Small island

Small Island is structured around four competing narratives each claiming historical truth and experience through shifts in setting and time. Levy’s historical novel is told through a series of extended analepsis that move back and forth between 1924 and 1948 as well as across national borders and cultures. Written more than fifty years after the first Windrush arrival, it creates a common narrative of nation and identity in order to understand the experiences of Black people in Post-Colonial Britain. Yet she frames these experiences within those of the British in order to acknowledge all historical truth and to not establish a singular articulation of the experience of migration and empire. Through the alternative narratives Levy attempts to fill the historical gaps and articulate a renegotiation of identity as after World War Two ‘the sun has finally set on the Empire, we are now having to face up to all of these realities.’
Throughout the novel Levy invites the reader to experience moments of encounter and how people had to negotiate nationhood, citizenship and culture in different settings. This is firstly illustrated within the significant interaction between Queenie and the exhibited African man within the Prologue. Queenie describes him through a series of superlatives, referring to his lips as ‘bike tyres’, reinforcing the notion of ‘the other’. She describes him as a ‘black man who looked to be carved from melting chocolate. [...]Blacker than when you smudge your face with a sooty cork.’ Queenie’s use of contrast and extended complex sentences demonstrates her attempt to negotiate ‘the other’ through common ground. She deconstructs the African man by using images that are familiar to her such as ‘chocolate’ and ‘soot’ and therefore through her own narrative creates an identity for him in which she is comfortable. Levy does this to allow the reader to consider the notion of discursive identify through the encounter with others and therefore how necessary