Abstract
This paper argues that V.S. Naipaul and Andrea Levy revise migrancy as a literary intervention into contemporary British discourses of cultural heritage and patriotism. Official, state-sponsored constructions of heritage and patriotism are closely intertwined to form an insular British national identity. In Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1998), migrancy not only denotes the deterritorialization and displacement of people but also the travel and transformation of ideas, or what Edward Said calls travelling theory. The concept of migrancy itself travels in the journeys undertaken by the narrators of these two novels. It gains a critical force that contests the insularity of British heritage discourse while also affirming the intersecting and ineluctable presence of people of colour from Britain’s former colonies in the history and cultural make-up of Britain itself.
Introduction
Contrary to celebrations of the postcolonial writer as a displaced migrant who has a detached, fluid intellectual and cultural subjectivity in our globalized world, I argue that V.S. Naipaul and Andrea Levy revise migrancy as a literary intervention into contemporary British discourses of cultural heritage and patriotism. Official, state-sponsored constructions of heritage and patriotism are often closely intertwined to form an insular British national identity. In Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1998), migrancy not only denotes the deterritorialization and displacement of people but also the travel and transformation of ideas, or what Edward Said calls travelling theory. Migration and the figure of the migrant have become exemplary and problematic tropes in postcolonial literatures, representing the experience of displacement from one’s homeland and a corresponding attempt at acculturation and assimilation into a new country. As the concept of migrancy itself travels in the journeys undertaken by Naipaul’s autobiographical narrator and Levy’s protagonist Faith Jackson, it gains a critical force that contests the insularity of British heritage discourse while also affirming the intersecting and ineluctable presence of people of colour from Britain’s former colonies in the history and cultural make-up of Britain itself, an enduring presence that conservative versions of British heritage would refute and deny.
I suggest that Naipaul’s and Levy’s novels are post-heritage narratives that combine thematic and formal characteristics identified by Rebecca Walkowitz in her analysis of the “post-consensus novel” (2009: 223), but with a specific emphasis on evoking and contesting representations of national heritage and locations associated with such heritage. The post-consensus novel emerged after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 and abolished the post-Second World War political climate of consensus on social welfare and economic issues between the British government and its populace. It consists of three “microgenres”: “the novel of minority culture; the novel of multiculturalism; and the novel of transnational comparison” (Walkowitz, 2009: 223). The first genre focuses on a political resistance towards racism and segregation of minority groups in Britain; the second on the ambivalent character of cultural and social intermixing; and the third shows “a respect for localized cultural and historical differences with an understanding of transnational interdependence and affiliation” (Walkowitz, 2009: 237).
While I agree with this tripartite, generic delineation of the post-consensus novel, I suggest that the Thatcher government’s increased attention to national heritage (particularly of the rural landscape) signified in the 1980 and 1983 Heritage Acts also occasioned a literary response by postcolonial and black British writers. The post-heritage narrative combines important attributes of the three post-consensus genres but is framed through the overarching discourse of national heritage. As a counterpoint to heritage discourse, it offers a migrant or transnational perspective that illuminates the fetishization of such heritage and the essentialist and racist assumptions underlying the heritage industry. My critique offers the opportunity for imagining new collectivities or reimagining existing ones in Britain. To put this another way, over the course of Naipaul’s and Levy’s novels the loss and displacement associated with migration travels and is transformed into the attachment and affiliation of dwelling, because “specific modes of travel … are in themselves markers of dwelling” (Procter, 2003: 15) that offer a sense of belonging without necessarily reinforcing the exclusiveness of national identity.
National heritage, travelling theory, and migrancy
Naipaul and Levy reconceptualize migrancy into a mode of dwelling, treating Britain as a national space rather than a culturally essentialist and racializing national identity constructed by a resurgent heritage industry. Their reconceptualization accords with Edward Said’s discussion of how concepts or ideas transform as they travel from one situation to another. This is central to our understanding of the post-heritage narrative’s critique of national heritage that is often presented in immutable and eternal terms. The revival of national heritage in the 1980s through the 1980 National Heritage Act was one example of a “revitalisation [that] mutated into a Thatcherite version of heritage … making prestige more available, something to be sought after and competed for rather than inherited” (Littler, 2005: 3). In this essay I am less concerned with details of the heritage debates themselves − which have been thoroughly discussed elsewhere in works such as The Heritage Industry (Hewison, 1987), Enterprise and Heritage (Corner and Harvey, 1991), and Representing the Nation (Boswell and Evans, 1999) − and more interested in literary interventions in heritage discourse and the role heritage plays in constructing a nostalgic and an insular national identity. As Salman Rushdie observes, films like David Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) and those which adapted novels about the British Raj, such as David Lean’s reworking of Forster’s A Passage to India (1984), were the mass media components of a patriotic resurgence encouraged by Margaret Thatcher’s administration to get “Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence” (1992b: 92). The 1980s and 1990s saw a marked increase in the number of films and novels taking part in the revival of British heritage that was “interested in not just preserving or restoring aspects and images of the past but reorienting their (re)production and consumption”, and “tapping into a Thatcherite agenda that advocated the sharp return to hierarchical Victorian/Edwardian values and a reverse of the radical social changes associated with the 1960s and 1970s” (Childs, 2005: 212), which took shape as films and popular novels increasingly repackaged nostalgic accounts of nineteenth-century Britain. Hand in glove with this heritage revival was an emphasis on patriotic spirit, embodied in a key celebratory speech by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher shortly after Britain’s victory during the 1982 Falklands War. Thatcher defied her detractors who felt that Britain’s “decline was irreversible” and it “was no longer the nation that had built an Empire and ruled a quarter of the world”, whereas “[t]he lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history” (Thatcher, 1982: np).
As post-heritage narratives, Naipaul’s and Levy’s novels take issue with the heritage industry’s nostalgic representation of Britain’s past and Thatcher’s narrative of national decline and resurgent patriotism, especially the ways in which “the countryside was … projected as a secure, nostalgic site infused with cultural and racial sanctity to buttress the influence of immigrants from the old empire” (Loh, 2010: 96). They take up the challenge issued by Stuart Hall to re-examine the official rubrics of heritage and re-define it to address the various histories of colonialism, migration, and mixing occurring within Britain’s geographical boundaries. If heritage “becomes the material embodiment of the spirit of the nation” and “a collective representation of the British version of tradition” (Hall, 2005: 23-4, original emphasis), then post-heritage narratives must “demand that the majority, mainstream versions of the Heritage should revise their own self-conceptions and rewrite the margins into the centre” (2005: 31). In writing post-heritage narratives, Naipaul and Levy do not simply throw out the idea of heritage or tradition (a move that would only add fuel to the exclusionary argument that writers from the former colonies simply do not “belong” to Britain because they do not value the past) but reconceptualize migrancy and emplacement, or the histories of “us” and “them”, as mutually implicated and entailing each other.
These mutually implicated histories remind us of the “affiliations” (Said, 2000: 452), or intellectual and moral connections existing between two cultures and societies formerly imbricated in colonial power structures, rather than a filiative mode of belonging to and rootedness in one culture. When migrancy is understood as a travelling theory, it becomes less a celebration about the translational newness of migrant or minority discourse or a general condition of modernity in a globalized world, and more a critical treatment of the imbricated and dialogical relationship between socio-cultural discourses of displacement and dwelling, movement, and settlement. The celebratory aspect of migrancy has become generalized, in part due to the work of postcolonial cultural critics like Homi Bhabha, as the exemplary subject position of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Bhabha, 1994; Smith, 2009). This results in a condition of “energized migrancy” (Boehmer, 2005: 226), in which the migrant is valorized over and above the local and the nation, and is often used to conflate “exiles, emigrants, immigrants, and refugees” under one rubric (Ha, 2008: ix) without regard for their different circumstances. Consequently, migration and displacement have come under scrutiny by scholars who insist on a need “to inquire into the ideological functions of metaphors in discourses of displacement” (Kaplan, 1996: 26), or to rethink migrancy as a dialogical or dialectical process imbricated with dwelling (Moslund, 2010), or as “migrant form”, a mode of cultural expression and literary style rather than a desirable subject position (Majumdar, 2010).
These critical approaches implicitly revise the concept of migrancy as a travelling theory. Anticipating James Clifford’s analysis of travelling cultures and his ethnographic emphasis on routes rather than roots (Clifford, 1997), Edward Said elucidates travelling theory not just as a theory of travel and movement, but as an idea or concept that has travelled or moved out of an (often imputed) origin and changed according to the different circumstances in which it is taken up. Such movement does not weaken but can strengthen and refine the critical edge of the original theory. Said develops this through a discussion of how Georg Lukács’s theory of reification is taken out of its “insurrectionary role” (1983b: 235) in Hungary and then adapted by Lukács’s students Lucien Goldmann in France and Raymond Williams in Britain. In other words, “once an idea gains currency because it is clearly effective and powerful, there is every likelihood that during its peregrinations it will be reduced, codified, and institutionalized” (1983b: 239). Theory should not be thought of as an intellectual blanket that covers diverse and unrelated locations and situations through a homogenizing system; instead, it must travel from one location to another and “[t] his movement suggests the possibility of actively different locales, sites, situations for theory, without facile universalism or over-general totalizing” (Said, 2000: 452).
Understood as a travelling theory, migrancy is reconceptualized beyond a figure of the postcolonial migrant who is culturally invested in the “Third World” but otherwise cosmopolitan in personality and politics and working in the affluent societies of the First World. By tracing how the experience of migration itself is problematized and pushed beyond the confines of filiative identity in the work of V.S. Naipaul and Andrea Levy, I argue that these two writers transform the migrant Caribbean experience often presented as exoticized difference into a cultural critique of late twentieth-century Britain’s patriotic narratives of cultural heritage and traditional greatness. This is what Said means when he says that travelling theory helps us distinguish a theoretical concept such as migration “from critical consciousness”, in which “the latter is a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory” (1983b: 241). This critical consciousness arises not from a direct contradiction to the original theory, but is rather an “awareness of the resistances to theory, reactions to it elicited by those concrete experiences or interpretations with which it is in conflict” (Said, 1983b: 242). Focusing on the concrete experience of government-sponsored immigration from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia after the Second World War that created “a new Empire, a new community of subject people” in Britain itself (Rushdie, 1992a: 130), Salman Rushdie recalls how being thought of as an “immigrant” in Britain in the 1980s was to be considered part of a “problem”, a socio-cultural discourse in which “racist concepts have been allowed to seize the central ground” such that only people of colour are marginalized under the category of “immigrant”, whereas white- or light-skinned people from other countries are warmly welcomed by British authorities without prejudice (1992a: 132). The British government encouraged migrants from its former colonial dominions to come to its shores, but subsequently broke faith with them, choosing instead to deal with these immigrants and their British-born descendants by reviving the colonial ideology of “the White Man’s Burden” (Rushdie, 1992a:130).
Given these historical and cultural circumstances, it is no wonder that both Naipaul and Levy are hesitant to celebrate migration or the figure of the migrant, choosing instead to interrogate and transform this trope and challenge its prejudicial associations. This does not mean that Naipaul and Levy completely eschew or deny their Caribbean backgrounds in favour of a new-found British identity; on the contrary, it is precisely because of their affiliative connections with both the Caribbean and Britain that they are able to mount a critique of post-imperial British culture and society. Both The Enigma of Arrival and Fruit of the Lemon are post-heritage narratives as both begin with an important instance of migration to Britain (Naipaul’s narrator moves from Trinidad to London and later the Wiltshire countryside; Faith Jackson learns from her parents that they came to Britain from Jamaica on a banana boat), but as the novels unfold migrancy is critically unpacked and transformed within the concrete experience and interpretations of cultural politics of national identity and national heritage in late twentieth-century Britain.
In other words, the energized migrancy that characterizes postcolonial literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries travels and changes into a form of dwelling in Naipaul’s and Levy’s post-heritage narratives. Migrancy is now energized in a critical fashion, by travelling as a theory out of the margins into the centre, not to inaugurate a new centre and subjectivity, but to expand and extend the notions of belonging and dwelling to those who have been previously excluded. This does not mean that migration is superseded or rejected by these writers. Instead, the deterritorialized subjectivity often ascribed to the migrant is reimagined as a critical connection to a range of geographical and cultural locations that can be found both within and across national boundaries. Although V.S. Naipaul wrote The Enigma of Arrival towards the end of Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and Levy’s novel was published during Tony Blair’s premiership, that both novels are set in the 1980s during which the heritage industry was flourishing suggests the persistence of a British national identity enshrined in romanticized country spaces and ideals of cultural traditions. Certainly, both writers’ critiques are inflected differently: Naipaul, as a first-generation postcolonial subject, desires acculturation into the Wiltshire countryside but cannot avoid detecting a disturbing undercurrent of patriotic subservience and vanity beneath the picturesque countryside steeped in heritage and tradition. In contrast, Levy identifies as a black British woman writer, juxtaposing the British and Jamaican countrysides and the family histories of her characters as she transforms the liminal space of migrancy into the affiliative places of dwelling. What they share is a reconceptualization of a deterritorialized, migrant perspective into an emplaced sense of dwelling that critiques the resurgent cultural nationalism and racial discrimination informing the national heritage industry; they do so through a critical examination of the countryside itself and the corresponding narratives of nostalgia and national greatness attached to rural heritage.
Dangerous obedience and new vanity: V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival
The Enigma of Arrival has often been read as Naipaul’s autobiography, but in the first edition of the book Naipaul subtitles it “a novel in five sections” (1987). 1 Unlike Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon, where the voice of Faith’s first-person voice is gradually circumscribed, The Enigma of Arrival is focalized consistently through Naipaul’s narrator. It begins with this narrator’s life in a cottage on a large English countryside estate and its various inhabitants; the second part of the novel traces the narrator’s journey from Trinidad to Britain by way of the USA and his increasingly illustrious career as a novelist and travel writer who sojourns in Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean; the novel concludes with his return to Trinidad to attend his sister’s funeral performed according to traditional Hindu rites. Although Naipaul’s writing is often regarded as expressing “colonial nostalgia” for “the idealized imperial England of his imaginings” (Nixon, 1992: 36, 37), The Enigma of Arrival contains a more complex and nuanced treatment of England, Trinidad (Naipaul’s home country), and post-imperial melancholy. While other critics correctly point out that Naipaul’s “self-interrogation” ultimately “repeats a late romantic ideology of the isolated, self-made author” (Nixon, 1992: 162), and that he “exemplifies the cultural dislocation which” is “a product of his colonial background” (Hayward, 1997: 63), no scholar has seriously considered the possibility that, even though The Enigma of Arrival does not condemn British imperialism, it can be critical of a resurgent British patriotism during Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister and in the aftermath of the 1982 Falklands War between Britain and Argentina. As a post-heritage narrative, Naipaul’s transformation of migrancy is more affiliated with a tradition of black and Asian British writing, in which “the lack of a single ethnic or national identity produces a creative tension and interaction” (Innes, 2008: 4) between discourses of displacement and dwelling, and less expressive of assimilated, Anglicized snobbishness.
In The Enigma of Arrival, the dialogical relationship between Naipaul’s positioning of his narrator and protagonist as a migrant who has arrived belatedly in Britain and the Wiltshire countryside, and the sense of dwelling he develops as he observes the social relationships in this rural landscape apparently steeped in tradition and heritage illuminates a spatial sense that serves as a measuring faculty and critical consciousness. At first glance, the narrator seems to register the nostalgia for a bygone culture and tradition that is consonant with the discourse of national heritage, as he sees in the Wiltshire countryside “water meadows that were like the water meadows [Romantic painter John] Constable had painted one hundred and fifty years before”, such that “[t]he past was like something one could stretch out and reach; it was like something physically before one, like something one could walk in” (170). However, in spite of this invocation of the “authentic” past concretized in the water meadows, the book the narrator reads about the history of Wiltshire “seemed new, contemporary”, like the river that runs through his landlord’s estate. Furthermore, even as he recognizes that Romantic painters like Constable “had imposed their vision on an old landscape”, nonetheless “on their vision was imposed something else now, a modern picturesque” (170). Naipaul’s post-heritage critique highlights traces of a modern repackaging of the pastoral underneath an apparently affirmative description of rural heritage. Through the narrator’s long walks in the storied past of Wiltshire, his identity as a migrant from Trinidad enters a creative tension with his sense of being a writer whose vocation is to write in and about Britain.
When Naipaul focuses on the military presence in the seemingly bucolic Wiltshire countryside, his critique of a resurgent British patriotism becomes more pointed, an aspect that has gone unremarked in most discussions of The Enigma of Arrival. In the first chapter of the novel Naipaul observes but does not dwell on the presence of a nearby artillery school and the bright-coloured targets they use for firing practice: “This was the viewing point for Stonehenge: far away, small, not as easy to see as the luminous red or orange targets of the army firing ranges” (14). Despite the “luminous” colours of these artillery targets, at this early point in his countryside residence Naipaul instead focuses on the grandeur of the ruins of Stonehenge and on “the idea of emptiness” around him, even though when he “looked down at Stonehenge, [he] also saw the firing ranges of Salisbury Plain and the many little neat houses of West Amesbury” (15).
The narrator’s consciousness in this first chapter is that of an immigrant from Trinidad who received a strong colonial education in English literature, for his sense of emptiness is given substance by “the idea of literature” that “enveloped this world”, bestowing upon him “a lucky find of solitude” even though the path he takes for his country walks is “surrounded by highways and army barracks” and “the vapour trails of busy military aeroplanes” in the sky above Wiltshire (24). As other critics have noted, Naipaul’s narrator views the rural landscape with “the literary eye, or with the aid of literature” (22), but the military presence, I argue, begins to disturb and trouble his literary vision of the land. After the death of his friend Jack, described as “a remnant of the past” who had been “accidentally preserved from people, traffic, and the military” (19, 20), he can no longer blithely ignore the presence of military aircraft and personnel. Standing on the site of a pre-medieval site, the narrator tries to revisit “the very ground” and “the same weather” of the people who lived there ages before him, but he finds it impossible, because these are “not now the same dawns or sunsets”, and there are “always the vapour trails of aircraft” (49, 50). Furthermore, Naipaul’s narrator, at this later point in the chapter, once more goes to “the viewing point in the windbreak on the hill” from where “you could see Stonehenge”, and this time even though he avers that Amesbury is “an old place”, he realizes that it is “now a military town, with little modern houses and shops and garages” (50). Naipaul’s literary eye begins to recognize with understated dismay that, with events “like a fair or open day there when, in the presence of the families of the soldiers, guns were fired off” (24), his idealized rural landscape and the people he imagines as organic emanations of the literary and cultural traditions are both marked by military use and communities centred around the army artillery school.
The militaristic organization of space also affects the social hierarchy characteristic of the Wiltshire denizens, especially in the country estate where Naipaul lives. Pitton, the estate gardener, is fired towards the end of the novel. Despite being a gardener, Pitton is “a man of fashion” who dresses in a “three-piece suit” with “extraordinary neatness” (207). Naipaul reckons that since Pitton had previously served in the army, his “style was modelled on that of a superior” officer (208), and the man’s son is also training at the local artillery school. Naipaul’s critique of the martial bent of the countryside community becomes clear when he observes that Pitton’s son “was being trained as a killer soldier, the new-style British soldier” (210). Both father and son share a “quality of obedience” to authority, but Pitton Senior’s vanity in dressing up in a three-piece suit becomes something more threatening in his son, encapsulating “the dangerous obedience, the new vanity, of the soldier” (211). However, this quality of obedience in both father and son is not rewarded, for the estate’s landlord eventually fires Pitton because he and his house “were costing money” (242).
Because the manor house “constitutes a key symbol of imperial confidence and power and of their decay”, and “the social organization of the manor is seen as subject to increasing disruption” (Hayward, 1997: 57) by the arrival of a former colonial subject like Naipaul, his critique of British militarism and patriotism underscores an increasing disruption of the dominant social order during the 1980s’ “philosophy of ‘independence’” that sought to “foster moral strength and character” and “revitalise the family and self-discipline” (Laybourn and Collette, 2003: 7-8). Reading Naipaul’s novel as a critical assessment of Thatcher’s exhortation that Britain is “ceas[ing] to be a nation in retreat” (Thatcher, 1982: np) reveals a desperate attempt to overcome this national melancholy by staging a show of renascent imperial military might and sterling qualities of empire-building, instead of confronting the difficult reality of the arrival of postcolonial migrants to Britain’s shores. Naipaul is able to mount this critique by transforming his migrant experience into a critical consciousness regarding British culture and society by placing it in dialogue with his sense of dwelling in Britain. His narrator, reflecting on the “accidents” of history that have brought him to Wiltshire, concludes that:
[t]he migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own, and a particular kind of education. This had partly seeded my wish to be a writer in a particular mode, and had committed me to the literary career I had been following in England for twenty years. (52-3)
Through his narrator’s comments, we see that Naipaul’s skilful possession of the English language comes from the migration of his family from one colony to another, rather than from a direct connection with the former imperial centre of Britain itself. Furthermore, his migration plants the seed of his ambition to be a writer in British soil, leading him to follow this “career” − a term carrying both the sense of a vocation and also a physical trajectory − in Britain itself. The literary eye Naipaul’s narrator uses to gaze upon the Wiltshire landscape takes on a different cast if one takes this into consideration. The novel’s “melancholy pleasure at the picturesque qualities of ruins” combined “with a sense of sadness that things are in a state of decline” (Hayward, 1997: 53) can now be understood as part of the trajectory of Naipaul’s self-fashioned literary career, and it concludes with a realization that “philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories” (335).
My point here is that over the course of The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul transforms the migrant’s desire to arrive in and assimilate with Britain into a critical consciousness centred on a spatial reckoning of militarism and patriotism occurring in the Wiltshire landscape. His description of land as an active and a vibrant entity “touched by our moods and memories” departs from the spirit of the heritage industry’s repackaging of the countryside as “a projection of national pride and identity” (Loh, 2010: 96) and is more inclined towards James Procter’s understanding of “the national landscape of Britain” as being “more than simply a nodal location within a global matrix of travel” and as “a dwelling place that has been home to a ‘sedentary’ black British experience” (2003: 15). Naipaul’s affiliative connections to India, Trinidad, and finally Britain offer him familiarity with colonial servitude on a plantation and help him scrutinize the dangerous obedience and deference to authority by characters like Pitton the gardener, as well as the British public during the heyday of the patriotic rhetoric of Thatcherism. While Naipaul’s refusal to identify or claim solidarity with other immigrant writers of his generation like George Lamming or Sam Selvon might reinforce his reputation as “a mandarin and an institution” (Nixon, 1992: 5) who ridicules and belittles the Third World at the expense of the First, this image of the assimilated Anglicized writer can be complicated by an understanding of the “concrete experiences or interpretations” of British cultural nationalism (Said, 1983b: 242) with which The Enigma of Arrival is in conflict and upon which it throws a critical light.
Bully boys and bastard children: Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon
While Naipaul’s novel achieves its critical force by dwelling on the dissonance between the Romanticist veneer of the heritage industry’s gloss of the Wiltshire countryside and the vain, subservient social relations that exist in its social hierarchy, his perspective is nonetheless that of a first-generation immigrant writer who views Britain primarily with “a literary eye” (18). Andrea Levy’s protagonist Faith Jackson, on the other hand, negotiates the tension between displacement and dwelling as a second-generation Jamaican British woman who has first-hand experience of racial discrimination that is closely tied to the patriotic nationalism critiqued by Naipaul. Faith is the narrator of Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon (1999), 2 and at the beginning of the novel she has been hired by the British Broadcasting Corporation’s costume department. Faith experiences persistent racial discrimination at her workplace and from her friends, and finally witnesses a hate crime perpetrated by the right-wing National Front against a young black woman. This precipitates Faith’s nervous breakdown, and her parents send her on a trip to Jamaica to visit her relatives, during which she discovers her family’s past, the intertwined historical and cultural relationships between Jamaica and Britain, and a renewed sense of her subjectivity as a black British woman. This narrative of growth and development shows how one version of the immigrant’s story − arrival, acculturation, and finally assimilation into British mainstream society and culture − that Faith’s parents try to achieve for themselves and their daughter is unsuccessful and, indeed, leads to Faith’s inability to confront and resist racism.
Levy does not reject migrancy outright but transforms this concept through Faith’s experiences of racism and sojourns in the British and Jamaican countryside, both of which impress upon her two different versions of heritage and history. Faith’s movement and journeying is a form of travelling theory that reimagines her filiative networks of relatives and ancestors into an affiliative, critical connection with Britain against the dominant atmosphere of ethnic nationalism and racial prejudice. This racial prejudice occurs at both social and political levels towards immigrants and black and Asian Britons since 1945, and its connection to an ethnic nationalist vision of Britain as a primarily “white” or “Anglo” nation has been extensively documented and researched elsewhere (Goulbourne, 1991; Solomos, 2003). Levy’s novel undoubtedly challenges this vision of Britain. As other critics have argued, the novel emphasizes “the significance of places in identity formation, and the function of homeland and motherland for the translated hybrid identities” (Toplu, 2005: np). Furthermore, “Faith is inserted into a travelling community, the migrant generation of her parents, via the acquisition of a family history, a web of relationality” (Saez, 2006: np). However, what has not been emphasized is Levy’s interrogation of the racialized embodiment of British identity through its symbolic representations and national heritage. First, the novel alludes to two important incidents in the history of British race relations: the infamous 1968 “rivers of blood” speech by Enoch Powell, and the 1993 death of Stephen Lawrence, whose murder was one among many hate crimes that revealed the rising violence against people of colour and the institutional racism of the police and other state authorities. Second, as a post-heritage narrative Fruit of the Lemon offers contesting representations of the British and Jamaican countrysides that refute the selective definition of national heritage in Britain and insist upon the imbricated histories of both nations and peoples.
Faith Jackson is, at the beginning of the novel, oblivious to any racial discrimination because her first-generation immigrant parents from Jamaica, Mildred and Wade, raised her to assimilate into mainstream British society. They look to Britain as the “Mother Country” (6), and imagine that the fireworks when they arrive on Guy Fawkes’ Night are a special “welcome” for “having come so far and England needing [them]” (8). Mildred becomes a nurse and Wade starts his own interior painting and decorating company, neatly fitting into professional niches most often occupied by Caribbean immigrants. They save enough money to buy a house, which they celebrate as the culmination of their migration: “when Mildred and Wade closed the door of their house for the first time, they both hung their heads and shut their eyes in prayer. ‘We finally arrive home’, they said” (11). This ambition to arrive and make a comfortable home leads Mildred to inculcate similar habits in her daughter Faith. After Faith learns that the BBC does not hire black women dressers, Mildred responds to this workplace discrimination by telling Faith “to take no notice of their foolishness”, and Faith “could feel her mentally combing at [her] ‘too long and a little fuzzy’ hair, straightening it, cutting it short, neat … dressing [her] in a knee-length skirt with a nice white button-up cardigan and placing a copy of the New Testament in [her] hand” so that Faith would be a shining example of a girl who is “respectable”, “from a good home”, and “educated” (73). Faith, in turn, wishes her brother Carl would behave in a similarly respectable manner; on their way to buy a car from a white woman in the suburbs, Faith notices “Carl slouching…with a surly look on his face” and “wanted to be able to say to Carl, ‘Stand up straight, take your hands out of your pockets, nah. And smile when the lady comes to the door. Don’t give her big lip ’” (58). Faith, at the beginning of the novel, has been interpellated by an ideology of migration that replaces the apparently “fusty provinciality” (Boehmer, 2005: 229) of Jamaica for the metropolitan respectability of Britain.
However, cracks begin to appear in the veneer of Faith’s assimilative desires as she realizes the racial discrimination that the white majority in Britain holds against her. Faith’s good friend Marion comes from a working-class British family, and Marion’s sister and father use racist slurs such as “wog”, “darkie”, and “coon” (83, 84) in Faith’s presence despite being aware of her Jamaican background. Marion explains her family’s prejudice as “a cultural thing” (93), but this only alienates Faith further because, following Marion’s line of reasoning, the British culture she and her own family have tried so hard to fit into ultimately demeans and excludes someone like her. This exclusion is further underscored when Faith visits her friend Simon’s family in the countryside: they live in a village that is “[q]uintessentially English” (115) and looks to Faith like a “model village [that] was a reconstruction of how England used to be”, with “[t]he village green with perfect lush grass sitting in dappled light, little thatched houses with windows and doors that looked too small, the pub, the post office, and the steepled church surrounded by yew trees and teetering grey gravestones” (116). Like Marion’s family, Simon’s family home seems deeply rooted in the national landscape and culture, with numerous portraits of Simon’s ancestors, “old furniture passed down from generation to generation”, and the British royal family tree “carefully plotted along one wall” (121, 122). Faith is welcomed by Simon’s immediate family, but she is treated coldly by various passersby on her country walk. Even though Simon and his mother say that greeting people when you meet them on a walk is “a sort of tradition” that will “show you’re friend not foe” (125), the reception given to Faith by other walkers is not at all friendly although she greets them first. A passing couple “looked at [her] and did not respond”, while another man “stared at [her] instead, turning round to look long after he had passed” (127), and at the local pub Faith notices “other eyes looking at [her]” and “thought the place hushed” upon her entry into the establishment (128). Faith is silently ostracized by the denizens of a model village that exemplifies all the characteristics of a normative, white British identity. In this quintessential heritage locale Faith is consciously aware that, to the staring eyes of the villagers, she has no place in local tradition. Faith, whose name suggests fidelity and trust, is paradoxically regarded as a foe rather than a friend.
This unspoken resentment in the countryside turns into violent racism in the city when, on an outing with a friend, Faith witnesses an assault committed by members of the right-wing National Front against a young black woman who runs a bookstore:
Simon had taken off his coat and put it round the woman. His white handkerchief was red. … I took off my blue scarf I had round my neck and Simon pushed that onto the woman’s gash which was still running trails of blood over her eyes and down her nose. (152)
Significantly, Levy’s description of Yemi, the black woman who was attacked, associates her with the colours red, white, and blue − the very colours of the British Union Jack. Levy presents Yemi as a sorrowful and wounded inversion of an important symbol of British heritage and national identity, the goddess Britannia, who is often portrayed as a fair-skinned woman with a martial bearing, wearing a helmet and brandishing a shield emblazoned with the British national flag. The dark-skinned and bleeding Yemi represents a powerful symbolic challenge to the essentialist and exclusionary racism embodied in the patriotic icon of Britannia. In other words, celebrating the goddess Britannia means victimizing black women like Yemi and Faith. Moreover, the “running trails of blood” on Yemi’s face are an allusion to remarks made in 1968 by Conservative Member of Parliament Enoch Powell about the dangers that immigration from Africa and the Caribbean posed to white, Anglo/British society, commonly known as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. To make matters worse, the police officers also make racist remarks, dismissing the attackers as “just a bunch of thugs” and opining that Yemi was “asking for trouble” because she was “one woman like that on her own” (154). These allusions to patriotic national symbols, inflammatory political rhetoric, and blithe institutional racism against a young woman who is “black like [her]” (156) make Faith recognize how, despite her parents’ efforts at assimilation, she is still regarded as an “extra-territorial” (Boehmer, 2005: 227) and a migrant, even though she is British by birth. Retreating into her bedroom, Faith cannot bear to see her reflection in the mirror as a helpless “black girl lying in a bed”, and simply “didn’t want to be black any more” (160). Instead of energized migrancy, Faith experiences an enervating breakdown.
What pulls Faith out of her despondent state is her discovery, in Jamaica, of the imbricated relationship between her Jamaican background and her British identity. The structure of the second part of Fruit of the Lemon, which is set in Jamaica, differs considerably from the first. Previously, the narrative was voiced by Faith herself, but in Part Two Faith’s dominant voice is literally interleaved with stories she hears and collects from her mother’s sister, Aunt Coral, and other relatives and friends. These sections of oral narrative are marked by a different, bolder typeface. Whereas, just prior to her breakdown, Faith began to believe in a Manichean binary opposition between races − “what it all comes down to in the end is black against white. It was simple” (159) − this interleaving of stories not only reveals to Faith that she has ancestors who were Scottish and Irish (and therefore considered white in Britain) on both her mother’s and father’s sides of the family, but it also begins the process of healing Faith’s psychic fractures as she pieces together her extended family history and the Jamaican and British parts of her subjectivity.
In her discussion of the healing power of storytelling in the novels of Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez, Karen Castelluci Cox argues that “the writer recognizes the power of words, the spells they cast, and the authority they wield over the artist” (2001: 142); this power is illustrated in one of Alvarez’s novels where a father blesses his daughters with “invention, voices to tell stories with which these silenced daughters can re-create a livable past from words” that eventually allows one of them to break free of “her anguished self-doubts and mental exhaustion” (2001: 146, original emphasis). Faith Jackson, unlike Alvarez’s characters, does not have parents who impart her a voice or a livable past, as her own mother Mildred was reluctant to talk about her family’s time in Jamaica, only giving Faith “little scraps of her past” that she had to “piece together…until [she] had a story that seemed to make sense” (4-5). But Faith’s exposure to the oral narratives in Jamaica helps her break free of the self-doubts and mental exhaustion she experienced in Britain. Upon her arrival at Jamaica’s airport at the beginning of Part Two, Faith experiences “culture shock” and remarks how this term is “[a] name made up by someone with a stiff upper lip who wanted to deny the feelings of panic and terror” (169). The almost stereotypical characteristic of the British “stiff upper lip” is echoed when Faith, confronted by a stern Jamaican customs officer, confesses that she “had never in [her] life felt so English” (225). Towards the end of her stay, however, Faith begins to shed her defensive stiff upper lip and relax as she feels that “[i]n Jamaica [she] could be anything. Irie” (293). The use of the Jamaican vernacular word “Irie”, which means “peace” or “everything’s all right”, suggests that, despite the odd looks she receives for dressing in pants for a church wedding (295), she “had learnt to adapt to Jamaican ways” (320). This adaptation is more than Faith’s subjective overcoming of culture shock; Faith realizes she was wrong when she believed “[her] history started when the ship carrying [her] parents sailed from Jamaica and docked in England on Guy Fawkes’ night” (325), when in fact Aunt Coral and other family members “laid a past out in front of [her]” that “wrapped [her] in a family history and swaddled [her] tight in its stories” (326).
The condition of being tightly swaddled in family stories contributes to one critic’s persuasive argument that “Levy’s novel constructs a Caribbean diasporic idenitty through the nostalgic acquisition of a historical context that is invested or maintained by commodities” (Saez, 2006: np). However, I contend that what enables Faith’s recognition of the historical context and its subsequent construction of a diasporic identity is Faith’s encounter with the very landscape of Jamaica itself, which has been physically marked by colonialism and thus testifies to the inextricably intertwined histories of Britain and Jamaica. Just before Faith leaves Jamaica, her cousin Vincent takes her on a trip up the Blue Mountains to the site of a former, historically-preserved coffee plantation. The site consists of the slave owner’s house and the slaves’ quarters: the former is “pretty pink and white”, with a “grey slate roof sloped like a country church and the windows [that] were tall and elegantly glazed with squares of glass like fine Georgian houses in England” (324). The slave quarters, on the other hand, are “around at the back of the house”, consisting of a simple shed “made of wood that was shaped like slates in overlapping squares gone grey in the sun”, with “wooden bunks like three shelves up a wall” (324, 325). Faith walks into the quarters, and
[f]rom the bottom bunk, past the brown slatted wood in the window holes, across the dirty oil drum and past the debris at the door, [she] had looked out and seen the pretty pink slave-owner’s house and beyond that the sky and the panoramic view of one of the most beautiful islands on earth. (325)
What is important here is the reversal of perspective as Faith sits on the lowest bunk of the slave quarters and looks outwards onto the Jamaican countryside: it is an illuminating counterpoint to the hostile stares she received earlier in the British countryside where, as a woman of colour, she is excluded from local tradition and a culture of normative whiteness.
Indeed, instead of suffering the discriminatory coldness and racial violence of British society as a personal or individual matter, Faith begins to see and comprehend the history of suffering and colonialism that connects Britain and Jamaica as societies, embodied in the physical structures of the slave quarters, the slave-owner’s house, and the natural landscape of Jamaica. In her declaration that Jamaica is “one of the most beautiful islands on earth”, Faith claims the island and its history as her own heritage, offering another counterpoint to her friend Simon’s earlier claim about the model village where he grew up: “Every time I come back it looks more beautiful” (115). While the slave-owner’s picturesque house is reminiscent of the country homes enshrined by Britain’s rural heritage industry and might fit quite well in the quintessentially English village where Simon’s family lives, the starkness of the slave quarters bears mute testimony to the violence and suffering of colonial conquest, forced migration, and plantation labour. The slave quarters standing behind the slave-owner’s house are a symbolic reminder of the slavery and colonialism that built and supported Britain as the centre of an empire and a modern nation, and the overlapping squares of slate-shaped wood recall the overlapping histories and cultures of Britain and Jamaica.
It is this heritage of a rural Jamaican landscape steeped in history, rather than suffused with a nostalgic vision of the past, that contradicts the cold treatment Faith received in the British countryside and helps her transform her migrancy from marginalization into articulation, from being discriminated against to dwelling within a vital storytelling tradition going beyond friend or foe. By the end of the novel, Faith not only has a story about her family that makes sense (compared to the incidental scraps her mother gave her as a child), but she also has a sense of the inextricably intertwined histories of Jamaica and Britain that empower her against racism in Britain:
Let those bully boys walk behind me in the playground. Let them tell me, ‘You’re a darkie. Faith’s a darkie. …Let them say what they like. Because I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day. (326-7)
While the references to children suggest a familial or filiative relationship, the combination of family stories with political and cultural histories of colonization point to what Edward Said calls affiliative connections: “[a] knowledge of history, a recognition of the importance of social circumstance, an analytical capacity for making distinctions” (Said, 1983a: 15-16). By the end of the novel, Faith has gained such an analytical capacity to make a distinction between the bully boys’ racist taunts about her parents coming to Britain “on a banana boat” (3) that exoticizes and marginalizes Faith as a migrant, and her own decision to tell this same story on her return to Britain (339) as a counterpoint that challenges the cultural nationalism shown by Enoch Powell, the National Front, and the patriotic symbol of the goddess Britannia.
Conclusion
While Naipaul’s narrator has the benefit of a literary eye and a writing career that scrutinizes the apparently bucolic Wiltshire countryside and detects the dangerous obedience and servitude of British society during his rural perambulations, Levy transforms Faith’s migrancy from an abject experience of marginalization and discrimination into a sense of belonging and dwelling-in-place through Faith’s empowering conversations with Aunt Coral and her extended family she meets in her Jamaican travels. Naipaul’s narrator walks whereas Faith Jackson talks, and these actions are the travelling theories that reconfigure migrancy into a dialogic relationship between displacement and dwelling. Both novels feature narrators who travel, and their movement is closely connected to their self-identification as writers and storytellers. In his essay “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin laments that “[t]he art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out”, and that this slow death is caused in part by “the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times”, which increases the isolation between writers and their audience (1968: 87). Both Naipaul and Levy revise Benjamin’s opposition between storytelling and the novel; Naipaul blends the novel and personalized storytelling by subtitling The Enigma of Arrival “a novel in five sections” instead of claiming it as autobiography, while Levy brackets Faith’s narrative by interleaving stories from her extended family in the second, Jamaican section of Fruit of the Lemon. As novelists assaying post-heritage narratives, they, like Benjamin’s storyteller, “combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-travelled man brings home, with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to the natives of a place” (1968: 85). The patriotic nostalgia for a cultural heritage that ought to be embodied or pristinely preserved in the rural landscape is reconfigured through the migrancy of Naipaul’s and Levy’s travelling narrators, underscoring how
rethinking national heritage does not only mean “including” “other” heritages by simply tacking them on to an official national story that is already sealed, but that it instead involves revising Britain’s island stories to acknowledge their long and intertwined histories with complex patterns of migration and diaspora. (Littler, 2005: 1)
Post-heritage narratives like The Enigma of Arrival and Fruit of the Lemon actively revise island stories and intertwined histories, and they serve as an empowering vehicle for postcolonial storytelling in which migrancy unseals insular notions of national identity, opening up creative tensions between sojourning and settlement, displacement, and dwelling.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.