Putting back the voices that got left out : Small Island Read 2007

This essay sets out to explore the way in which Small Island’s dynamic novelization of the Windrush epos (and its celebration of the transformative impact of African-Caribbean migration on British identity) fecundly intersects that “development of shared understanding of overlapping histories” (Lola Young 2007) which is expected to emerge in the wake of the 2007 celebrations for the bicentenary of the British Abolition of the Slave Trade. Andrea Levy’s powerful and yet balanced re-enactment of the cultural negotiations following the arrival of the Windrush generation, and her narrative cross-fertilization of the “English” myth of the Blitz with the “Black” epics of diaspora, help indeed to shape that new, cosmopolitan national imaginary which is an overarching concern of the current official discourse of nationhood and belonging in Britain. Against this backcloth, the essay also addresses the way Small Island incisively re-writes the struggle over living space between white and black British citizens along lines which prioritize the trope of the House, and it suggests that Small Island’s bid at canonicity may be seen to rest not only on the breadth and variety of its imaginative texture, but also on its hybridization of more conventional narratives of migration with an ironic re-modulation of canonical patterns of romance.