Gilbert Joseph (David Oyelowo), Small Island
Queenie Bligh (Ruth Wilson) greets Hortense (Naomie Harris), Small Island
Dear friends and readers,
A blog on this marvelous, sweeping and intimately moving novel, and its effective film adaptation. The hype is deserved even if both book & film have flaws. The central thrust of this paradoxically finally optimistic book: coming to terms with a false imposed identity and creating a new one out of the shards of what you can’t escape (it’s part of you and the people around you will not let you escape) and turning back to old memories, reworking the pain of these to be brought forward as part of your recreated self:
A few days ago I got my schedule for teaching this coming spring and got back to working on Chapter 5 of my book project, now called “A Place of Refuge: The Sense and Sensibility movies.” My need to watch a mini-series or film adaptation of a novel by John Alexander (as the director of the 2008 S&S) had led me to read Andrea Levy’s rightly award-winning (Whitbread & Orange Prizes!), Small Island, as prologue to watching the movie (directed by Alexander, written by Paula Milne and produced by Joanna Anderson/Vicky Licorish). Well it seemed perfect for my 302 Humanities class and I plunged in. By the time I reached the close of both (book and movie) I had been absorbed, moved, and experienced something new and yet as old to me as experiences I had when I was five and in first grade and felt real admiration for the art of both.
The story is not told in chronological order but rather weaves back and forth between 1948 when (in the movie especially) events come to a crashing dramatic crisis and “time before” from the childhood of Hortense and Michael Roberts in Jamaica (the Carribean), to that of Queenie on a pig farm in rural UK (1930s) to their experiences of growing up, in the case of Hortense and Michael and a third Jamaican protagonist, Gilbert Joseph, emigrating to the UK, and in the case of Queenie and Bernard Bligh, working to lower middle class, marrying, enduring and experiencing WW2 and surviving on afterward. We experience Bernard’s war in India, and move back in time to experience how his father, Arthur, was traumatized permanently by his experience of WW1 in Europe; we get glimpses of Gilbert’s experience of war as a soldier-driver in the UK and Michael as an black officer of the RAF. I’ve ironed things out to group them, but in the book we move back and forth to juxtapose events thematically and for irony. A full plot-design and story summary brings into play the history and cultural worlds in these two islands (Jamaica and England are both small islands) especially as experienced along class, race, and gender fault-lines.
The movie moves forward more or less from the time Hortense is young and decides she wants to act on her dreams of working in a high position “as a teacher” in “the Mother Country,” England, with occasional flashbacks taking us back into the past and into the minds of the characters remembering specific crucial incidents in their lives.
At first I had trouble getting into the book. It has this deliberately “difficult” (complicated, complex organization (the author has prizes like the Booker in mind where such organizations retelling the pasts of different subjectivities are common): we are given individual character’s soliloquies which are thrust at us, and we are asked to pick up everything about each as we go. As I know little about Jamaica or the experience of black people in London in the 1940s (the two places events occur at thus far), it was a struggle.
It felt weak at first. I could see it belonged to the category of written, successfully marketed, and be-prized books that (for example) in A Critical Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, James English calls Tropicalizing-Colonialist-UK where (as James English says) the miseries and wretched conditions of the marginalized world (“The empire”) are presented using the modes and outlooks of the hegemonic one (in English, the Anglo). Such stories seems to critique the powerful and high ranked, and yet feed off it to make money and flatter the person reading them. English asks if such books are not exploitable globally marketable (high prestige) airport literature where the relatively well-placed, some rich, some well educated (booksellers, film people) and exploit the periphery using fashionable post-colonialist attitudes.
As I carried on though the book gripped me completely and won over my doubts for the most part. It picked up and became strong when in Jamaica our heroine, Hortense (illegitimate and living with an uncle and aunt) has to watch her male cousin, Michael, go to school and she doesn’t.
Hortense Roberts (Naomie Harris)
Michael Roberts (Ashley Walters).
This is a vividly, intensely experienced injustice in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, which I read with a sophomore level literature class three terms ago. Dangarembga opens with how her heroines hated her brother and is glad he has died, for now she may have a chance to go to school as her mother and father have no son. Levy’s is a less startling variant on this; it’s softened by the two being cousins, not brother and sister, and Hortense falling in love with Michael, and getting to go to a teacher’s school without his having to die for her to get a place. She then hopes to rise with him as his wife. All the black characters are seen to have advancement as a continual conscious motivation from a very young age.
A second turn came and deeper engagement when Gilbert Joseph, the young black Jamaican man who seems our secondary hero, but begins to seem our primary one finds himself for the first time in England. World War Twp has begun, and he has volunteered to “fight” for the “Mother country,” whose history, norms, ideals have informed his education from his youngest years so that he learned in school far more about English (not British, but specifically) English ways than he did about the history of the country he was brought up in, much less the western hemisphere than a tiny part of an island in a northern Archipelago. Gilbert hopes to learn a trade, a craft as an airman in the RAF.
Gilbert in the UK (David Oyelowo)
He discovers he will not be considered for any position higher than a driver. Just as bad, his dream of this beautiful idyllic fine society is shattered because the place is shabby, poor, cold, a “squalid shambles” with of cold, lousy tasting food (everything boiled), no heat,, with himself treated as utterly inferior, an outsider. I was deeply moved by the scene where he first approaches this island because I experienced this myself when coming to England by boat at age 21 and seeing the white cliffs of Dover (to be followed by working class Leeds in October). Out of my own reading, I made myself an identity that was Anglophilic, and while the first time I came I felt this intense uplift and loved all I saw (London, 1968) and was treated at least as well as anyone else, it was within a week or so a profoundly disillusioning experience. I saw as white from the get-go the rigid class system which made a huge majority of people ill-educated; class in the UK replaced race in the US. As I did in this novel Gilbert Joseph moves from dream, to realization of the actual (to him especially) cruel system, to dislike (very intense at first), and then gradually resignation because analogously it is just like the country one comes from, and then to acceptance (seeing social justice far more accommodating and far more flexible for people who don’t fit a “norm”), to even — for me in Leeds and Yorkshire, love and for Gilbert and Hortense Joseph at the close of the novel in Finsley Park hope and identification of a new sort.
The book has six principals: three blacks, Hortense and Michael Roberts and three whites, Queenie and Bernard Bligh, and Arthur, Bernard’s shell-shocked father who lives with Bernard, Robert.
With respect to the blacks, the book is also (as I wrote) about being a girl in a traditional society, and each of the paradigms that Hortense goes through in school have their parallel in Nervous Conditions, with this difference. Levy is less personally angry than Dangarembga (that’s a problem in the book) but more aware of theoretical issues and shapes her fiction to have wider application — to white women (especially working and lower middle class) say, and to all traditional women. It does give a certain “making book” quality to her book, a factitious quality, but I could see (not meaning to put this utterly cynically but rather pragmatically) how this book would be perfect to assign in a classroom. Like many of the Booker Prize books it lends itself to analysis which includes the typical middle class person and is not hard to analyse but has the kinds of structures that make for papers.
For example, again and again Hortense in Jamaica and then Gilbert in the UK go through job and application interviews. Gilbert once he returns to the UK after the war is over and he discovers he can get just nowhere in Jamaica, would have ended a poor subsidence marginal semi-working hanger-on, an attempt to get a better position. He can only rise in a developed country, but there he’s a man whose credentials and abilities are utterly ignored. What happens is what matters is, who was your father? Were you legitimate? Hortense is thus rejected for better positions as a teacher in Jamaica repeatedly and her dream of getting into the white school as a teacher utterly crushed. What is your race? your ethnic identity? are you one of us? So Gilbert dreams of being educated to be a pilot and learning about aerospace. Is he kidding? he ends up a driver. (This happened to me in my life several times: the first in in my junior year in high school. I wrote a composition which I saw several teachers knew was excellent but it was rejected along the lines because I was not in the AP class, not in the honors English, not going at that point to college, and clearly working class without the manners and ability to present myself the other girls had. What a lesson that taught me. I’ve never forgotten it. You don’t have to be black to learn it, just working or lower middle class.)
A particularly moving moment comes early in the book with the death of Michael Roberts — or so we think. A telegram written in euphemistic language arrives. The euphemisms used to describe his death are at not at first understood by the naive parents. The authorities don’t know for sure and don’t want the parents to know how he died and that he was in fact thrown away.
The book obviously does not neglect white people either, the real colonist types Trollope likes to present, fringe people in the UK who come over to the colonies try to rise about those who are exploited as beneath them. We have Mr and Mrs Ryder, the pair who run a Jane Eyre like school. He’s adulterous with many women: we are shown how women get along everywhere by selling sex. She’s adulterous with Michael Roberts.
We meet Queenie, a girl in a laborer’s family, brought up a farm girl and given an opportunity to educate herself minimally for office work when her Aunt Dorothy invites her to come to London to learn manner, how to speak (dialect is class-inflected), how to dress, type, and meet young men. Before Queenie can find a place for herself, her aunt dies, and she is threatened by her mother (in effect) with returning to the farm. She has met but not loved a shy, un-aggressive bank clerk, Bernard Bligh; he has tried to ask her to marry him, and she was not eager. But under pressure she makes the pragmatic choice.
In the film Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch) steps forward to say that Queenie (Ruth Wilson) has accepted him when her mother (Mary Jo Randle) says she has no way of supporting herself in London
Bernard is driven to enlist out of shame and a sense that Queenie does not admire or love or even need him. The marriage is not simply a desperate choice (like Charlotte Lucas in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) one as the male here is while shown with all his flaws (racist through and through, narrow, dull) is also sympathized with. When he goes off on his bus, Queenie shuts the door and does not watch Bernard to the last moment.
The scene has a parallel in film and book when much later after the war and Bernard has not come home, Michael Roberts turns up for a second time (no he was not killed), becomes Queenie’s lover for a weekend but as he has no love for her beyond that walks out of her life off to Canada, without turning round. She would have gone with him but is afraid to ask if she can lest he give her an answer which reveals his indifference to her.
Queenie (Ruth Wilson) and Michael (Ashley Walters) during the weekend
So the book reaches out and joins the unprivileged in both small islands.
Two powerful scenes may stand for how the black and white stories are woven together. Gilbert Joseph comes to live in Queenie’s house as one of three servicemen looking for a place to stay (this while Bernard has gone off to war). Gilbert takes Queenie to a teashop where some American white soldiers; they see him and immediately want to destroy him. In terror, he has to get out of there and yet not show the fear. He and Queenie go out in the street and meet up with Bernard’s father, Arthur (a barrier to these men) and then decide to go into a moviehouse (partly Gilbert seeking safety).
Gilbert and Queenie with Arthur (Karl Johnson) in the film
Gilbert is about to sit downstairs with Queenie (and perhaps Arthur) when an usher comes over to tell him he must sit upstairs. The mayhem that follows is intensely persuasive: as many whites are for him sitting there (British people) as there are American whites incensed at him. We see how the usher and manager just don’t want trouble, how the vast majority of those sitting just wish all would sit and watch the movie. A riot ensues in which Queenie’s father-in-law is killed because a American military white type suddenly produces a gun.
The film offers a shorter version of the scene, one which occurs wholly in the street: Gilbert (David Oyelowo) is trying to reach and to help Arthur who he has become fond of (Arthur is a good card-player, in fact cheats)
We see the intense racism of Americans against the unthinking not institutionalized “color” bar of the UK.
Both white and black women make pragmatic marriages. When Gilbert comes homes to Jamaica, he just has no chance for anything; not considered for any role, cannot make even a subsidence living. Hortense has learned how limited her chances are too, so she offers to pay for his return (she has worked for years in a low-paying job putting away some of her pay each week), of he will marry her first and then send for her afterward. She says she wants to marry him as it does not do for a “young lady” to travel and live with a man without being married to him. She is utterly conventional in her aping of respectable ways.
The deal is about to be struck (Celia [Nikki Amuka-Bird] Hortense’s friend who does not get to go as she is not allowed by Gilbert to desert her dependent mother
He cannot find a decent place to stay at first, and when he finally does find a job as a postman, he remembers Queenie’s address, seeks her out and as she is a rare non-prejudiced person who needs lodgers very badly, she rejoices to see him
Greeting one another
The book does not neglect showing how Queenie experiences the war: as bombing. How she works as a government aid whose business it is to supposedly help traumatized, homeless, maimed and bombed out people. She is ever giving them super-complicated forms and send them off to officials we are to realize will not exactly greet them with the open arms Queenie displays to Gilbert
What often bothers me about some post-colonial or third-world novels is a kind of prejudice is set up against the whites — and it might seem so in this book by my above paragraphs. (And this is true of Jumpha Lahiri’s first volume of stories, Interpreters of Maladies and her Namesake where the working class whites are stigmatized, for example, by their drinking habits and the upper class whites caricatures of New Yorker imagined readers.) Not so with Levy: we get an inside-the-white-skin moving account of Queenie Bligh’s growing up working class, her marriage to Bernard (lower middle) , her experience of the war, of being deserted by him afterward, which persuades me if Levy didn’t grow up in the UK she has a strong empathetic imagination.
Another aspect of this book which makes it at once more acceptable for a woman’s novel (and thus be-prized) and seems one by a man — and a wee bit of a problem to set as a text for students — is its vast sweep. Why? It makes the book longer. Atwood’s Lady Oracle is under 300 pages, and Lahiri’s Namesake and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto) not much more. J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is well under 125. Anyone who teaches will tell you how increasingly hard it is to get students to get a book of 400 plus pages. (All these gentle reader are books I can and will assign beyond Small Island if I got through with this to my 302 in Humanities students.)
It does make the novel more impressive; there is a long moving section of a white working to lower middle class hero, Bernard’s, time fighting in India. What is striking here is how Levy uses the subjective soliloquy style narrative which moves back and forth in time (common in Booker Prize books) for varied purposes. She captures the early history of Bernard’s father (who is suddenly killed in the race riot outside the movie house I described yesterday) so that we learn to love this man, a broken person from WW1 (and thus get some of this). She also gives us an incident where our conventional hero who has thus far refused to mutiny, refused to strike, refused to do anything rebellious suddenly finds himself pressured and bullied to lie about the death of one of his close friends, to claim the man died as one of a series of strikers in order to fulfill the agenda of the officer (promotion). When he refuses, he is thrown in jail himself, court martialed. I had not thought of this: how officers and powerful people would pressure lower people not just to lie about their mistakes, but lie about others to use them — just as much in death as anywhere else. Yes this is an anti-war, anti-colonialist novel.
Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch) coming home at last
He feels how Queenie is shattered and also that she does not want him. She does not go to bed with him. She rightly is indignant that he questions her decisions to take in blacks when he has not been home for 2 years, was thought to have deserted her. He thinks her spirit now weakened considerably by the terrible bombing and loss of her father-in-law — his father. What he does not know is she is now pregnant by Michael Roberts.
The novel does cheat. It has a magical providential patterning using Michael Roberts. What is an accepted providential nature of novels allows Queenie to meet up with Hortense’s cousin, Michael Roberts, the young black man who was sent to school when Hortense wasn’t, and then declared missing believed killed in the white man’s war in the RAF; Queenie naturally has a one night affair with him. There is a Lawrentian undercurrent here: Michael is the sexy man of the novel.
It’s on Michael’s second weekend-long tryst with Queenie after the war is over (and Bernard has not returned) that she became pregnant. He then (as I wrote) went walking off to Canada.
Without giving the whole ending away (not quite predictable), I have to say the white women and white couple (Queenie Bligh and Bernard Bligh) are the big losers in this novel. The young black couple (Gilbert Joseph and Hortense Roberts) are giving the providentially happy use of an inheritance which a black friend of Gilbert’s is willing to share with him (which of course calls upon their work ethic). The young black couple are going to go live in a much nicer house in Finsley Park whose income they will share in; Queenie may yet get a certificate to teach English in the UK. They are going to do all right. The white male comes back blasted and nervous and our white heroine, a strong presence throughout the book ends up with him and gives up what means a tremendous amount to her — her baby to the black couple, not because she doesn’t love it but because she loves it very much and knows she will not be permitted to bring it up without terrific prejudice thrown at it such that it will grow up twisted and angry. She also give Bernard a place that he can feel comfortable in by simply staying with him.
There’s a sort of hidden revenge going on here. I said I often did see an animus against working class whites in books by Afro- people, sometimes spiteful and through caricature (Jhumpa Lahiri); this was not at all the way in this novel until the very last scene, which I suspect could also be attacked at (not meaning to but) reinforcing racial separation (against say adoption of black childen by whites or any ethnic/racial child of one haplogroup by parents of another haplogroup).
I did cry as I felt intensely for Queenie — our white working class heroine.
*********************
I watched the mini-series immediately after reading the book and thus the inevitable comparative temptation was to find the film wanting in comparison with the novel. As I went on I recognized the film had its own themes, or (to put it another way) elaborated the themes of the book with a different emphasis. The idyllic dream of England found in the book and slowly torn down to a minimal expectation of a more comfortable modern life, one in the book analogous to and made also to stand for the dream of being promoted, advanced, having a career of dignity and fulfillment is emphasized and shapes the choices, plot-design and especially the close. Most of the characters are thwarted at almost every turn until near the end Gilbert and Hortense get the opportunity to move into the house of Hortense’s dreams: it may be run down, but we can see it has potential. I say especially the close, for the most moving characters in the film (perhaps paradoxically) is Queenie (Ruth Wilson) and she is left crying on her stoop, her weak husband’s arms around her as Gilbert and Hortense drive with baby Michael (her name for her baby) away.
One of the reviews I read, this one by Laura Albritten, Harvard Review, Nov 29, 2005, pp 237-39, argued that Queenie is the most admirable character but for Gilbert Joseph, and as hardest and permanently hit, the most memorable.
All four protagonists, the black young man and woman and the white young man and women are thrown away by their society at some point, the blacks more ruthlessly than the whites, but just as surely. They are given little opportunity to use their talents, education, gifts. The only one who might fulfill hers is Hortense at the close but it’s chancy. In the logic of popular (naive) art, it’s somehow fitting that Hortense, the most insistent on her self-image and pride is the person who may indeed fulfill her dream:
Hortense putting her nose up at Queenie’s unnecessary but well-meant explanations of what is sold in a given shop
I felt some of the scenes in my bones as someone who got a Ph.d. and had no chance to become a tenured type, as someone who came to the UK with this dream of the place and saw the reality. Actually I was struck by how in the end the black characters stay in the UK and accept and even like it; I would have stayed too had my parents not offered Jim and I a real step-up of money and I gain a position in university in NYC and Jim get so much better a job. This is the distance between the US in the 1970s (a place where jobs and advancement were possible for lower middle in the 1970s) and Jamaica (a place where this was not possible in the 1940s).
My feeling is this theme of being shut out, a class based fault-line for whites, resonated with the viewers of this film too. The scenes of someone with a good education (Hortense) laughed at, of someone who aspires to one (Gilbert Joseph) scorned and humiliated, who gradually learns to live with his or her place were among the strengths of this (optimistic finally be it said) film:
Hortense and Gilbert on a park bench contemplating Buckingham Palace.
A small side show was the two older characters who are nervous wrecks and supported by their families. Bernard’s father is an emotional cripple from WW1 and he is kept and his death in a race riot (considerably toned down) as devastating as in the book. The film adds a woman who is equally in need of support, Celia’s mother whose father deserted her years before and who I described above. Celia does not get to leave the Carribbean because Gilbert Joseph will not hear of her leaving her mother to go with him; Queenie is faithful to the end to her father-in-law.
The flaws are (to someone who did no more than read the book and watch the film for entertainment) departures from an already compromised text: The opening gets rid of the brother-sister (Michael versus Hortense Roberts) rivalry which is so powerful at first in the book and collapses it immediately into a romance between the two cousins (actually they are cousins) which the novel (to be fair) eventually does too. They make the white teacher in the Carribean, Mrs Ryder, simply a lover of Michael Roberts, who since he becomes Queenie’s lover too, begins to be a portrait of a philandering cold male by the end. This gets rid of the reality of promiscuity we see in Mr Ryder (who is not having an affair with anyone in the film) and Mrs Ryder and turns the thing into lurid romance. Hortense’s dislike then becomes “the young girl who has a lot to learn” (and her lesson is the Lawrentian I’ve been noticing from Turn of the Screw and Atonement that the girl must accept male sexuality in full power because healthy passionate (&c) women do, like Mrs Ryder and Queenie (later in the book) and in the Atonement, Cecilia.
Albeit straight from the book, Michael Robert’s multi-function in all three women’s lives is improbable — it does connect to the male who is presented as glamorous and sexy because he’s aloof. He does walk off into the sunset so to speak — to Canada, never to be seen by any of the characters again we are to suppose. So he can stand for the male who deserts.
Michael as false comforter
A young minor black woman in the film, Celia, is not able to escape Jamaica because her mother’s mind has become unhinged and she needs her daughter since her husband deserted her. Bernard, Queenie’s husband, in effect deserts her (for 2 years after the war from depression, fear, anxiety, an idea he has syphilis), but ironically when he comes back, she is not elated to see him, he only makes trouble for her as she’s become independent and managed on her own after all. The sad ending is partly the result of Bernard being there; Queenie would maybe not have made the decision she did had she not had a racist white male husband to live with.
On the other hand, as in so many films recently, we again have – and there is not one iota of warrant for this in the text — these older women continually counseling the young girl to compromise, the accept the male fate has offered her (Hortense’s aunt, supervisor, Queenie’s aunt and mother). The tone is not as bitter or vile as in Lost in Austen, but the reiteration is striking — especially when there’s nothing like this in the book.
We have a narrator but he is male — this is a book by a woman. I did say Levy had been clever enough to combine a male type novel with a female but substituting a male voice erases the mark of this as a novel by a woman. Yet in the interests of time and expense, the war sections are cut severely so the novel is about here and now and domestic romance primarily. This is loss even if it was to save money and time.
The film-makers also considerably soften the racism — they were afraid to show the full extent of suffering of blacks lest they lose their white BBC audience I suppose. They make Queenie’s husband much less racist than he is in the book. In the book his behavior is both real and painful to watch. Our black hero, Gilbert Joseph, has far worse experiences in the book when he comes to the UK both during the way (the death of Arthur is far more ravaging and poignant) and is bitterer in the book.
But as I’ve shown, much is left that is of individual and unusual value.
Hortense arriving (the opening of the film)
They did keep the book’s and allusion to Gone with the Wind, and it worked so fittingly: when Queenie comes to have her baby with Hortense in the room, Queenie says we are Scarlett and Prissy (you see the type) all over again, Hortense denies this stoutly (getting the allusion) and we can see this archetypal scene has undergone a sea change: Queenie is not a queen, she’s having an illegitimate baby through adultery and Hortense is an educated young woman, not a slave.
An irony about the depiction of racism in recent BBC films: I notice the same small group of black actors recur in many of these films. Three of the principles here; David Oyelowo (Gilbert Joseph), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Celia), Ashley Walters (Michael Roberts) I’ve seen repeatedly in star roles in films where blacks are wanted (Five Days for example) so not that many blacks are being promoted and advanced in quality British TV. I did love Ruth Wilson (Queenie), recently in Jane Eyre: bringing Jane Eyre together with Queenie Bligh shows the folk typology at the heart of this film. Naomi Harris (Hortense) I’ve not seen before, the new ingenue princess, we are to see her as prissy, and that is a good thing as her self-esteem and demand for respect does help her — as it might not in life. Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Bernard was the rapist in Atonement and has gone on to be a modernized Sherlock Holmes so his typology is complicated, here extends his range:
Need I say all are brilliant actors in the modern British quality TV tradition, Karl Johnson as Arthur.
And I saw many film techniques of John Alexander which he uses in his, Andrew Davies and Anne Pivcevic’s 2008 BBC Sense and Sensibility (use of romantic surging music, of nostalgic kinds of blurs, of landscapes); nothing as original as shaped by Davies’s montage poetry-drenched text, but the films definitely have the same director. There are memory montages for Queenie remembering Michael (this is typical modern technique, found in 1996 Meridian Emma to 2009 Lost in Austen. The real love affair in the book is that of Queenie and Michael, and he deserts her, and she gives up his child. This is a film which shows us the risks and limits of romance in our world in so many areas of life on so many levels.
Yes finally it’s a woman’s book and a woman’s movie.
E.M.
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
N.B. On the heart-wrenching close-ups of Ruth Wilson as Queenie Bligh at the close of the film, Small Island, and then far shot of Benedict Cumberbatch with her on their stoop:
She has come to what she knows at the moment because really one guy used and left her (Michael Roberts), another deserted her for too long (Bernard her husband), no one came to her aid only to criticize her for taking in black lodgers (Mr Todd stands for that), or (in Queenie’s mother’s case) to insist on her coming back with them and adhering to a view of the world that mocks aspiration, any dream, any self-respect from real decent individual fulfillment. It is hard to stay with the notion that what you do out of the goodness of your heart is a sign of your strength and never to be regretted when that too led to this moment — the book does not mean this but some could come away with it, saying, see this is what comes of defying the racism of society. And in the end, Queenie didn’t care; she gave her baby up.
An interesting review article on the book where Laura Albritton argues paradoxically in this novel meant to be equally about black people, the most moving character and memorable is the really virtuous victim white heroine (once again). I don’t agree for I find Gilbert Thomas (the black young man who lodges with Queenie) and Bernard Bligh’s long soliloquies just as powerful. But I can see a case could be made as we begin with Queenie and end with her.
E.M.
Sara Read: “I agree completely. It’s an amazing, thought provoking read. Expect tears.
Lynn Tuplin: “plus the BBC did an really good adaptation of it”
From Gynn Bailey:
“Loved the book – have taught it some years ago when it was ‘just out’. Provoked some very interesting discussions – this was to adult classes with ethnic minorities not far from the area of Brick Lane. At the end of the course I took a coach trip to the Brick Lane area which has been an area of immigration for hundreds of years. We started off at the musuem of immigration: http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/ and then explored the area individually. I must look out my notes. BTW this is also the area of Jack the Ripper!
PS I really enjoyed the film, obviously there had to be ‘cuts’ but I felt it ‘got the spirit’. I am so sorry that I haven’t sent you my ‘Brick Lane’ notes, will do right now. You will see that in a lot of it I have compared it to Small Island [may have notes for that too if you want them]. Loved the book and series.”
Journalizing, 5/3: About half the class is reading it, and last night 84 minutes of the movie appeared to grip yet more. I have five black students, two from abroad (Africa). I had not realized how charming (I usually avoid this word as it’s a buzz one with little meaning for real) the mix of comedy and anguish feels: the actor playing Gilbert Joseph is an effective comic actor.
The exigencies of the schedule make our final May 16th so there’s hope most of the class will have read the book by then: it’s 1/4 of the last part of the term and the way things have worked out will weigh 1/3 (the other thirds being Ross Poldark by Graham and Northanger Abbey by Austen).
Two instances of success last night: two talks one of which was wholly on Small Island and the other partly were very good: the students had read the book with care and quoted a lot from it.
One was a talk comparing the one working class male brought out strongly and individually in Ross Poldark, Jim Carter, with the two lower middle males in Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Small Island is our final book. The young male student was asked to compare the barriers class made then and now.
He did that thoroughly for all these: 1940s are not much different in terms of barriers (though not outright near starvation and then laws to enforce this starvation, as anti-poaching) as the 1790s. He reviewed Jim’s sickness as well as his participation in a food riot (what the student called wreckage scavenging). He didn’t pick up much on Bernard Bligh’s miseries because Bernard is a white racist, but Levy does show how Bligh is as excluded — and punished — as the others. While Bligh is in India, he recognizes the average Indian has little to win in fighting for Britain but not himself. His best friend is killed in a semi-riot and the officer who wants (for his own career sake) to prove mutiny tries to blackmails Bernard into saying the friend was part of a mutiny and when Bernard refuses, Bernard is court-martialed himself and put in prison. He comes home as shattered in his way as his father, Arthur (killed in a race confronation — by a stray bullet).
The second talk was also by a young man. He showed how intertwined all the exclusionary and painful practices was. A class prejudice and bigotry inflicted and depriving and humiliating someone was often also a gender one. He showed how war made no difference. White English families who have lost their home are found one in an upper class area and people come out and bitterly complain going after the jobs of those who put them there. He came up with so many instances by the end we had quite a portrait of the ironies and cruelties practices by human nature. Hortense Roberts is looked down upon as black — and controlled as female — in London (and marries so she can travel) but she looks down the whites around her (Queenie) as uncouth, not having good manners, not dress “up”.
Chuffed,
Ellen
A life and works:
Lima, Maria Helena. “Andrea Levy.” Twenty-First-Century “Black” British Writers. Ed. R. Victoria Arana. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 347. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 26 Nov. 2010.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY:
Born on 7 March 1956 in London, Andrea Levy is the daughter of Winston and Amy Levy, Jamaicans. Her father and his twin brother (who had been among the thousands of West Indians serving in the wartime Royal Air Force) were among the first wave of Jamaican migrants to arrive at Tilbury on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948; her mother joined her husband in London six months later. Although they were British citizens, Levy’s parents faced incredible difficulty finding not only a place to live but also proper employment because of the color of their skin. Levy’s mother, for example, a trained teacher in Jamaica, had to sew to make a living, working in sweatshops with foreigners. Her father worked at a post office. By the time all four of their children were born–Levy, the youngest, has two sisters and a brother–the family lived in a council flat in Highbury, north London, next to the Arsenal football field. About this period, Levy wrote: “In the world outside our flat, I was a north London girl. I went to the local schools. Spoke like a cockney. Offered to mind people’s parked cars on match days. . . . Everything from Jamaica was odd to me. . . . I wanted just to fit in and be part of everything that was around me, and these strange parents were holding me back” (“This Is My England”). Levy’s fiction so far attempts to represent and work through her dual reality–Jamaican and English–“the two notions of home,” or in Bonnie Greer’s words in “Empire’s Child” (The Guardian, 31 January 2004) “the fact of being both the child and the orphan of Empire.” (Levy’s motto in life, she has often said, is that “It is better to light one small candle than to rail against the dark.”)
In her lively online memoir “This Is My England” (2000), Levy tells her readers about the ordinariness of her childhood. She attended Highbury Hill Grammar School, almost failing her English A-level examination. At school she was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. Later she studied the works of William Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. She took piano lessons and could sing “Greensleeves” to her own accompaniment. In history courses she was most interested in such matters as “the repeal of the Corn Laws and free trade” and the doings of Victorian prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli . “I was educated to be English,” she notes, adding that her white classmates “would never have to grow up to question whether they were English or not” (“This Is My England”). Levy confided to Teddy Jamieson in a 2007 interview for The Herald Magazine that although a “lazy” student she nevertheless “got 10 O-levels and two A-levels.”
She studied textile design and weaving at Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University), graduating in 1978. When she left college, Levy began work as a woven-textile designer and assistant buyer in various shops. She later worked in the wardrobe departments of the BBC and the Royal Opera House, where she read constantly. Around 1982 she met Bill Mayblin, a graphic designer trained at the Royal College of Art in London. Their friendship developed slowly into a durable partnership. Meanwhile her growing political awareness drew Levy to literature. Levy found some of what she was looking for in books by Toni Morrison , Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou , but she searched in vain for a British equivalent. In 1987 her father died of lung cancer.
She did not begin to consider writing as a career until after her father’s death. In 1988 she attended an advanced writing workshop at the City Literary Institute, a “Center for Adult Learning” that now uses Levy’s critical acclaim in its advertising. Her reading had inspired her to try to write the novels that as a young woman she had always wanted to read and never found. For a while she took off one day a week from work to write what she hoped would be her first book. In 1989 she visited Jamaica for the first time. There she met relatives who told her more about her ancestors, including her father’s father, who was born Jewish but converted to Church of England while fighting in World War I; about a distant Scottish forefather; and about her mother’s great-great-grandmother, who was a slave. Upon her return she conceived of her first novel, a tribute to her parents, and particularly to Winston Levy.
Every Light in the House Burnin’ was eventually published in 1994. Publishers initially had turned it down, perhaps because they felt it was not like books by other black British writers who were successful at the time–Victor Headley’s Yardie (1992), for example. Levy, in contrast, wanted to show the experience of her parents’ generation and the children who came after–their having to live in a hostile environment and coping in law-abiding ways. “There was a lot of the street culture being represented” in black British fiction in the early 1990s, she observed, and added, “I didn’t relate to it at all. It wasn’t my experience” (unpublished Maria Helena Lima interview, 5 March 2002).
In Every Light in the House Burnin’ Levy offers a loving depiction of her protagonist’s father, Winston Jacobs, who, much like Levy’s own father, was born in Jamaica but migrated to England in 1948 on the SS Empire Windrush with 492 other Jamaicans in search of better opportunities. The Windrush pioneers, as Onyekachi Wambu writes for the BBC in “Black British Literature since Windrush” (1 January 1998): “were coming ‘home,’ to a place that was rapidly changing.” Mr. Jacobs is depicted as the reliable breadwinner who works for the London Transport. Although he is not loving and openly affectionate to his children, the first-person narrator (Angela) feels closer to him than to her mother. When the Jacobs children’s “friends” remind them that their dads have said the Jacobses are “not English,” calling them “wogs,” “coons,” “nig-nogs,” and “Blackies,” telling them to go back to the jungle where they came from, all Beryl, their mother, answers is “You’re not black and you’re not white. That’s what we are–we’re not black and we’re not white. . . . You born here. That’s what matter.”
While Angela’s memories of her mother are of her “hiding” either in the kitchen or in her room, studying for an Open University degree, Beryl’s resignation, omissions, and silences cannot be dismissed simply as internalized racism. She had been a certified teacher when she left Jamaica but has to study in England for analogous credentials to be deemed good enough to teach English children. At the same time she seems to care more for appearances and protocol than for anything else. When Patricia, Angela’s “darker” sister who “was always miserable” and whom Angela sometimes wished to disown, gets married at age eighteen, their “mum” is “horrified” she is “getting married in black–more by the suit than the pregnancy.” Yvonne, the light-skinned older sister, becomes a trained nurse and goes to live in New Zealand–according to the narrator, “the furthest away she could get.” Of the four Jacobs children, most readers and reviewers feel, only Angela develops into a mature young woman who seems to know who she is and to what she is entitled. The narrative point of view, Angela’s, accounts in part for the egocentric perspective of the daughter who tells her family’s story. Nevertheless, by juxtaposing Angela’s past and present life, by describing Angela’s recollections of childhood years while she is helping her mother to take care of her terminally ill father and cope with the inadequacies of the National Health Service, Levy illustrates both intimately and dramatically how her protagonist comes to terms with herself, her family, and her place in British society.
Looking back on the experience of writing her first novel, Levy told the Edinburgh International Book Festival crowd on 16 August 2005: “For me the whole writing malarkey has been a journey of discovery about my past and my family. All my books so far have something to do with that journey and that discovery. They are about looking at what it is to be black and British, trying to put back into history the people who got left out–people like my Dad.” Reviewers compared Levy’s combination of a Jamaican heritage and British working-class perspective to Meera Syal’s Bhaji on the Beach (1994), and Hanif Kureishi ‘s My Beautiful Laundrette (1984) and The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), but also to Nick Hornby ‘s Fever Pitch (1992) and Roddy Doyle ‘s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), best-sellers by white British comic novelists. “None of my books is just about race,” Levy reflected in an interview with Christie Hickman of The Independent (6 February 2004). “They are about people and history.” And they are rich in bittersweet humor.
Like Every Light in the House Burnin’, Levy’s next novel, Never Far from Nowhere (1996), is a coming-of-age novel that focuses on the renegotiation of identities fundamental to migration and crucial to the children of migrants. Levy once again immerses readers in the stories of the development of girls born in England to Jamaican parents, girls who struggle to re-create their identities and allegiances as they grow up in the 1960s and 1970s amid systemic racism and skinhead violence. Never Far from Nowhere alternates the voices of the two sisters: the light-skinned, artistic Vivien and Olive, her big, unhappy, “darker” elder sister. Both Vivien and Olive were born on a council estate in Finsbury Park, North London; and, like the sisters of Every Light in the House Burnin’, they are the daughters of parents who migrated to England from Jamaica on a ship. Although Olive believes that her mother and Vivien think she worries about color too much, she is sure they cannot know how she feels because “they haven’t gone through what I’ve gone through.” Olive always has frustrating nightmares of winding up in the wrong country. Vivien, with the insights of a younger sister, does not want to end up negative like Olive. But because Olive does not feel she belongs in England, she decides in the end to leave it for Jamaica. She wants to enjoy life
in the sun and watch Amy [her daughter] playing on beaches. I’m going to live somewhere where being black doesn’t make you different. Where being black means you belong. In Jamaica people will be proud of me. I’ve had enough of this country. What has it ever done for me except make me its villain. Well, I won’t take it any more.
Neither sister, however, can be optimistic about the other’s future. Olive’s Jamaica exists only in tourist brochures and her imagination, and Vivien tells Olive: “You act as if I was born in Buckingham Palace and you were born here,” in welfare housing. Olive, on the other hand, is sure that Vivien is fooling herself with the belief that “she has escaped, with all her exams and college and middle-class friends.” Olive believes that Vivien will never “be accepted in this country” and be “one of them.” Olive, considering herself the pragmatic one, thinks, “I know more about life than her. Real life. Nothing can shock me now. But Vivien, one day she’ll realize that in England, people like her are never far from nowhere. Never.”
In 1998 Levy was granted an Arts Council Writers’ Award to support her creative writing. Levy’s third novel, Fruit of the Lemon (1999), tells the story of Faith Jackson, who travels to Jamaica to recover her family history. When readers take that journey to Jamaica with Faith, they travel back into her family’s past, recovering the complex history of her ancestors. Her great-great-grandfather, for example, comes from the northwest of Scotland. James Campbell’s family “was made to move from the lush green glen, out to the coastland where they had to stop farming and start fishing.” Because they cannot catch enough fish to feed a growing family, in the summer months James goes to Glasgow to find work, where he is offered the promise of a better life in Jamaica, working on a sugar estate. In Jamaica, James marries Amy, “the daughter of a woman who was born a slave. Her family had worked on the estate for many years–as slaves, as apprentices, and then as free men working in return for small plots of land and lodging.” Amy used to say to everyone that her husband, “the white man, was one day going to take her and her children to Scotland to live in a small stone house, in a beautiful lush green glen where the sun shone all day, even through rain.” That day never came, and that version of Scotland only lives as a hand-me-down memory of Faith’s Jamaican relatives. She has to travel to Jamaica to learn the history of her ancestors, in all its complexity, in order to acknowledge the African, Irish, Scot, and English components of her identity.
“When you look at family trees–anybody’s family tree–people’s individual histories,” as Levy put it in “This Is My England,” the question of identity is thorny. She explains,
It would be nice and simple if we were all pure. If we all came from where our parents, grandparents and beyond came from. If we all just took on our forefathers’ culture. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say that all Africans are black and all English are white? . . . We would all fit into our separate boxes, and in times of change, such as those that we are now living through, we could retreat into them and lick our wounds. But it is not like that. Any history book will show that England has never been an exclusive club, but rather a hybrid nation. The effects of the British Empire were personal as well as political. And as the sun has finally set on the Empire, we are now having to face up to all of these realities.
Levy has acknowledged that many black people with backgrounds similar to hers do not wish to be called English. But national identity, Levy has emphasized, is not a personal issue. It is political, and “Englishness must never be allowed to attach itself to ethnicity” because, if most English citizens are white, “some are not.” Citizenship, she suggests, safeguards civil rights and legal protections and entails social responsibility. In “This Is My England” Levy acknowledges that the complicated family history detailed in Fruit of the Lemon, and which explores these themes, is based almost entirely on stories told to her by her mother.
In 2002 Levy married Mayblin, a senior partner in the London-based design firm Information Design Workshop and the witty illustrator of dozens of texts in the Introducing series published by Totem Books; but not until her interview in February 2004 with Hickman did Levy disclose humorously: “We’ve been together for 22 years, and we got married two years ago. I don’t like to rush into these things.” Mayblin had two daughters from an earlier marriage, whom he and Levy had been rearing together since the 1980s. Levy knew from an early age that she did not want to have children of her own, but feels “lucky” to have had the experience of raising her two stepdaughters, now adults. Her books, Levy avers, are her offspring.
One of Levy’s lifetime ambitions, to have her “portrait to hang in the National Portrait Gallery,” was fulfilled on 31 August 2004. It is a color photograph taken by Mary Dunkin. Levy connects the distinction of that honor to her concepts of nationality and decent citizenship. Five years earlier Levy had told reviewer Raekha Prasad in an interview, “The great and the good are in there. I don’t want to set my sights too low” (The Guardian, 4 March 1999). In “This Is My England” Levy reiterated a point she has hammered at over the years: “I’m English. Born and bred, as the saying goes. . . . I don’t look as the English did in the England of the ’30s or before, but being English is my birthright. England is my home.” By September 2004, in large part as a result of the enormous success of Small Island, published in February 2004, Levy was an international celebrity. Small Island was coming out in paperback, and she was the writer commissioned by The Guardian to write “Made in Britain,” a report to commemorate and to celebrate the coming together for a photograph of fifty contemporary British writers of Caribbean, Asian, and African descent gathered in front of the British Library on Sunday, 12 September 2004. This new A Great Day portrait was inspired by the photograph A Great Day in Harlem that Art Kane took of American jazz musicians gathered together in New York City in 1958. “Britain,” Levy wrote, “is finally beginning to gather up its more distant voices and listen to the rich stories that they have to tell, stories that are as central to the history of Britain and of British literature as anything that we are more familiar with.” Britain stands to gain from recognizing this cultural wealth, Levy observed. “Where else in the world would this particular grouping of writers have any meaning?”
Whereas Levy’s earlier novels were quasi- autobiographical coming-of-age narratives, Small Island, her fourth book, represents a much more ambitious project of remembering. It is an historical novel that for the first time in Levy’s oeuvre offers an account from the point of view of both the white and the black British of a decisive period in England’s history: the moment when the children of the Empire came “home” to the mother country. By juxtaposing the past and the present lives of two couples, one Jamaican and one white English, Levy’s narrative unfolds an elegant and meticulous layering of observed detail, authentic voices, and social observation, re-creating the social fabric of the 1940s, its conflicts, its racist attitudes, and some of its victories. As she told Hickman in February 2004, England, like Levy herself, possesses “this wonderfully rich heritage which I would like more people to understand and acknowledge.”
The novel examines that heritage from all sides, with roughly the same number of chapters for each of the four protagonists: Queenie and Bernard Bligh, Hortense and Gilbert Joseph. Each chapter expresses one character’s thoughts and recollections in an easily distinguishable first-person voice. Although Levy chose to name each chapter after its narrator, the speakers are easily identifiable without resorting to that device since their voices are distinctive and convincingly their own. Readers will follow significant personal and public events and turning points from each character’s point of view, and the web of relationships is more complex than merely ancestral. Levy conveys, for example, how Queenie, the working-class Midlands girl to whom readers are introduced in the prologue, shares with the Jamaican Hortense comparable aspirations to improve herself by moving to London.
The two couples discover that the Empire has forged for them a common destiny, but readers only realize at the end of the novel what that destiny entails. According to reviewer Greer in “Empire’s Child,” family is both theme and metaphor in Levy’s novel–“the story of the Jamaican family in London, and the metaphor of Empire, the Big Family, which turns out to be a betrayer and, in some cases, destroyer.” What brings the two couples together is sheer fate, but the compelling erotic forces that unite them redefine British identity and history forever. In his review in The Guardian on 14 February 2004, Mike Phillips wrote, “If ever there was a novel which offered a historically faithful account of how its characters thought and behaved, this is it.” Levy recalls long days spent in the Royal Air Force Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and local community center archives. “The novel took four and a half years to research,” she told her audience at the Museum of London on 14 July 2004. “Some of the best research,” she added, “was talking to the people who lived through the time.” In his review, Phillips emphasizes Levy’s authentic “grip” on the idiom of the characters: “Queenie sounds like a Londoner brought up in the early part of the last century. Bernard sounds like a man who served in the Far East.” The rhythms and substance of Hortense’s and Gilbert’s words are no concocted Caribbean patois, Phillips notes, but finely calibrated speech patterns that indicate their different backgrounds, educational experiences, and shifting concerns.
Gilbert Joseph is one of the six thousand West Indians who volunteered for the Royal Air Force, serving as a driver rather than the pilot he imagined he would become. At the Museum of London, Levy read what she called “Gilbert’s rant on the mother country” to underscore the disappointment such volunteers felt about not being welcome:
Then one day you hear Mother calling–she is troubled, she need your help. Your mummy, your daddy say go. Leave home, leave familiar, leave love. Travel seas with waves that swell about you as substantial as concrete buildings. Shiver, tire, hunger–for no sacrifice is too much to see you at Mother’s needy side. This surely is adventure. After all you have heard, can you imagine, can you believe, soon, soon you will meet Mother?
The filthy tramp that eventually greets you is she. Ragged, old and dusty as the long dead. Mother has a blackened eye, bad breath and one lone tooth that waves in her head when she speaks. Can this be that fabled relation you heard so much of? This twisted-crooked weary woman. This stinking cantankerous hag. She offers you no comfort after your journey. No smile. No welcome. Yet, she looks down at you through lordly eyes and says, ‘Who the bloody hell are you?’
About the ending of Small Island Levy wants readers to reflect, “Is that the country we want to live in? Is that how we want to live?” (talk Levy gave at the Museum of London, 14 July 2004). The whole novel is designed in such a way as to raise cultural concerns, rather than allay them. She does not want her readers to come away with only the feeling that her characters somehow made the right choices.
Levy chooses realist conventions because of her faith in the power of representation and her belief that a writer who represents reality is more likely to inspire ways to change it. In the unpublished interview with Lima, Levy explained, “I write because I would like to change the world. I wasn’t a great reader until I discovered storytelling. For me it is about wanting change. I don’t say that all writers have to do that–that all writing should do that.” She added that no essay she ever read was so powerful an agent for change as a James Baldwin story.
Small Island earned the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2004 Whitbread Novel-of-the-Year Award, the 2005 Commonwealth Best Book/Eurasia Region, the 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and the 2005 “Orange of Oranges” Prize. It became an internationally acclaimed best-seller, widely reviewed in the world’s English-language periodicals.
Although Levy has always been reluctant to tell interviewers what her next book will be about, she has often mentioned that she is considering writing a book that has nothing to do with being black. In more than one interview she has mentioned that she would like to write a book about growing older, without racial markers. “When I think of not writing about black, I’m not saying, write about white. I’m not saying I’m going to write about being white. I’m not talking of writing from a white perspective–I couldn’t. I’m thinking about writing about aging. I don’t mention the race of anybody” (Lima interview, 5 March 2002).
Andrea Levy writes, she insists, not just for the black community but for everyone. She has made it her mission to counter all sorts of racial and cultural stereotypes by delving deeper into personal history and forgotten stories. Because she was annoyed by the conventional notion that to count as a “black author” a writer has to write a certain way and for a chiefly black audience, she raised the standard against confining marketplace expectations and pernicious clichés. Her literary successes show that readers respond positively to her creative project. “That’s why I’m still on that mission–I hope,” she says, maintaining that “you can write about anything you would like, and you are still a black British writer because you are a black British person” (Lima interview, 5 March 2002). She lives in north London in a rambling Edwardian house, where she graciously and gregariously welcomes fellow writers who wish to interview her. When she is writing, however, she accepts no speaking engagements and withdraws to her book-lined study to work. On 7 July 2006 she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, Middlesex University, for her literary and humanitarian achievements.
Ellen
My class — or at least I – have gotten up to the last novel of the term. It’s just wonderful, superb; unlike _Namesake_, Levy brings in money, class, and the real shocks and obstacles of prejudice, the real harm done within that is not theoretical and individual. I’ve written about this novel before and also the effective movie. It’s a woman’s film as all connected in charge are women but John Alexander and his great films include the 2008 _S&S_.
For those interested in _Gone with the Wind_ I don’t know if I ever talked about how at the close of the film when our white working class heroine, Queenie, gives birth to her child, by our black philandering hero, Michael Roberts, with Hortense Roberts, his cousin in attendance, the two make funny ironic allusions to the famous scene in GWTW where Scarlet and Prissy have to help Melanie give birth, with comments like (from Hortense) “this is not _Gone with the Wind_ you know, and (from Queenie): “whoever said it was?”
Ellen
I’d like to note that the job Gilbert Joseph gets is a gov’t job; so too Winston. Only the gov’t would hire them. Both my parents and Jim’s parents (white, lower middle and working class) had gov’t jobs; it was the best offer they ever got. Jim has supported us all our lives with a gov’t job and then a jov’t pension. Izzy now has a gov’t job. Ugly prejudice against gov’t jobs because the human impulse to exclusion makes them called easy jobs; they are no easier than any other in a large organization.
We need to tax the wealthy and corportions, use that money to expand social services for all and hire people to do the jobs in these. This is the way prosperity for all is achieved through peaceful means.
E.M.
what is the chronological order of this book’s chapters?
There’s a sort of hidden revenge going on here. I said I often did see an animus against working class whites in books by Afro- people, sometimes spiteful and through caricature (Jhumpa Lahiri); this was not at all the way in this novel until the very last scene, which I suspect could also be attacked at (not meaning to but) reinforcing racial separation (against say adoption of black childen by whites or any ethnic/racial child of one haplogroup by parents of another haplogroup).
Do you suspect if past encounters with hostile working class whites may have led to this attitude in their novels?