“The whole of everything is never told,” said Henry James – and often we don’t even get the half of it. The 300-odd-years of slavery in Jamaica from the 16th century until abolition in 1834 is a case in point. It was black Africans who were forced to endure slavery in Jamaica. But it was white Europeans who wrote their immediate history. In her afterword to The Long Song, Andrea Levy explains that she found precious little documentary material written by the black majority. Nearly all contemporary accounts of the life of slaves came from the European perspective. And whether they were written by well-meaning abolitionists or slave owners, they came, says Levy, through the “weird” filter of European racism.
The Long Song is a way of “putting back the voices that were left out” and redressing this imbalance. “I wanted to put back the voices of everyday life for black Jamaicans that are so silent on the record,” says Levy. “If history has kept them silent then we must conjure their voices ourselves and listen to their stories”
This, then, is a novel where voice matters even more than usual. Seeing how this voice is established – powerful, overwhelming even, right from the get go – is one of the many fascinating things about The Long Song.
The novel opens with a forward, purportedly written by another hand, that of the narrator’s son, Thomas Kinsman. Conveniently enough he is a printer and so has been able to produce this book, which he tells us “was born of a craving”. This framing device seems old-fashioned – but of course, that’s how things should be in a book purporting to have been made in 1898. It also allows Levy a few pages in which to soften up we readers and prepare us for the storm ahead. While discussing the practicalities of the production of the book, Kinsman also lets us know what kind of person we are dealing with: “a sweet woman” – but one who tirelessly seeks him out, haranguing him, following him even to his place of work to tell her story. Also, “a resolute woman”, insistent upon having her way – even if initially fearful of the process of writing.
So when the opening proper comes it’s not as wrong-footing as it might have been. We already have an image of a determined woman, old enough not to worry too much about upsetting anyone in her audience. We’re primed to expect a few fireworks.
They come right away. There’s real shock value in hearing about (what we must presume to be) this narrator’s own conception, described with hilarious ribaldry, and summed up in one curt opening sentence: “It was finished almost as soon as it began.”
This self-described “indelicate commencement” immediately provokes questions. How can the narrator know so much about her mother’s rape? Is it in fact her own conception? Is the narrator supposed to be writing a memoir or is she making up a fictional story? Is she close to Kitty – the woman who is assaulted in the first paragraph – but who seems more worried about what to do with the “limp offering”, a “crumpled bolt of yellow and black cloth” her white assailant gives her afterwards? Or is Kitty a figment of her imagination?
Good luck if you want to ask the narrator the answer to such questions. In the forward we’ve already been told that she doesn’t listen to her son’s advice – and now she even breaks off from her only-just-begun narrative to tell us that her Kinsman has complained again – and that she is not having it: “Please pardon me, but your storyteller is a woman possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink.”
Better luck still if you want to argue with her about what she may or may not possibly know. Within the space of just one paragraph she already warns you that if you don’t like her style, “be on your way, for there are plenty of books to satisfy if words flowing free as the droppings that fall from the backside of a mule is your desire”.
She’s funny – but she’s also fierce. Expanding on those mule droppings, she urges any reluctant readers to go away to the other books “wrapped in leather and stamped in gold” and “whose contents you will find meandering through the puff and twaddle of some white lady’s mind”. European readers are not going to get an easy ride. There’s little love for “white ladies” here.
In the normal run of editing, thus alienating a big chunk of potential audience, and further suggesting to a reader that they might prefer another book would be met with a red pen, exclamation marks and quite a few uses of the word “no”. But, as I say, good luck here. Kinsman’s mother makes such remarks again and again. Wonderfully, for instance, she says she isn’t going to bother filling in too much historical background, referring us instead to a book called Conflict and Change. A view from the great house of slaves, slavery and the British Empire, adding: “… if you do read it and find your head nodding in agreement at this man’s bluster, then away with you – for I no longer wish you as my reader.”
As she lets us know that she is a narrator who isn’t going to stand for narrative convention, she also neatly and cleverly frees herself from the restraints of the usual first-person storytelling. In sowing doubt about whether the book is a memoir or a story (and in letting it be so definitely known that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks about that) she has allowed herself the best of both worlds. There’s a feeling of intimate knowledge, of high stakes and personal anger and sorrow. Of things endured, horrors witnessed, joys shared. But she can also swoop in and out of place and time and flit from person to person, scene to scene, however she sees fit.
So, in just a few short and apparently simple pages, we get a fantastic induction into another world. The world controlled by this woman. A woman who can give us intrigue – why is she so angry with white ladies, anyway? A person of strong, strident personality. A storyteller with no concerns about convention. “Stay if you wish to hear a tale of my making,” she says with typical defiance. I, for one, found it impossible to say no. It’s a voice that promises so much, after all ...
