiny in the “fabled mother country,” but the absences in the narrative, the “silences and gaps in our knowledge and understanding” eventually reveal a “lost history for many of us” (Levy, Six Stories) which deserves to be acknowledged as integral to Britain’s “greatness” (17), as Levy explains. Hortense’s physical and metaphorical journey also implies a rite of passage towards enlightenment: upon arrival, the character will need to come to terms with her black background and upbringing as integral to her identity, since constituting herself as black is the recognition of self through difference rather than identifying with homogenizing and destructive notions of England and Englishness in a romanticised, mythical understanding of identity which is eventually meaningless. What is actually at stake in Levy’s narrative is not so much who Hortense is, or where she comes from in her identitary quest, but rather what she might become in face of a new reality she has to come to terms with in a more realistic way. Her identity is the outcome of the realisation of difference and exclusion, rather than of identification with all-inclusive sameness (Hall, “Introduction” 4). Hortense’s coat signals her attempts at sameness in terms of cultural identity, and yet, its unsuitability brings forward the cracks and fractures of her identification, which rather works in terms of difference. In that sense, the history of Hortense’s coat emerges as a token of the interplay of modalities of power, of specific cultural and ethnic backgrounds, exemplifying a complex intersection out of which identity emerges.
19In “Uriah’s War”—the closing short story in Levy’s Six Stories & An Essay—the writer once more intertwines her own family history with the collective consciousness of the Jamaican diaspora in the United Kingdom, while also drawing from historiography and literary criticism. As the writer argues in the preface to the story, the narrative aims to celebrate the memory of her grandfather, a volunteer in the First World War who, like many other British colonial subjects, crossed the physical borders of the Empire and sacrificed his life out of loyalty for what he believed to be his own endangered country. Levy’s narrative—written in the context of the Great War’s centenary—is not merely an act of revival, but a politically committed action in tune with what Paul Ricoeur has termed “realizing anew,” in which “the creative power of repetition is contained entirely in this power of opening up the past again to the future” (380). In her preface to “Uriah’s War,” Levy acknowledges the centrality of Richard Smith’s pioneering study Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War (2004) in unearthing the role of Jamaican subjects in World War I, one of them being Levy’s own grandfather (112). In his book, Smith demonstrates how imperial soldiers experienced extensive racism which translated into discriminatory attitudes and practices. Along with Smith, Levy argues for a greater consideration of battalion forces if a more accurate ethnic map of armed war is to be attained. She could not find any details of her grandfather’s service in the British West Indies Regiment (BWIR) during the war, “but he was probably on a labour battalion that supplied the front lines. Perhaps not in a combat position but in one that needed just as much heroism, as fatalities were high” (Levy, Six Stories 111).
20Like many other Jamaicans, Levy’s grandfather served in the BWIR as a labourer rather than a soldier, which partially explains, according to Levy, the lack of official recognition and, most significantly, the absence of memories and of stories in the family history of the Jamaican diaspora. When Levy was told by a relative that her grandfather had been at the Somme during the war, she “didn’t believe it. I had never heard of Jamaicans taking part in that war. So I did some research” (11). The contribution of the West Indies Regiment to British history, Levy argues, “must not be overlooked,” since it was central in making of Britain a “great” empire (112). Jamaica offered the mother country not only moral support but also human resources, and thousands of Jamaicans volunteered as soldiers and service personnel—a contribution widely “shrouded in amnesia and misrepresentation,” as Richard Smith writes in an article (“Propaganda” 90).
21“Uriah’s War” is rendered in the first person by two narrators and protagonists of the events: Uriah Williamson, whose recollections entail the larger part of the narrative, and his friend Walker, who writes the story’s epilogue after Uriah’s death. Both are black Jamaicans appealed to fight at the European front for different motivations: in the case of Uriah, the pay, a shilling a day, is hard to earn in his homeland (111); for Walker, however, it is rather a question of honour, patriotism and national identity. Uriah’s narrative begins at an army camp in Seaford, England, where Jamaicans have called to join the BWIR. Whereas Uriah is just a plain Jamaican soldier who gives little thought to the British cause, Walker is the natural leader of the battalion, endowed with charismatic virtues such as honesty, courage and patriotism, who fuels his comrades’ courage and spirits and whose high ideals all seek to emulate:
We were full of [patriotism] then. Walker more than me. He was one of the first to volunteer for the British West Indies Regiment. He heard the King’s appeal as if whispered by His Majesty into his ear alone: I ask you, men of all classes, to come forward voluntarily and take your share in the fight . . . Walker was pleased that at last they would let black men do more for the King and Empire than ride a blasted bicycle around our island looking for spies. You see, the Empire was our protector, that is how we thought. England was great, sort of thing. And she was under threat. (115)
22Walker eagerly responds to King George V’s appeal to his subjects—heard in Jamaica on October 30, 1915 (Smith, Jamaican Volunteers 55)—“as if spoken to his ear alone” (Levy, Six Stories 115), but to his disappointment, the British West Indies Regiment is not sent to the Somme but to Alexandria, which Walker takes as an insult both to his race and masculinity: “Was he not fitter than the puny-tale English boys we trained with (all fed on bread and dripping . . . )? His fight, Walker wanted everyone to know, his fight was with the Germans!” (117). The BWIR march across the Sinai Desert, which brings to mind the Hebrew exodus towards the Promised Land while fleeing from Pharaoh’s Empire: like Moses, invested with God’s grace and strength, Walker passes over the Sinai reminding his comrades of their sacred mission, fuelling their courage and raising their spirits. After fighting the Turks, Walker’s courage is acknowledged by British officers for having saved numerous British lives at the battlefront. However, the narrative’s turning point occurs, paradoxically, after the 1918 armistice, when the battalion stop at Taranto—an episode informed by Richard Smith’s book and its description of the rigid regime of racial segregation imposed there by British officers, and of the harsh punishment black soldiers received when striking over pay conditions (Jamaican Volunteers 134). In “Uriah’s War,” despite their officers’ promise to be spared “all demeaning work” in recognition of the West Indians’ front-line service in Palestine, the Jamaicans are subjected to the same treatment as the BWIR labour battalions and are forced to clean out the latrines and are denied a pay rise, which provokes unrest. When being told by an officer that they were actually “better fed and treated than any nigger had a right to expect,” Walker attacks him with a pail, is awarded Field Punishment Number One and so feels treated like “a slave” (Six Stories 125): “For disobeying an order, for attacking an NCO, Walker is on a Field Punishment Number One. My friend who was once mentioned in dispatches for his coolness and devotion to duty is shackled in fetters like a… like a slave! (125). Field Punishment Number One was often administered in special camps and consisted in attaching a soldier who was restrained in handcuffs or fetters to a fixed object for several hours a day over consecutive days. As Smith notes, among black soldiers this provoked “particularly strong feelings” because they “had enlisted in a war regularly portrayed in the West Indies as a struggle against slavery” (Jamaican Volunteers 128).
23In Levy’s story, Uriah is determined to “go to the sergeant to demand to speak to the Brigadier General about this injustice” (Six Stories 124), but he is shot dead by the sergeant as a result of a climate of nerves and apprehension which a previous mutiny had produced. Walker closes the narrative with a letter addressed to an unknown recipient whom he informs of Uriah’s death. Walker expresses bitter disenchantment:
I must state that I am alive to the fact that we West Indians were unfairly discriminated against in this war. This discrimination was not only an insult to all those comrades who volunteered to leave family and home, to fight, shed blood and die in foreign fields. But also an insult to the patriotism of the loyal people of the West Indies. Uriah and me did not fail you. We were British soldiers. But you have failed to recognise our contribution. In consequence, I turn my back upon Britain, my Motherland. (127)
From this moment onwards, Walker’s struggle will no longer focus on the preservation of the Empire’s integrity, but will address precisely those issues for which Jamaicans had been discriminated against when, paradoxically, fighting for the Empire: “the right to vote, the right to work. But most of all, the right to live without insult” (127).
24Levy’s story advocates a more inclusive understanding of the Great War as a worldwide conflict and the centrality of colonial subjects, whose contribution to the British cause must be officially acknowledged. Oblivion, silence and forgetting are, according to Paul Ricoeur, “the challenge par excellence put to memory’s lack of reliability,” since the “trustworthiness of memories hangs on the enigma constitutive of the entire problematic of memory, namely, the dialectic of presence and absence at the heart of the representation of the past” (414). However, the possibility of forgiving and forgetting necessarily requires the accomplishment of rituals that have been left unfinished, namely, proper mourning and public recognition. To a large extent, Levy’s narrative suggests how the lack of public response has affected, traumatised and embittered a number of generations from 1914 to the present. In a sense, “Uriah’s War”—whose title emphasises individual perception versus official narratives—aims at the progressive disappearance of what Ricoeur calls “the gap between the history taught at school and the experience of memory.” With Ricoeur, Levy’s story can be read within the larger framework of what we call historical memory, “a genuine acculturation of externality” which inevitably requires a “gradual familiarization with the unfamiliar, with the uncanniness of the historical past” (394). The lack of proper mourning and the failure to perform the necessary symbolic burial rituals accounts for the presence of transgenerational ghosts. The paratextual elements of “Uriah’s War”—Levy’s preface—explain how a granddaughter is haunted by the ghosts from the past and is consequently called on to the task of settling accounts by writing those forgotten, untold stories which will enable the dead to finally rest. In so doing, the narrative urges for a reconsideration of national identity which extends across borders and calls for more inclusive conceptions beyond ethnicity.
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25Andrea Levy’s collection Six Stories & An Essay explores different moments in the history of the British Jamaican diaspora, their anxieties, expectations and frustrations from a critical perspective. The characters’ dreams of integration in a country which they have believed to be their homeland stand in opposition with the harsh reality they lived and the insidious racism they encountered. The characters’ liminal position, their cultural and social in-betweenness—which poses them at a crossroads of borders and cultures—is at the core of these stories. In so doing, the collection brings forward the possibility of opening up a critical space—forged by those liminal, interstitial positions—to question received assumptions pertaining to class, ethnicity, physical and psychological borders and, ultimately, national identity. But the manner these characters relate to national identity and to their own ethnicity and background often results in shame and denial of their own cultural heritage: “I was embarrassed that my parents were not English,” Levy declares. “One of the reasons was that no one around me was interested in the country my parents came from. To them, it was just a place full of inferior black people.” However, those Jamaicans involved in the intense migratory fluxes to the United Kingdom from the 1940s onwards were, in fact, British citizens; they travelled on a British passport and yet, upon their arrival, found out that “the things they thought of as quintessentially English—manners, politeness, rounded vowels from well-spoken people—were not in evidence” (Levy, “My England”). Six Stories & An Essay responds to the author’s conviction that the Jamaican cultural heritage is also integral to British identity, and must be officially recognised as such, thus extending beyond polarised identities towards more inclusive identitary conceptions. In Levy’s view, British identity is a political issue which should depart from essentialist conceptions grounded on ethnicity if a plural and more inclusive nation is to be forged.
26The collection, in fact, puts forward an urge to reconsider British history by acknowledging the centrality of diasporic subjects in making of Britain a “great” Empire. The hybridity which characterises Levy’s narrators and their speech, places and cultures extends to the narrative itself, which integrates in a colourful composite a variety of elements stemming from an array of sources: personal recollection, family records and historiography, all in a lively conversation with each other, all eventually aiming at offering a more inclusive vision of British history as told from the perspective of ex-centric, colonial subjects in their efforts to trespass both geographical and psychological borders dividing “us” from “them.”
