"Reclaiming Reality through Art: Andrea Levy's Narratives of Identity"

This essay examines the novels of Andrea Levy, one of the more remarkable figures in the contemporary Black British literary landscape, in order to illustrate the restorative and healing power that can be exercised by the creative word in redefining identity and affirming a sense of belonging. The work of Levy epitomizes in artistic terms the effort on the part of black diasporic subjects to readjust their lives and identities in the very heart of the old Empire, in a society that has been radically transformed by mass migrations and the processes of hybridization they inevitably entail, but that is still resistant to a new world order reflecting these realities. The essay shows how Levy uses her creative activity as a writer to give voice to silenced histories, making possible that understanding of the past which is essential to the reknitting of fractured identities and to bringing about mutual acceptance and effective reconciliation in society. The five novels written by Levy since the 1990s—spanning the history of black Jamaicans in Britain from the period of the slave trade, through the deracinated Windrush generation, to those in today’s society suffering more subtle forms of uprootedness and exile—weave a vast canvas in which the different strands of a “common” past are interwoven. This is a project that disrupts schematic presuppositions inherited from the past and tends to foster partnership relationships based on mutual understanding and sharing. The hybridized, composite and shifting identities of the characters populating Levy’s novels, constantly repositioned by the interplay between historical, social, political and personal forces, foreground the urgency of moving beyond the boundaries of original monolithic subjectivities in order to articulate identity within a dialectics of cultural difference, and of rethinking abused and outworn categories of belonging. In Levy’s novels art establishes itself as a space of negotiation where different cultural discourses are able to interact, shaping a new sense of community in which everyone can find their place and feel fully “at home” not despite but thanks to their multiple, hybrid and liquid identities.