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The Long Song by Andrea Levy – a writer’s notes

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...

The National Trust and Napoleon’s Hat

The National Trust and Napoleon’s Hat I first met Napoleon at a sign language class. He wore a bulky black greatcoat, a two-cornered hat and apologised for his presence, explaining he was due to meet his troops later in the day at Bassano but had dropped by through a portal. We students all rolled with it and, as weeks became months it dawned on us the young man really thought he was Napoleon. Eyebrows were raised. Some would make the sign for madness but I felt there was nothing to see here – the man was happy as Napoleon, he was a perfectly civil guy, and, if somebody had to represent Napoleon in this world, he was doing a fine job of it. I confess, I kind of fell in love with him. He lit up the college and whenever he appeared suddenly your own real-world problems looked small-small. How else could you feel when faced with a guy worrying about the oncoming battle at Waterloo? Abhorrent to me then, was the idea that some mean-spirited puritanical psychiatrist might try to strip him of his delusion. What would it achieve? Who wanted to see him reduced to his prosaic birth name, rocking in a corner of the class, and all of us a little duller, no longer lit by his light? Some delusions are fine. Let them be. Nations like their delusions too. America: Sweet Land of Liberty! That the United States was arrived at by the genocide of the indigenous population, the subjection of enslaved Africans, and the brutal expansion of its core lands by war and subjugation is not a story many Americans want to hear. Indeed, the myth of America’s rise by moral exceptionalism holds such a strong grip on the American imagination they are offended when you raise such contrary facts.  So too France. Land of Rousseau. Of Liberté! Égalité! Fraternité! But not for the enslaved who eked out an existence under the French whip across the Caribbean. And of course, England. England never had its Rousseau. The closest was Cromwell but he arrived a century too early. British belief in Enlightenment values was for a long period distinctly untroubled by any doubt around slavery or British involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. In a neat bit of classificatory footwork, those enslaved by the English were relegated to the category of lesser humans, and the colonising, enslaving drive recast as a civilizing mission undertaken by the noble white man as part of the ‘white man’s burden’. It was a fine act of national sophistry.  And it was supplemented with myth, with monument as the answer to the question: How best can we chisel the story of our greatness, our graciousness, our nobility into history? The Egyptians were the primus inter pares chisellers. Their monuments did the all-time- greatest job of proclaiming the brilliance of their Pharaohs. The voice Shelley gave them, feels just right: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! So, what about  the National Trust properties? They were often donated during a period of dynastic distress. Typically, the owners hit hard times after the Second World War and offered the crumbling mansion to the nation with an implied (or perhaps actual, legal) codicil that the Trust look after not only the bricks, but the family story too: the sentiment – if not the letter – a plea that the National Trust preserve not only the land and buildings but also the story of our family’s glory, our ancestors’ sagacity, nobility, generosity, vision etc.  The Egyptian’s chiselled, Pharaoh voice is the only voice that distinctly survives from that era, no one else could afford the chisels and chisellers. Some of the country homes have their dynastic story leaded into stained glass windows or imbued in leather-bound mahogany desks. But, unlike the pyramids, English country homes were built and furnished at a time when recording had become cheap and when cataloguing, archiving, keeping copious records had become de rigeur as part of the general colonising project. Naturally, historians – those crawlers over documents – have wormed their way into these archives  to gather contextual information, and in doing so have found themselves querying the story of unalloyed nobility and generosity that the country homes by their substance enact. Such scribblers as UCL Legacies of British Slave Ownership project (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/), and the research of a body of treasonous academic folk such as Marian Gwynn, Corinne Fowler (@ColonialCountr1) and Katie Donington have followed on the heels of England-based slave trade historians, James Walvin and Alan Rice, in querying the country homes’ long-buffed, saintly image – with such evidential accuracy that their research is seen as an attack on the English national myth no less. Cue outrage. Alacrity is abroad and everywhere. America. France. England. Nations with deluded ideas of their past. Nations hugging their myths and unwilling to absorb information that runs counter to those myths. The archival diggers  are denounced as traitors. Unpatriotic. Yet do not all myths of Empire founder? Do not all monuments meant to fix myths and perpetuate stories of glory, go the way of Ozymandias, eroded by the slow truths that time brings to them? As Shelley has it of Ozymandias: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. Or does a nation find a way to allow...

Kalu Bluebird music video: some background

        A nation is a set of stories. And the National Trust is a custodian of stories, set up by Act of Parliament tasked inter alia with keeping in good health those country houses which are of national significance – considered to contain within them   important stories about the nation.* The country houses owned by the National Trust are therefore clearly part of the narrative fabric of the nation.  What stories do these country houses tell?   The cultural theorist Paul Gilroy notes in his seminal text After Empire, how ‘Englishness’ is constructed. He points out that historical amnesia and postcolonial melancholia are persistent elements in conventional  ‘Englishness’ narratives (Gilroy After Empire 2004, 95-100, 116-120).   The National Trust, with its 1907  foundational purpose of ‘permanent preservation’ has such conventional narratives available to it and it uses them. So a September 2019 tweet (screenshot below) suggests as an activity: “Discover how top-secret map makers and allotments grown in the dig for victory played an important role in our wartime history.” This tweet shows admirable dexterity. It manages to combine several ‘Englishness’ tropes: ‘map making’ with its allusion to Empire;  the Home office sponsored slogan,  ‘Dig For Victory’ – a reference to England’s much narrated ‘victory’ in World War Two; and most imaginatively, the tweet also manages to squeeze in a reference to that quintessentially English phenomenon (and I have one!) of the allotment.      Yet there are other narratives available. And some artists, myself among them, want to unsettle this rather cosy version of Englishness (or even ‘Britishness’). We are focused on putting forward narratives that acknowledge and move closer to the centre of meditations on Englishness, the depredations, cruelty, stereotyping  and symbolic violence which underpinned the British Empire and colonialism. Violence which still affects us today in all its symbolic, linguistic and conceptual shockwaves. More specifically, we seek, through our art, and by a re-examination of historical lands, buildings, artefacts and archives, to foster the rise of suppressed and hitherto unheard voices – including voices of the ‘Other’.  The Leicester University based Colonial Countryside project has gathered some such artists together – primarily writers. Twitter and Facebook abound with other organisations, artists and historians  seeking to  transform understandings of how Empire and its successor, colonialism, has affected national identity.    Poem – origins The poem which forms the lyrics of ‘Bluebird’ was inspired by the lock, stock and barrel of Penrhyn Castle, a National Trust property in North Wales. Penrhyn Castle itself is a marvellous trompe l’oeil – a stately home  built between 1820 and 1833 (just before the Victorian era)  but presenting itself as something more ancient: a Norman castle.  Thus, the issue of presentation, representation, reality and authenticity is mixed into every brick of the property.  It is a magnificent structure, not only in its architecture. It is decorated and furnished so as to proclaim its owner’s sophistication, civility, good taste, aristocratic roots, wealth, knowledge and power. Nobody who visits can be left uncertain that the primary story there is of the Pennant family’s importance in the world.  The poem is a counter-narrative. It refers allusively to the slave trade origins of the Pennants’ wealth, using imagery to indicate objects in the Penrhyn Castle display –  such as stuffed birds and paintings – where slave trade and colonial connections can be found.  I won’t spoil the poem by pointing out all these references.  But a visit to Penrhyn Castle with the song on your headphone’s playlist would be enough to reveal most if not all!  Song – development The basic musicality of the poem supplied the beginnings of the song.  From this, the song itself was developed, composed and arranged by my 15 yo daughter, Naomi Kalu.  We argued about whether the last, consolidating, note of the song should or should not be played (she won the argument – in the video it is not).    Video – development Jonny Ferryman shot all the video footage in two hours at Penrhyn Castle.  He then edited the video, adding some acoustic effects (the bird song, the sea waves).  Charlotte Maxwell assisted in the direction and with costume. The sound editing was done at HQ Recording Studio.          *The consolidating statute (National Trust Acts (1907-1971) puts it in glorious legalese : “The National Trust shall be established for the purposes of promoting the permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation of lands and tenements (including buildings) of beauty or historic interest and as regards lands for the preservation (so far as practicable) of their natural aspect features and animal and plant life.”   ...