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The Long Song by Andrea Levy

Click link below for excellent interview with Andrea Levy in Changing English "Andrea Levy in Conversation with Susan Alice Fischer"

http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/muana/levyinterview.pdf

"Courage and Love Among the Slaves of Jamaica" by Andrea Levy.

Researching her novel about a slave in colonial Jamaica, Levy expected stories of humiliation and cruelty, but she also found loyalty and defiance.

At a conference in London several years ago thetopic for discussion was the legacy of slavery. A young woman stood up tio ask a heartfelt question of the panel: how could she be proud of her Jamaican roots when her ancestors had all been slaves.

I cannot recall the panel’s response, but, as I sat silently in the audience, I do remember my own. Of Jamaican heritage myself, I wondered why anyone would feel any ambivalence or shame at having a slave ancestry? Had she never felt the sentiments once expressed to me by a Jamaican acquaintance of mine? “If our ancestors survived the slave ships, they were strong. If they survived the plantations, they were clever.” It is a rich and proud heritage. It was at that moment that I felt something stirring. Could a novelist persuade this young woman to have pride in her slave ancestors through telling her a story? That was where the idea for The Long Song started.

There was one big problem though — the last thing I wanted to do was to write a novel about slavery in Jamaica. Why? Because how could anyone write about slavery without it turning into a harrowing tale of violence and misery? The young woman at the conference did have a point. I remember as a girl being unable to watch much of the TV dramatisation of Alex Haley’s Roots because it was too upsetting. Every book on slavery that I had read (and I have read a few — it’s hardly virgin territory) was hard going, with definitely little room for humour. And if I was to write a convincing story I would have to spend a great deal of time researching 18th and early 19th-century Jamaica — a truly horrible part of our history.

More than that, I would have to immerse myself in the weird world of European racism. I would have to fill my head with sentiments such as those of the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.”

Or this from Emmanuel Kant: “Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have a smaller amount of talent. The Negroes are lower, and the lowest are a part of the American peoples.”

Or the esteemed writer Anthony Trollope, who in his book The West Indies and the Spanish Main says of the Negro: “They are covetous of notice as is a child or a dog: but they have little idea of earning continual respect ... On the whole they laugh and sing and sleep through life: and if life were all, they would not have so bad a time of it.”

I could go on. Racism as a belief system had become truly endemic in Britain at this time; making “Negroes” into non-people — into subhuman livestock — was an important aspect of justifying slavery. So was this to be my reading matter for the next few years? I wasn’t sure I would be able to stomach it.

Yet writing about the experience of slavery was a natural progression for me. Small Island, my most recent novel, was the story of Jamaican immigrants to England in the years after the Second World War. Before that I had written three other novels that dealt in some way with the experience of black people in Britain. How could I not write about where and why the relationship with Jamaica and the Caribbean began? It made sense. I had to do it.

So I started the rather uncomfortable mental journey back to early 19th-century Jamaica, with what I already knew from the history I was taught at school. It wasn’t much. In a nutshell it went something like this: sometime in the 1500s white Europeans “discovered” the Caribbean islands along with the Americas. Then, in their efforts to put the lands to productive use, they became involved in the business of buying captive Africans (mainly from African traders, it seems), shipping them in chains across the Atlantic and using them as slave labour. A triangular trade grew up: from Britain to West Africa carrying manufactured goods to buy slaves; from West Africa to the Caribbean, where the slaves endured the infamous “middle passage” and then were sold to plantation owners; and, finally, back to Britain carrying the product of their trading — sugar. Eventually, thanks to the likes of William Wilberforce et al, the British saw the error of their ways and abolished the slave trade in 1807 and, eventually, slavery itself in 1838. They governed the islands for another 100 years or so and then left, leaving the land to the descendants of those black African slaves.

So if this was the potted history, where was I going to find a fuller one? My family background was my first source of inspiration, but not in the way that you might think. When I was growing up, my parents, who were from Jamaica, were at pains to distance themselves from every aspect of their slave ancestry. My parents couldn’t — or wouldn’t — tell me much about the history of where they came from. But if they didn’t add any more in words, everything about them, the way they looked, their names, even the silences and the things they didn’t say, hinted to me that Jamaican society was, in fact, a densely woven affair with a rich history. This history includes not only the slave population from West Africa, but also people coming from all over the world — as white owners of plantations or their employees, indentured labourers from India, workers from China, Jews from North Africa and Portugal. Clearly this all created a society that was considerably more complex than I had appreciated.

Slavery in Jamaica was so inhumane that it is hard to think of it as a society. Instead it seems to have been boiled down to the potted version — the middle passage, the cruel plantation life and the attention paid to the struggle for its ending. It could almost be a morality play with the planters as the villains, Wilberforce as the white knight and the slaves as simply a mass of wretched, voiceless victims.

But as soon as I began to reflect on the plain historical facts, I realised that slavery was much more than a two-act play; it was a vast social system — a society in the true sense — that endured for 300 years. If you were a slave in Jamaica in, say, 1815, it was possible that your ancestors stretching back 12 or more generations had also been slaves in the same place. A whole society had built up over time according to the distorted rules that slavery imposed. People were suffering and dying. But clearly people were living and surviving as well.

There is an excellent body of scholarship, in Britain and in the Caribbean, on the history of slavery. But there are few surviving documents and artefacts that I could find where slaves speak for themselves. Little testimony has emerged that was not filtered at the time through a white understanding or serving a white narrative — whether it be the apologists for slavery and the planter classes, or the abolitionists.

This is where fiction comes into its own. Writing fiction is a way of putting back the voices that were left out. Not just the wails of anguish and victimhood that we are used to, although that is very much part of the story, but also the chatter and clatter of people building their lives, families and communities, ducking, diving and conducting the businesses of life in appallingly difficult circumstances. Now there is a story of a unique society that developed around a giant, brutal island factory and survived, if not to tell the tale then to give us its descendants, black and white, the privilege of piecing it together and telling it for them. I was beginning to get excited about this new book of mine — this long song of a tale.

I researched as widely as I could for The Long Song — through archives, libraries, the internet, contemporaneous books, though sometimes my heart would sink on discovering yet another planter’s account of the Negroes’ childlike ways that I felt I would need to read. I visited Jamaica and spent days staying on an old sugar plantation; wandering among the preserved waterwheels, the Georgian factory buildings now mostly crumbling, the planter’s Great House still cool and luxuriously furnished in early 19th-century style, and the lumpy scrubland full of broken pottery that was all that remained of the old slave village. I tried to imagine myself — literally myself, because it could have been me ... hey, it could have been you — living through that time and place.

We’ve all heard about sugar plantations, but how did they work? What were the day-to-day concerns, routines and power games of a people, the vast majority of whom were the property of the remaining few? And what about that tiny slave-owner minority? What did it feel like to be living on a faraway island vastly outnumbered by people whom you owned, whom you constantly feared and whom you believed to be at best childlike and at worst bestial?

I began to piece together a largely unrecorded domestic history. Though there are very few black people’s accounts, there are many narratives from the time, written by white people from different viewpoints concerning how life was lived by blacks, as well as factual records of circumstances that were useful if you read between their lines.

Lady Nugent, for example, the wife of the Governor of Jamaica of 1801-05, records in her journal: “The sea was rather rough this evening, and I took a walk with the little ones, instead of a row. We met a horrid looking blackman, who passed us several times, without making any bow, although I recollected him as one of the boatmen of the canoe we used to go out in ... he was then very humble, but tonight he only grinned, and gave us a sort of fierce look, that struck me with a terror I could not shake off.”

First I read the fear of a white woman in the presence of a black man who is not behaving with proper deference. But reimagined from the black man’s point of view, perhaps a delicate calculation has been made here; away from the gaze of others, and the need of the obsequious demeanour required of a boatman, he can take a risk. What cathartic relief might he feel by showing this woman just a hint of what he really thinks of her and all she represents.

Or think about this from the wife of a Scottish planter, Mrs Carmichael, in her book Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Coloured and Negro Populations of the West Indies, published in 1833: “The first defect of character which struck me as very marked among negroes, was a love of deceit ... I have seen negro servants appear with part of my wardrobe, and wear it without fear of detection, or shame at being a thief.”

How can you practise deceit but “without fear of detection”? I suspect something more open, more defiant was happening here. Maybe they were trying to tell you something, Mrs Carmichael, and you just didn’t get it! She goes on to say: “The negro women are such connoisseurs of dress. Standing by I heard them criticise everything I wore, both in materials and make.”

Yes, sisters! I could imagine those proud slave women so clearly, looking down their noses at this dowdy white woman. Even slaves can have a fierce pride in appearance.

And then there were the “field slaves”, the ones who actually laboured in the cane fields and factories: “One slave came perpetually up. Her tongue was every morning a different colour. One morning it was bright blue. The doctor took a wet towel and he told her to put out her tongue whereby he washed the die off and a healthy tongue was underneath.”

This just tells me of the ingenious ways people tried to escape their working day. It made me laugh out loud. What a plucky woman!

Even the progressive voices of the time — the missionaries and the abolitionists — can still make uncomfortable reading with our modern sensibilities. Again I detected the underlying pseudo-scientific racism, but here with a kindly face: if only we would treat these simple creatures better, they would be grateful, and be happy to follow white people’s wishes and requirements. When emancipation finally came this proved not to be the case, much to the disillusion of many reformers. It seems that ex-slaves were not especially grateful. Why should they be? Whatever pragmatic tactics and pretences they had employed to endure their slavery, as free people they would do what they wanted. Wouldn’t you?

For me, reading these British settlers’ accounts was a bit like gazing at an optical illusion — at first I see a candlestick, but suddenly it turns into two faces in profile. By reading between the lines of these narratives, and by tapping into our common human ways (our motives, fears and ways of coping with the hand life deals us), I found it was possible to imagine a vivid picture. As a novelist it is important to have the confidence, when I have no supporting documentation, to rely on an understanding of human nature; how a person will feel about something. Once the mores of the time are allowed for, this is surely the one thing you can be confident has not changed.

Having found my story, I now had to think about how I wanted to tell it in a book that will, inevitably, be thought of as an “historical novel”. Many such novels start from the history, and place their characters as witnesses or participants in the events that we know about from our history books. But what I wanted to explore isn’t in our history books. I wanted to put back in the voices of everyday life for black Jamaicans that are so silent in the record. When I researched for my book Small Island, I interviewed my mother and many others. This first-hand oral research lead me to a very individual understanding of events that went on 60 years ago. When the time you are writing about is 200 years ago, there is no one to interview and so the individual view has to come from the writer’s imagination. An historical novel may not pass the exacting standards of history as an academic discipline, but it is not meant to. I was trying to breathe back the life of ordinary people into the skeleton of recorded events. That requires imagination as well as research.

Slowly I began to realise that I was not, in fact, writing a novel about slavery. The Long Song is set in the time of slavery, and the years immediately after, but it is really a story about a person’s life, a lost voice from history that needed to be heard. July, a black house slave, is my main character and she tells her own story. It features her mother, her father, her owner, her lover, her children. It’s the story of her life lived in a society so strange to us that we can barely understand it. But she lives it much as you or I would try to — with ingenuity, cunning, charm, resilience, despair, love. As for there being no room for humour, on the contrary, as in any life lived, it is part of the fabric. Dramatic events happened in Jamaica during this time — real events, such as the Baptist wars, the period of apprenticeship and emancipation itself — but again, just like you or me, July is never really at the centre of the action. She hears about it, is affected by it, but her experience of her times is an individual one, full of action of her own.

The black peoples of the Caribbean are not the only lost voices, of course. Many white men and women’s stories are ill- served by history too. But the truth is that the story of the Caribbean cannot ultimately be divided into “black” and “white” or African and European, just as slavery cannot be filleted out of 300 years of British history. Those island societies would not exist as they do today were it not for Britain, and Britain would certainly not exist as it is today were it not for those islands.

So what do I have to say to the young woman at the conference who was shamed by her slave ancestry? Why should she be proud? Well, there was hardship, cruelty and humiliation to be sure. But I would tell her that through everything I have read of slaves in the Caribbean there runs a constant thread of small but courageous acts of defiance. A spirit that would see them endure and ultimately thrive. Out of circumstances where their very humanity was denied, I would ask her to just look at what these people created: a vibrant language that infuses our own modern speech; a rich fusion of oral stories; complex festivals of dance and costume that echo today on our own streets; a musical tradition that has spread across the globe; religious innovation; fabulous cuisine; world-class sporting prowess; a strong literary canon. I could go on. These are people who, from their tiny islands, have made a mark on the world.

Instead of a sense of horror, I have emerged from the experience of writing the book with a sense of awe for those millions of people who once lived as slaves. I would tell the young woman that our slave ancestors were much more than a mute and wretched mass of victims and we do them a great disservice if we think of them as such. These were people who needed strength, talent, guile and humour just to survive. But they did more than survive, they built a culture that has come all the way down through the years to us. Their lives are part of British history. If history has kept them silent then we must conjure their voices ourselves and listen to their stories. Stories through which we can remember them, marvel at what they endured, what they achieved, and what they have bequeathed to us all. The Long Song is my tribute to them and, I hope, an inspirational story not only for their descendants, but for us all.

The Sunday Times UK January 30, 2010

"Andrea Levy: Under the Skin of History" by Christie Hickman

Andrea Levy has transformed the story of the Windrush generation of immigrants into a portrait of post-war Britain, black and white. Christie Hickman meets her.

When Andrea Levy's first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin', appeared in 1994, it was still difficult to interest mainstream publishers in new black British writing. How wrong could they be? Not only did it sell well to a diverse readership but, two years later, her second novel, Never Far From Nowhere, was long-listed for the Orange Prize.

When Andrea Levy's first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin', appeared in 1994, it was still difficult to interest mainstream publishers in new black British writing. Although this was a fresh, quirky story about the family life of a second-generation black Londoner, Levy says that, "the main problem was that they perceived it as being just about race, and thought it would only appeal to black readers." How wrong could they be? Not only did it sell well to a diverse readership but, two years later, her second novel, Never Far From Nowhere, was long-listed for the Orange Prize.

Back then, Levy was something of a pioneer, a situation that's hard to imagine now, when British-born black and Asian writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali have redefined concepts of Englishness and stormed their way into the bestseller charts. "It took a book like Zadie Smith's White Teeth to really blow that perception out of the water," says Levy, who is a tall, fair-skinned, striking woman with a mane of dark, curly hair and an infectious laugh, "and we needed somebody to do that. It's made an enormous difference. Things have changed so much in the last 10 years."

For Levy, who lives in an elegant Edwardian house just a few miles and a world away from the north London council estate where she grew up, everything has changed. That Highbury estate provided the setting for her first two semi-autobiographical novels, but as Levy became more aware of her Jamaican ancestry, the family tree proved to be a source book of ideas.

"I'm still English," she laughs, "but I also have this wonderfully rich heritage which I would like more people to understand and acknowledge. And that's become very important to me." She explored its diversity in her third novel, Fruit of the Lemon, and it more than informs her new book, Small Island (Review, £14.99), which looks at the outcomes of war and migration on her parents' generation immediately after the Second World War.

Levy's father and his twin brother (who had been among the thousands of West Indians serving in the wartime RAF) were among the first wave of Jamaican immigrants to arrive at Tilbury on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948. Her mother followed six months later. They had been brought up as children of the British Empire and England was the "Mother Country" on which they pinned their hopes for a better life. But, far from welcoming them, post-war London, still in the process of surfacing from five years of bombing and privation, was cold, prejudiced and hostile.

Against all the odds, they somehow made it work. Her mother, who had been a teacher in Jamaica, had to take a sewing job to make ends meet. "But she did go back to college," says Levy, "and got a degree with the Open University. One of the first. She was a plucky woman, my mother."

Levy's father died from lung cancer in 1987. Two years later, she visited Jamaica for the first time, where she discovered even more about her colourful family background. There was a red-haired, Scottish great-grandfather, and her father's father who was born Jewish, "married out" and became a Christian while fighting in the First World War. Even further back, her "mother's, mother's, mother's mother" was born a slave. Every Light in the House Burnin' was, in part, a moving elegy to her father, as well as a voyage around her own identity, but it's easy to see that all three of her novels have been progressing steadily towards Small Island.

The arrival of the Windrush pioneers was a watershed in British history, and a period that Levy was eager to examine from all sides. In a vivid and skilful piece of storytelling that defines a time of irreversible change, Levy uses four individual voices to pilot her narrative.

In 1948, Gilbert and Hortense, a pair of ill-matched Jamaican newlyweds, rent a shabby room in an Earl's Court house owned by Queenie Bligh and her husband, Bernard, who spent his war in India with the RAF. Queenie (always drawn to outsiders) is virtually prejudice-free, but Bernard is not, and declares open warfare on his lodgers, with unforeseen results.

Small Island took four-and-a-half years to research and write, and became a labour of love. "I tried to find areas and aspects that hadn't been explored in depth," Levy says, recalling long days spent in the RAF Museum, the Imperial War Museum and local community-centre archives. She talked to Londoners who lived through the trauma of bombing, rationing and homelessness, to her family and to former servicemen who had survived India and the Burma front, as well as RAF life in the UK.

"I felt very humbled by the experience," she says quietly. "The more I researched, the more I thought what an incredible thing these people had gone through. They were so young, and marriages were just ripped apart by husbands being sent away for five years and then coming home and being expected to pick up the pieces. It was shocking. I don't know how they coped. I wanted to do justice to those stories. And it has changed me in some way."

Like her previous novels, Small Island addresses both black and white experiences of race, class, gender and identity, but on a much broader canvas. "I like that point of contact between black and white. The fission. For me, that's where the energy is. Immigration is a dynamic process. The people who come are as changed by it as the people they come to."

Racism was part of the landscape when she was growing up, but it was never discussed at home. Much later, when she persuaded her mother to talk about her early experiences (many of which were used in Small Island), the subject still remained in the margins.

"My mum would say, 'I don't think I encountered any real racism. They'd call me things like 'darkie', but then of course I was dark.' And she'd say: 'When I was a teacher, some of the parents took their kids out of my class, but I was glad to see the back of them.'" Levy laughs ironically. "But no, she didn't encounter any racism."

She says she could have written an entire book about Bernard, which is intriguing given that he is a white, racist bigot. But Levy saw Bernard as a challenge, and wanted to climb inside his mind. This is a process she applies to all her characters, and it is why she likes the immediacy of writing in the first person. "For me, it's akin to acting. Whenever I started to write Queenie, I had her voice in my head. I knew how she talked and what she was thinking. And it was the same with Gilbert and Hortense. I like to live that person.

"Every time I've started a new novel," she continues, "I've said, I'm going to write this one in the third person, but when I begin it's like a sheet of glass between me and what's happening. As soon as I switch back to the first, it disappears and I'm there. What I'm not interested in is my opinion. A lot of writers like being present in their own narrative, but I hate it. I want to show you what is going on and hope that you'll form your own opinions. If you can understand something then you're part of the way to changing it."

Levy didn't start writing until her early thirties. There had been nothing before to indicate that she might become a writer. She was the youngest of four siblings and grew up liking television, music (Julie Andrews was an early role model) and the company of her white friends.

There were no burning ambitions, though she would have liked to try acting, and she says that she "drifted" through those early years. As it was, she went to art school to study textile design and stepped into a parallel universe of creative and political awareness. "I'd never read a book with any interest until I was 23, and then somebody bought me [Marilyn French's] The Women's Room, and that was the first time I realised a book could be enjoyable. It was a revelation, and it turned me into an avid reader."

She devoured all the popular African-American writers, but it left her hungry for books that would illuminate her own experience of being born black and English. "There was nothing, so I thought I'd try - and I joined a writing class at the City Lit and loved it."

With the added encouragement of her partner, Bill Mayblin, a graphic designer, she has never looked back. "We've been together for 22 years," she says, "and we got married two years ago. I don't like to rush into these things."

Surprisingly, Levy doesn't see herself as a predominantly London writer, nor as part of a London migrant writing fraternity that began with post-Windrush classics such as George Lamming's The Emigrants, Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage. "I don't get a sense of being part of any particular group. What I do feel is that I'm still learning my craft. I just hope I'm an accessible literary writer, and, more and more, I'm beginning really to enjoy storytelling."

Levy is determined and passionate about her work, and by telling stories she says she is able not only to filter her observations through fiction, but to watch herself grow as a writer.

"None of my books is just about race," she stresses. "They're about people and history. Basically, I love people. The greatest thing I could ever do would be to walk into a room with all my characters in it and mingle with them."

Biography

Andrea Levy was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican immigrant parents. After grammar school, she went to Middlesex Polytechnic where she studied textile design and weaving. When she left college, she began work as a woven-textile designer and assistant buyer in various shops; she later worked at the BBC and Royal Opera House wardrobe departments. Levy began writing in 1988, and attended a writing course at the City Literary Institute, taking one day off a week to write her first book, Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994). Her second, Never Far From Nowhere (1996), was long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her third novel, Fruit of the Lemon (2000), drew on her Caribbean family history, as does her new novel, Small Island (published by Review). Levy also writes short stories which have been anthologised and broadcast on Radio 4, and has been a judge for the Saga Prize and the Orange Prize. She lives in north London with Bill Mayblin, a graphic designer, and has two grown-up stepdaughters.

Independent.com.uk

Interview with Andrea Levy

Andrea Levy's fifth novel, The Long Song, is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. She talks here about her initial reluctance to write the book, the research that fired her imagination and the importance of reading aloud

PJ: After Small Island you've said you began to wonder, "What were my parents doing in the Caribbean in the first place?" which led you, inevitably, to slavery. Yet you were reluctant to go there. Curious and reluctant?
AL: You needed a deep curiosity to write this book. I was scared of this story. I thought, it's a story no-one wants to hear. I can remember myself not wanting to read books on slavery. I didn't watch Roots. It's upsetting, miserable, not a pleasant subject. I knew I'd been reluctant to read that kind of story, so to write one seemed ridiculous - why do that?

PJ: How did you come to write it?
AL: After Small Island - as you do when you've finished a novel - I was pulling at threads and I found a book: Domestic Manners and Social Customs of the White, Coloured and Negro Populations of the West Indies, by Mrs Carmichael. It was a white woman's account of her life on a plantation. She was an apologist for slavery: "You know, the working class in Britain have it harder than these slaves." She told you how the slaves had a lot of food, because they stole it, that sort of thing. As I read between the lines I could hear a different story. I began to see not a victim society but people who were making the best of the circumstances under which they lived. And, we were in the Caribbean, not America. In the Caribbean white people were by far the minority. It was a different kind of power structure. I thought: this is interesting, this is different.

PJ: That research changed your perception of how slaves had lived?
AL: I'd learned the history - the Middle Passage, people brought from Africa in chains, on to Wilberforce and abolition, but I began to I realise that this was over 300 years, slavery had existed for 300 years, therefore a society had grown up. I was interested in people who'd made lives for themselves under such a 'social' system. What sort of society came out of that? This was a big, broad subject. Those people are my ancestors, part of me and part of how the Caribbean has developed. Suddenly it became the most interesting story in the world to me.
PJ: So you were already working on a novel when you attended the conference where the young woman spoke of the shame she felt about her slave history, and set you thinking, "Could a novelist persuade this young woman to have pride in her slave ancestors through telling her a story?"
AL: Yes, I'd started the book. I was going to write something that started in slavery and got out quickly, I was still nervous of the subject. But her question made me think: this is not only an interesting, big, broad subject, it's also essential. There are a lot of people who don't know this story. It's part of British history and it needs to be told. I knew what people would say when the book came out - "we've had books on slavery, we've 'done' slavery." How can you can take 300 years of human history and maybe in ten or twenty novels say it's been done? Yes, there are some novels about slavery but hardly anything on Caribbean slavery.
PJ: Did that woman's question, her sense of shame, change the writing for you?
AL: Only in that I wanted to write a book that she would want to read. I didn't want to write a misery fest. I wanted to write a book that had hope and that showed the humanity of the people involved. It's important to write books that are entertaining, that aren't essays, that aren't dull.
PJ: Do you plan research beforehand or leap in and let one source lead to another?
AL: I leap in and let one source take me on a trail. I will use what I find, rather than go looking for something I think might be there and can't find. I find things I enjoy and that feed the story. For example, it was in Mrs Carmichael's book that I read about the bed sheet being put on the table instead of a tablecloth. You pick up detail that allows your imagination to start. I was always reading between the lines, I was looking at it from a different perspective to Mrs Carmichael.
PJ: What kind of notes do you make in research - factual or do you begin to sketch scenes?
AL: Mrs Carmichael's book was a great source for details of daily life but it was in the rare books section of the British Library. So there you are, you have a pencil and whole book. I wanted the whole book; I wanted it at home. I searched for a copy to buy but no chance. In the rare books section there is also a music area with booths to listen to music, so I went into a booth and read the book into a recorder. They didn't know what do with me; I kept having to get out to let people listen to music. But it was the only way I could get what I needed.
PJ: As you research ideas must be bubbling up all the time - do you remember anything in particular?
AL: Attitudes are what I remember. Trollope's mother wrote a book about her travels through America and she recalls an incident at a friend's house where a slave girl, aged about 8, had accidentally eaten some rat poison so they made the girl sick. The girl was hurt and crying. Mrs Trollope took the girl into her lap. The girl had no mother. All the family laughed at Mrs T for being so sentimental about this slave. That really stuck with me, the image of a child with no parent, going though the most traumatic experience and having no one to comfort her. How could you not see a human being? That sort of attitude - they weren't human - was so prevalent. It's profoundly shocking. But that's how we work, we human beings, we make other people into demons.
PJ: It's that kind of research that allows you to imagine a powerful scene, such as the one where John Howarth feels Kitty's legs as if she were an animal.
AL: When you read about the attitudes it's akin to them talking about animals; the idea that they weren't dealing with people
PJ: Getting back to the concrete detail - the bed sheet used for a tablecloth - that piece of research seems to have allowed you to grow the section on the contrasting Christmas celebrations - slaves, big house - but the section also ends with a real historical event - the Baptist Wars. How does it all come together?
AL: I wanted to show the slaves living a life, show them doing their job, serving Christmas dinner to Caroline and her guests, but also their celebrations. They are real people. Some of them are better dressed than others and they have their rivalries. I've always got an eye to illustrate what life might have been like, wanting to show people are people. I've always got an eye to driving the story, all of that goes along together. It's happy happenstance that the Baptist uprising was at Christmas. It's such an unconscious process.
PJ: Research also took you to Jamaica. At which point - once you had characters and a few scenes, or was location research vital to getting going?
AL: I was quite well into the book. I knew I wanted to see a plantation, to get an idea of the geography. Thank god I did! I would never have figured that out in Crouch End! The vastness of it was amazing to me, just to see the relationship where the works were to the fields, where the great house was to the slave village, how the cane came through, where the river was, how it all worked. I had a tape recorder to say what I saw and I took loads of pictures.
I stayed on this fabulous plantation. I remember having dinner one night in the great house just me and my husband, Bill. In the kitchen out the back, there were 7 or 8 black Jamaicans getting our dinner. I could hear them. We're sitting at this rather grand table waiting for them to serve us dinner and I thought: what's different? I was in the 19th Century; that's the sort of thing that is an emotional research. You sit there, and think, I can feel what this is like.
PJ: You could be both Caroline and July?
AL: Yes, because I had to be both, I had to understand them both.
PJ: You took 6 years to write The Long Song - how much of that was spent on research and finding the form/characters?
AL: It's hard to say now. There's initial research to find a story. I found a story and I knew where to find detail if I needed it. So things like the Baptist Wars, I had to go and read a first-hand account to get an idea of what happened, but I knew that was there when I needed it. Most of the The Long Song, was me imagining it. Really thinking myself into it. Into a country I don't live in, in a time I've never lived in and in a language that is not ordinary. You need detail to give it sense of place and time. So getting that detail is the thing I go back to research for. When Caroline sends July into town for a pair of gloves I have to know what kind, so I research - oh yes, yellow kid with a Bolton thumb. I almost don't know what I'm talking about. I live in fear of a historian saying, yeah well, they didn't have a Bolton thumb at that time!
PJ: We know Thomas and July are out of slavery, as the book is narrated from a position of freedom but did you know how far back July's story would go?
AL: I wasn't sure what the arc of the book would be. The story took it's own shape. I'm an intuitive writer. I let the story take me. I see how it feels when I read it back. I wanted you to have a narrator that you knew was comfortable - you knew she was all right, because as I reader that's what I wanted. As a writer I enjoyed playing with narrator addressing the reader.
PJ: Did you always have July as first-person narrator?
AL: I started off in the third person, the language was a bit more, not patois, but stronger than it is now. That was difficult. I didn't think I could sustain it. So I wanted her to write in standard English. Someone at a reading said, "Well, that's not how my mother speaks." No, but that's how my mother writes. It isn't a spoken account, it's a written account. When you write you do tend to be more careful and formal.
PJ: What was a typical writing day once you'd started the first draft? How did that change as you got into the middle and then on to the end?
AL: I write in chunks. First I write longhand in the library. A rough idea of what I will cover in that section. I wouldn't show that to anyone. Then I work it up to quite polished before I go on to the next bit. So by the end of the book I have a lot of polished pieces. It's 90% is done. I will have been reading as I go along, making notes noting where there is a hole - so I'll go back and perhaps move things around, but I don't tend to change a character, or do something fundamental.
PJ: So, as you go from chunk to chunk you're building, structurally, from scene to scene?
AL: Yes, I'm very careful with structure. I spend a lot of sleepless nights on the structure and how it's going to fall and will it work as a story? I really lose sleep over that. I always have a notebook by my bed for the bits where I struggle to keep the story going.
PJ: You're working intuitively, keeping track of structure but you don't plan the whole arc - how much ahead are you seeing?
AL: I have a rough idea of what comes next because it's not only a book of stories it's a book of ideas and wanting to explore those ideas. So the Christmas sequence is wanting to explore the daily life of being a slave and the relationship between the big house and the slaves. After that, moving into the Robert Goodwin section, I wanted to explore what slavery can make of a decent human being, how it can turn you into a brute quite easily. So I'm moving the story on, but I'm moving the ideas on, ideas about slavery and what it does to people. There are so many strands that you pull in. It's such and unconscious process. I wish I could say, it's like this, or like this... What I'm thinking about when I write is getting into the scene, it's incredibly intense - I can see each scene. I don't see words, I see the scene.
PJ: When you spoke at Goldsmiths you said, you didn't trust yourself to write for more than two hours a day.
AL: Two hours a day is from a blank page to something written on it or from a pile of rough draft to a polished piece. I like to think a lot about what I've written. So I give time to come back to it fresh. If I'm editing polished stuff or researching then 16-hour days are not unheard of.
PJ: You've talked before about reading work out to you husband, Bill, your first reader. That's part of the process for you?
AL: I read aloud to Bill once a section is polished enough. But I always read out loud as I write. I do it all the time, every minute. I type and I say it back to myself. I always hear it. When I came to do the audio book it was second nature. I knew it backwards. I write by speaking it. So if it doesn't sound right I change it. Sometimes I think: I need another beat there, the rhythm's not right. I have to get the rhythm right. It's very important to me how it sounds.
PJ: You've played with storytelling, giving several versions of the same event, implying gossip or eyewitness or memory. This allows you to spare us being present at some distressing moments, such as Kitty's final confrontation with Tam Dewar. We hear speculations on what might have happened, and it's all the more powerful for that. How did this evolve?
AL: That bit I can remember writing quite well - the riot. Very hard to write a riot, to give that some convincing momentum. So it started with other people telling it and that was a Eureka moment, that July could narrate what other people said they saw. I probably did write the scene directly, initially, but when I wrote it through the other character's eyes, I realised that I'm telling you something about the humanity of the other people around and what they had to go through. That kind of happenstance - finding a way to narrate, I love that.
I remember writing a line that said they saw Kitty standing up like Nanny Maroon, even now it makes it makes me cry, it's a powerful emotion, that someone would endanger their lives for their child. I can't stand sentimentality but I also don't want to write naked misery.
PJ: You give us plenty to laugh about too.
AL: A lot has been made of the humour - it's upset some people that a book on slavery isn't a misery fest, as if you're not taking it seriously enough. Whereas I think humour is part of the human condition. This is how human interactions work, you laugh and you're serious. But if you laugh doesn't mean it's not a serious book.
PJ: Most of your characters are neither all good, nor all bad. You've been careful to deal each one a fairly even, let's say, realistic, hand.
AL: I think very carefully about characters. What would they do? And in order to do that I have to think, what would I do in a certain situation? What would somebody I know do? That's very important, getting that right - how would someone act? It has to be something I could imagine a real person doing. The have to be human beings.
PJ: Thomas's ending packs a punch - did you always have that in mind?
AL: I knew that from fairly early on. Once I'd got Thomas I knew he would bookend the story. There is also a link to Small Island. I'm not going to tell you what it is! I put it in for the careful reader to find! It gave me a great deal of pleasure to have that link between the The Long Song and Small Island.
PJ: What are you working on at the moment?
AL: I'm having a bit of a rest. The Long Song was a very difficult book to write. The hardest book yet. When I got to the end, I was so relieved. I'm looking forward to spending time on 'receive' instead of 'send,' - going to galleries, museums, travelling.
PJ: What are you reading at the moment?
AL: Mainly non-fiction. I've just read Bill Bryson's At Home - very informative.
PJ: What would you say to someone about to begin a first novel, particularly one that depends largely on historical research?
AL: Run! Run like the wind!! No, really. If it isn't tough you aren't doing it right. It's hard work, a lot of hard work. It can be incredibly enjoyable, I love the intensity sometimes, but I also like to put my feet up.

http://wordsunlimited.typepad.com/words_unlimited/2010/09/andrea-levy.html

"History of Jamaica - The British" from The Jamaica National Heritage Trust

It was not until 1655, however that the Spanish were driven from the island by Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables. The Spanish were forced the flee the island but not before freeing the slaves who took to the hills where they remained a constant thorn in the side of the English.

In an effort to settle the island Cromwell issued his famous proclamation, which granted land to British citizens who were willing to settle on the island. In 1656 approximately 1,600 immigrants arrived and settled around Port Morant. Although the Spaniards were driven out they never gave up hope of recapturing the island of Jamaica and in 1658 another Spanish force landed but was defeated at the decisive battle at Rio Nuevo.

The island began to prosper under the rule of the British. Great wealth was brought to the island by the buccaneers, who operated mainly from Port Royal, by plundering Spanish ships which transported gold and silver from South America.

By the late Seventeenth Century, Port Royal had earned the reputation of being the richest and the wickedest city in the world. In 1692 this town suffered destruction by an earthquake in which more than half of the town sank beneath the sea. This signaled the end of piracy in the West Indies.

The second half of the Seventeenth Century saw the beginning of the "sugar revolution". Large parcels of land were planted in sugar cane. The whole process of making sugar required a huge labour force. The English planters sought various groups to provide the much needed labour. African slavery was not new to the West Indies and had been introduced by the Spanish and the Portuguese. Later, the Dutch supplied slaves from Africa, and they taught the English the techniques necessary for the production of sugar.

The Africans brought in were from many tribes, although the majority were Coromantees from the Gold Coast, Eboes from the Bight of Benin and Mandingoes. The Coromantees are described as being a strong, brave, proud and fierce race. Most of the slave revolts in Jamaica were led by Coromantee slaves.

The slaves were divided into two main groups, the field slaves and the domestic/house slaves. In the case of the former they were further divided into skilled workers such as carpenters, coopers, drivers, masons, blacksmiths, and unskilled workers, that is, those who worked in the field. Punishment was a regular part of estate life and ranged from lashings, to maiming and ultimately death.

There was resistance to slavery by slaves, both passive and active. Examples of passive resistance included poisoning of masters, destruction of property, and infanticide. In the case of active resistance, there were open rebellions, and many slaves ran away and joined forces with the slaves who were set free by the Spanish or who had fled to the interior hills of the island. They were later called Maroons. In 1735 - 1739 they fought against the British in what was called the First Maroon War.

Although Jamaica's sugar industry continued to grow and provide England with great wealth it was not without its problems. For instance, wars throughout the Eighteenth Century, caused a reduction in trade between the colonies and Great Britain. The lack of supplies adversely affected the health of the slaves, and ultimately lowered the production of sugar.

The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, marked the beginning of the end of slavery and the economic power of the Jamaican planters. By 1813, the wealth of the West Indian planters could no longer muffle the cries of the abolitionists and humanitarians to free the slaves. Consequently, in 1833 slavery was abolished in the British West Indies and a system of apprenticeship was adopted. The objective of the apprenticeship system was to help the slaves adjust to their free status and to supply the planters with a source of constant labour until they could adjust to full wage labour. The abuses of the system brought about a premature end to slavery and in 1838 full freedom was given.

Although taken from their country of origin the slaves retained some aspects of their culture. In the case of their language some African words, such as "nyam", "duckunnoo", "patoo", and language patterns which include the repetition of a word, as in the case of "chaka chaka" meaning chaotic, and "little little" meaning very small, were retained.

The abolition of slavery saw a rise in the construction of Free Villages, and growth in peasant farming. There was also an increase in the membership of Nonconformist Churches and a system of education for the free blacks was introduced. In addition, the planters' fear of mass migration of ex-slaves from the plantation saw the introduction of other racial groups to replace slave labour. Groups brought in included Europeans (Germans, Scots and Portuguese), Free Africans, Chinese and East Indians.

Although many things had changed, social conditions remained more or less the same for blacks. By the 1860's the situation had worsened and gave rise to what was later called, the Morant Bay Rebellion. The Morant Bay Rebellion brought about some changes in Jamaica, firstly, the system of Government changed from Representative to Crown Colony (or direct Crown rule), secondly, the Anglican Church was disestablished, thirdly, the Institute of Jamaica was founded to encourage literature, science and art. By 1872 the capital was transferred from Spanish Town to Kingston. There was an improvement in the water supply and a number of schools were established. There was a shift from sugar to banana production.

The Great War (1914 - 1918) gave many Jamaicans the opportunity to travel which in turn helped to shape their views of the system of Government. In addition, during the early Twentieth Century, many Jamaicans left in search of employment in the Panama Canal Zone, and in Costa Rica, Cuba and Honduras to work on the plantations. The movement of people brought about a change in ideas by the 1920's. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who promoted unity among blacks and pride in their race, became a prominent figure during this period.

http://www.jnht.com/jamaica/hist_english.php

Jamaica National Heritage Trust