Small Island

"And Hortense. Her face still haughty. But how long before her chin is cast down? For, fresh from a ship, England had not yet deceived her. But soon it will. All us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness were a joke to my clever smirking cousin now."

Andrea Levy's Small Island is actually quite reminiscent of Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, but also the more recent White Teeth. While focusing specifically on two couples, Jamaican and English, around the time of World War II, Levy's novel tells the story of the Windrush generation of Jamaican immigrants in London. Zadie Smith's White Teeth occurs decades later, but both novels share a similar fixation with the Second World War as the springboard for anticolonialism and immigration in London. Both novels also feature India and Jamaica, although none of the major characters in Levy's novel are from South Asia. 

Instead, we get a very Jamaica-centered narrative on how West Indians contributed to the war effort, experienced extreme discrimination in the military and civilian life in London, and the rising tides of independence in Jamaica and India. Levy's novel somehow manages to encapsulate so much of the tragedy and contradictions of World War II with a sense of humor that is quite endearing and optimistic. The film adaptation is very faithful to these themes and humor of the novel, which pleasantly surprised me when I finally completed the book. 

One gets a very useful background in Jamaica during the 1930s and 1940s. Hortense and Gilbert's intriguing backgrounds reveal so much of the intricacies of color and class in Jamaican society, with the strong assumptions forced into West Indian minds that England is the 'Mother County,' English ways are best. Upon finally reaching England, the dream dies as Hortense and Gilbert endure the racist and classist prejudices of London. Like Selvon, Lamming, Smith, and numerous other Caribbean or Caribbean-descended writers, the bitterness of the immigrant experience pervades the text. The imperialism (and outright racism) of England's military and treatment of Indians during Bernard's service also tie in here, revealing how the myths about World War II as a 'fight for democracy' or 'freedom' were nothing but. 

The real magic of Levy's novel lies in how she manages to juxtapose this Caribbean immigrant experience with the class nuances of white England. Queenie's character eventually becomes a sympathetic one, despite her disturbing upbringing (Queenie used to mock the children of miners, the poorest of the poor) and being reared by a class-conscious aunt in London who prepared for her for a loveless marriage for economic security and status. The strictures of the class system of English society seem to come to life in Levy's tale, revealing some common threads with the search for opportunity by Caribbean immigrants after the war. It is, in this sense, one finds the mutual experiences of the Blighs and Josephs capable of expressing some hope for the subsequent generations of a multicultural, multiracial London.