The Literary Legacies of Black Britain and Black Canada: A Comparative Reading of Andrea Levy's and Austin Clarke's Early Works

Abstract:This essay offers a comparative, transnational reading of Andrea Levy's first two novels—Every Light in the House Burnin' (1994) and Never Far from Nowhere (1996)—and Austin Clarke's Toronto Trilogy—The Meeting Point (1967), Storm of Fortune (1973), and The Bigger Light (1975). These early works bear striking similarities to one another; they are also notably different from those of the Windrush generation, the first wave of Caribbean writers such as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon who published in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. While the Windrush writers framed themselves and their works as articulating a Caribbean consciousness, both Levy's and Clarke's early texts demonstrate a profound interest in exploring Britain and Canada, the spaces from which the authors wrote and in which their novels are set. Levy and Clarke display a similar literary commitment to negotiating a place for Blackness in nations that were, in the 1960s and 1970s, actively hostile to non-white people. Their early novels indict and hold their respective nations accountable for their marginalization of the Black immigrants and their descendants who are, or will become, their legal if not their social citizens. The essay also examines the various literary traditions in which Levy and Clarke are—or are not—positioned and how they situate themselves vis-à-vis their respective nations. By insistently naming themselves, their characters, and their works as English and Canadian, respectively, they write against dominant narratives that use their Caribbean ancestry to attach them to elsewhere.