Redressing Racist Legacies in the Melancholic Nation: Anger and Silences in Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon

Abstract:"I am the bastard child of Empire and I will have my day," declares Faith, the narrator of Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon (1999), upon her return to England from Jamaica and after a catalogue of racial microaggressions that Levy carefully unfolds in the first part of the novel. Focusing largely on this portion of the novel, this article looks at how Faith's experiences of racialised trauma are a direct consequence of the melancholic state of the nation. It draws on Sara Ahmed's figure of the angry black woman, Audre Lorde's pioneering work on anger as a response to racism, and Anne Anlin Cheng's and Paul Gilroy's work to explore how the novel addresses racial and postcolonial melancholia. Paying close attention to the formal developments in Levy's work, particularly her use of ellipses and the defamiliarising effects of her openings and endings, I examine the novel's complex engagement with silences, anger, and racism. Like Small Island (2004) and her other novels, Fruit of the Lemon brings multiple and contesting collective and personal histories into direct collision from its very first sentence. The novel presents readers with "the suffering racial body" (Cheng 29) from the very beginning and, like Levy's other works, urges readers to keep on "looking at the historical, cultural and cross racial consequences of racial wounding and to situate these effects as crucial, formative elements of individual, national and cultural identities" (Cheng 94). By looking closely at the workings of racial politics in the novel and the ways in which various expressions of anger are silenced and/or articulated, I argue that Faith's situation is complicated because the nation is melancholic in its relation to its colonial history and the raced other.