[lit-ideas] Re: England good at "incorporating" immigrants
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:32:08 EDT
And 'The Internationalization of English'. This is the section in B.
King's book referred to by L. Helm and cited in the reference section of the
online interview with A. Levy, online.
My last post today. J. Evans was referring to his interview to A. Levy,
online, so here are some excerpts.
---
Q: I’ve read that you started writing in your mid-thirties in the 1980s.
That was a
time when there was so much going on in ... third world publishing. Was
there was any connection for you in that respect?
A: Certainly.
Q: Does anything in particular come to mind?
A: [T]he beginning of black consciousness.
Q: How did you start writing?
A: Back in 1987. ... You had a nice day out in Covent Garden every week
[at this workshop], and I really
enjoyed it.
Q: In "Never far from nowhere", [you have this character] Vivien [with her
'issue] -- "Do I belong in England? ..." And I just read ‘Loose change’
which is about another wave of migration.
A: Before I wasn’t so interested in the link between Jamaica, the
Caribbean and Britain. I was much more, ‘we’re black British, we’re here, and
how
are we going to move on?’ And that’s absolutely part of what I do, too,
but I didn’t think that looking backwards was so important, whereas now I
think it is absolutely important and so fascinating.
Q: [Y]ou interviewed your mother about your family history?
A: Yes, as far as she could tell me anything.
Q: So when you were growing up, your parents’ experience wasn’t talked
about?
A: No, no, no, no, no. We never really discussed that. I had no idea. I
had to prise it out of my mother. I can’t tell you what it’s like to grow up
in an incredibly nuclear family—a nucleus—because we had nobody else at
all. And then to have a sense that actually you do have family, that you have
connection, that you do go back. It sounds crazy, but it’s a revelation
because I’ve just grown up in this tiny, tiny world. So when people talk
about grandparents—I never knew a grandparent. When my grandmother died it
meant absolutely nothing to us kids—which is incredible. Connecting with that
again—I think that’s where it started off. Now I want to know everything.
...
Q: As "Changing English" is a journal for teachers of English, I wanted to
talk about
education. ... Was the English curriculum part of the experience of
exclusion?
A: Oh, I’ll say. Middlemarch? [Laughs.] Yes, because it was something
entirely
different, the code was Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, fabulous
writers. I
can see what they were getting at now, but for someone who was coming from
having to watch the telly from four o’clock to eleven—and there were some
great things on the telly—but for someone who just doesn’t read, this isn’
t going to
work. You’ve got to understand what reading is about before you can get
into
anything like that. So there was life—and there was this stuff that you
had to do at
school.
Q: And the connections just weren’t there.
A: No, no. Even now, I’d still say what is the connection between me, ever
having
read, at the age of 15, Middlemarch? Middlemarch? At the age of 15? Are
you kidding
me? I just read it recently, and I thought I’m beginning to understand it
now, but the
age is crazy. Books to me were where you got bored stiff. That’s what a
book was. It
was something to get through if you could. ... You wind up
reading Middlemarch and thinking, ‘this is wonderful, if only they’d read
it’.
Q: [Why always London?]
A: It’s just because I live in London, and London as far as I am concerned
is a country and very
different from the rest of Britain. I grew up here and everything I know
and
understand is in London, and I really value that sense of belonging I feel
in London.
It’s really important to me, I feel like a Londoner, and I am. I love
that. Having said
that, my next book isn’t set in London. I’m beginning to worry [laughs].
Q: In all your novels, that sense of belonging is something that your
protagonists
have to struggle to get.
A: When I was first on the shortlist for the Orange Prize, two papers said
that there
was only one Briton on the shortlist and that was Rose Tremain. I tell
you, I nearly
packed my bags. I felt very grounded in London, but as soon as that
happened, I felt,
actually my family have the most incredibly fleeting relationship with
this place. I’m
not grounded to it. My parents came here. They lived here for 30-odd
years. My
mum is at the moment living in New Zealand. My Dad is dead. I’ve got a
sister in
New Zealand, a brother in Vietnam, very little family here. In fact my
family in
the next 50, 100 years, will probably no longer be here—I don’t have
children. And
in a way it didn’t matter as well. This is my home, and it’s dynamic. You
struggle
with it all the time. There are people who would like you to piss off, but
it doesn’t
worry me.
Q: In your most recent novel, two people come to Britain thinking the
doors are
going to be open to them and they literally and figuratively have the
doors slammed
in their faces.
A: People have often said to me—because that happens, because there is
that sense
that people don’t want you here—don’t you feel that you should say you
belong
somewhere else? Shouldn’t you find your sense of self or belonging
somewhere else,
somewhere where people want you?
Q: That seems an extraordinary thing to say.
A: It is an extraordinary thing to say.
Q: At the end of Never far from nowhere somebody asks Vivien where she is
from,
and she answers, ‘My family are from Jamaica, but I am English’.
A: That’s how I feel. My sense of belonging doesn’t depend on being
universally
loved or accepted. I don’t know whether some people do have that sense,
but I never
really have. I’m always a bit of an outsider everywhere. When I was in
Jamaica
people talked about me being a Caribbean writer, and I’m sort of ‘I don’t
think so’ and
people are, ‘aren’t you proud of what you’re doing? Why don’t you want
to be a
Caribbean writer?’ But I don’t come from the Caribbean. I felt like a
fraud to say I was a
Caribbean writer because I don’t know the Caribbean. Therefore the
Caribbean isn’t
necessarily the thing that is informing my work, maybe it is a bit, but I
don’t feel like a
Caribbean writer. And then I thought, why shouldn’t I say I’m a Caribbean
writer? I
just decided to be cool about it. Passing through Birmingham—Birmingham
writer.
Q: Related to this notion of London spaces, of belonging at times and being
excluded at others, is what constitutes home. It’s in Every light in the
house burnin’
when the characters go to the Ideal Home Exhibition, but it’s also in your
most
recent work where the house is emblematic of England. Though very clearly
drawn
as individuals, the characters also seem to represent the interaction
between
migrants from Jamaica and the English. And in your recent short story, ‘
Loose
change’, there’s homelessness.
A: Oh yes, how interesting. Academics always have a different take—it’s
wonderful. When you’re talking, I’m suddenly thinking I can see how home
is
very important. I have a tremendous fear of being homeless. My biggest
fear would
be to be a refugee—absolutely terrifying. I grew up in this tiny little
council flat, and
it was a real dive, six of us in this tiny little place and we always
dreamed of a home,
not dissimilar to the one you’re sitting in now. And there was this
programme on the
telly once called ‘Kathy Come Home’, about homelessness in Britain, and I
remember watching it, I must have been quite young—terrifying. So I think
there is
something about finding that space that feels yours. If you can see it in
my work,
then it has probably something to do with that.
Q: I imagine it also has to do with being first generation in a new place.
A: Yes, that’s right. Because my parents had a fear of losing their home,
if they
were homeless for a while. If you’ve got a home, if you’ve got somewhere
that you
can shut the door on, you’ve got something solid and you are within a
society. When
that’s taken away, you are just floating.
Q: When Faith has the breakdown in Fruit of the lemon, she doesn’t feel
she has a
home anymore. And the novel opens with her parents saying they are going ‘
back
home’ and all she can think they mean is back to their council flat in
Stoke
Newington.
A: That sense of home must have to do with having immigrant parents and a
palpable sense of insecurity of being in a society where the only real
sense of security
is being at home. I used to dream about it. And the Ideal Home Exhibition—
all my
friends and I when we were young wanted a home, a nice home, it’s very
important.
For some people, though, their home is what they carry with them; it’s not
necessarily a place. For me it really is a place.
Q: With the experience of migration in the family, you can be in between
places.
A: Yes, absolutely. I grew up with a sense of insecurity about home
because I was
always in council housing and they can always chuck you out and so the
sense of
somewhere that is in your control in the middle of London, to have a house—
to have
control over where you can stay—
Q: In ‘Loose change’—your story of the refugee from Uzbekistan who doesn’
t
know where to sleep that night—the narrator remembers her immigrant
grandmother
who was given a spare bed, but then her decision at the end is very
curious, very …
A: Very Andrea Levy. The genesis of that short story, like most of my
short stories,
is from a dream. I remember having a dream where I woke up thinking, what
would I
do in that situation? Am I big enough? I often think about that with the
war, would I
have been a hero or would I have been one of those collaborators. If
tested, if push
came to shove—do I just want to fit in or could I be different? And until
you’re tried
you never know. That’s what that’s about. You don’t know what you’re
protecting.
If I so tenaciously want a home, would I protect it?
Q: How does your writing fit in or intersect with contemporary British
writing
today? Or does it?
A: Time will tell. But, I think that at the moment there’s a lovely sort
of vibrancy
about black British culture. We’re having a little moment, and perhaps we
may look
back on this and see it. Certainly in the last year, we’ve had the
Mastermind
champion—do you get that programme in the States? It’s a big quiz. We had
The
Apprentice, and he was black and British, and then we’ve had Zadie Smith,
we’ve had
my book, we’ve had Kelly Holmes getting two gold medals …
Q: At the West End theatres, The big life and Elmina’s kitchen—
A: And some fantastic actors. In theatre, Roy Williams’s stuff is really
good.
Music—and in art, Chris Ofili. I’m hoping we’re going to look back on it
as a sort of
Harlem Renaissance. But you don’t know when you’re going through it.
We’re goingto have to fightourway intothe canon. I’ll have to fight to
get in the canon.
I had this thing through the post about the classics of the future, and
they wantedme to
choose 15 books out of this list of a hundred books. I just looked at this
list of a hundred
books and I thought Small island’s not on it. You’ve left my book off it,
and there’s
CaptainCorelli’s mandolin and Birdsong.Who chose this list of a hundred?Who
’smaking
this canon? And I wrote back saying this list is so limited. It’s daft.
Itmakesme somad. I
do think we’re going to have to fight so hard to come out of this
oh-that-was-lovely-dear
syndrome. It’s so patronising. No, this is serious work. It’s more
serious than a lot of
serious writing in Britain. Because you laughed, you think it’s not
serious.
Q: Oxford University Press recently published two separate histories of
contemporary British literature, one about black and Asian literature, and
one more
focused on white writers, and it seemed an odd choice to keep these
traditions separate.
In an article called ‘Literary apartheid’, Susie Thomas (2005) talks
about the way
publishing and marketing seem to separate these writers. She says that
Maggie Gee
had difficulty getting The White family published because it was assumed
that she
couldn’t possibly write knowledgeably about black characters.
A: I had someone ask me how can white writers write about a black character
because as soon as we do we’re accused of being racist. I said, if you don’
t think
you’re being racist, then fight your corner. If you’ve written about a
black person and
someone says you’re racist and you think they’re wrong, then say why, so
that we
move on. Don’t just don’t do it. It makes me laugh to think people are
scared to
write about characters because someone says that’s not right, a black
person doesn’t
do that. If you think they’re wrong, then you say. Then that’s how it w
ill break down.
If you get into a big row, and it gets into a big hoopla, what the hell,
this is what is
dynamic about it. That sort of mindset, ‘oh we can’t do that because then
we’ll be
accused of being racist’: well, if you are and you’re not, then fight
your corner,
what’s the matter with you lily-livered bastards? [Laughs.]
I think that some of the more established British writers are feeling a
sense of
threat in that it’s becoming clear that writing about a modern society and
a modern
Britain does actually involve having to know something about other
communities,
and you can live in Britain and know absolutely nothing. I know about the
ethnic
majority, as I call them, because I live here, so that’s no problem for me
to write
about. It’s hard to make a book feel like it’s dealing with a modern
Britain unless it
takes in the changing face of Britain.
Q: How have your tools as a writer developed over the years?
A: I think I’m definitely learning. At the moment I’m fixated on
story-telling. I
really want to be a storyteller. So I read all sorts of books by people
that I wouldn’t
normally read, but I think they’re fantastic storytellers. I really do
feel like I am
learning all the time and that there is a lot to learn. With each book
there is
something different that you’re exploring and trying to learn both in
terms of its
content and in terms of the way you actually deliver it. I just love
novels, I love
stories, and when they work well, I don’t think there’s anything to beat
it in terms of
art. I don’t think there’s anything to beat a really finely crafted,
fantastic novel.
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