Levy’s novel is not about contemporary America: it is set in Britain in 1948 (and, through flashbacks, in Jamaica and Britain and, briefly, India and America before and during the war). I don’t know what intuition led me to pick Andrea Levy’s Small Island as my first book to read after the U.S. Arthur Bligh had become another casualty of war - but come, tell me, someone. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.I could no longer see her but I called out to Queenie as an MP, his baton thrusting hard into my chest, his face pressing close to mine, hot breath breaching my cheek delivered the words ‘Get away from her, nigger.’ Only now did I experience the searing pain of this fight - and not from the grazing on my face or the wrench in my shoulder. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors.
Undoubtedly, Levy’s use of easily apprehensible metaphors for the complex condition of the postcolonial and diasporic subject has played a role in the success of her novel which has become a popular text and has opened up broad discussions about ethnic and cultural formations in the recent history of Britain. Levy also interrogates other conventional metaphors of the colonial and postcolonial condition, such as the house to represent the nation or the individual and, particularly, daffodils as a metaphor for imperial control, a trope that originated, as we shall see, in the use of Wordsworth’s poem ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ in colonial education.
Metaphor has traditionally articulated the interaction between the metropolis and the colonies, and Small Island engages with the conventional filial metaphor of the centre of empire as the ‘mother country’ and the colonies as her children. This chapter explores the role of metaphor in Andrea Levy’s Small Island (2004) and particularly the way it transcribes the diasporic subject’s emergence from the metaphorical shackles of imperialist discourse and entrance into the official history of postcolonial Britain.
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