“I am the bastard child of the Empire”: Women and Hybrid Identity in Andrea Levy’s Fiction

Abstract

In the novels published in the course of the nineties, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996), and Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Andrea Levy (1956–2019), a British writer of Jamaican origin, focuses on the experiences of British-born daughters of first-generation Caribbean immigrants in Britain. This paper will examine how Levy’s young protagonists struggle to come to terms with their highly hybridized identities, which resist reductive racial categories of ‘white’ and ‘black.’ Experiencing racial bias on the one hand and confronting silences about their Jamaican heritage on the other, Levy’s protagonists often find themselves in liminal spaces and are constantly compelled to negotiate private (Jamaican) and more public (British) spheres of existence.Keywords: Andrea Levy, Stuart Hall, womanhood, British, hybridity, identityIn Jackie Kay’s 1984 poem “So You Think I Am a Mule,” the lyric speaker is an unapologetic mixed-race woman. She responds very assertively to the questions of a baffled white Scottish woman who has a hard time believing that her interlocutor identifies herself both as black and Scottish. Refusing to be put down with racially coded language which tries to determine her “true origins,” questions the “purity” of her skin and labels her a “mulatto,” the female lyric speaker (taken to be Kay’s alter ego as the writer was born to a white Scottish mother and a black Nigerian father) proudly and unashamedly aligns herself with blackness and her “black sisters” (“So You Think”). The poem, written in the form of a dialogue, also functions as a strong backlash against Britain, which shows racial bias toward non-white Brits at the end of the twentieth century.