Writing about historical trauma How can you write about harrowing events in a way that does not traumatise readers, causing them to reject the text? Writing about plantation slavery poses this problem for Andrea Levy. She answers it in a unique way. The Long Song is a deeply researched, deeply felt story of black lives in Jamaica during a 50-year period that straddles the parliamentary abolition of slavery in British colonies in 1834. The Long Song is a compelling, beautiful work, which follows the lives of Kitty (pre-emancipation) and her daughter July. It is replete with the details of everyday life of the time that only serious research can provide. Yet is a nimble text, not over-burdened by the weight of that research. My greatest interest as a writer is in the narratological devices used – how Andre Levy keeps the readers (and herself, the author) from becoming mired in the trauma of reliving those times. Levy uses a succession of narratological levers: Distancing by time: the older woman who is the teller of the story, has survived all the battles and lets us know she is determined to tell the story her way, only partly paying heed to her more earnest son’s instructions on what to write and how to write it. Use of the third person. Most of the novel is told in the third person past – which puts a cooling distance on events unlike the ‘hotter’ first person, present. Occasional direct address – the narrator is not averse to Charlotte Bronte-like steers (“Dear reader…” is a common address in The Long Song). This ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ (to borrow a theatre term) also adds flavours of playfulness as per eg Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy etc. Which leads us to.. Distancing by use of farce, humour, narrative switches and perspective breaks – the telling of the story sometimes switches from mother to son, else switches from a ‘showing’ of the character’s emotions and dilemmas to the more insulating ‘telling’ mode. Such switching breaks tension: the reader is never immersed totally of for long in the misery. Levy avoids the sustained “close consciousness” technique seen in e.g. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Other distancing techniques include the choice as main protagonist of July. July is aware of but does not suffer the worst of the depredations of slavery; in The Long Song that is the dungeon – a prison where enslaved Africans who are being punished by the plantation owner for one reason or another, are kept); Levy “tells” of the dungeon experience rather than “shows” it, and this elliptical rendering is delivered in part by means of a plantation children’s rhyme (which made me reflect on how so many children’s songs – Ring-a-ring a roses, Mulberry Bush, Rock-a-Bye Baby, Oranges and lemons…. – describe horrors but delivered in sing-sing voices and becoming all the more macabre for it). This avoidance, ellipsis and filtering is explained by the narrator: “’I know that my reader does not wish to be told tales as ugly as these” (p191). The narrator is adamant she is going to write a story that emphasises the beauties of life and of her own personality. She is a consummate storyteller, aware of how different voices and tellers produce exaggerations, hyperbole flat inaccuracy and contradictory versions of events. One example must suffice: when Miss Kitty (July’s mother) kills the plantation master, the narrator tells us plainly that nobody witnessed it and that there are various versions of how Kitty did it; she gives us all versions and acknowledges them all as part of the folkloric record of what happened. Farce – physical humour and improbable situations are within Andrea Levy’s narrator’s repertoire. For example, she describes how the main character July hides under the plantation master’s bed with her boyfriend as the plantation master blows his own head off. OK, it’s not funny written up here in cold prose perhaps, but it’s funny in the book, and that fierce humour is part of the genius and audacity of Andrea Levy – to deliver this tone at such a dramatic moment. When I remembered that Andrea Levy has passed away I was saddened. I would love to have met her, for her ingenious storytelling smarts, her humour, her empathy, and her resolve not to let the miseries of life drag you down, whether those miseries be in the past or the present, and to stay in touch with joy and beauty. Andre Levy, thank you for this song. PS. I found out recently that this form of historical writing that attemtps ot fill in the gaps, silences, opperssions, occlusions of majoritorian history, is called ‘critical fabulation’ – a term used by Saidiya Hartman in...
