Voice, Violence, and Masculine Suffocation in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

Chapter two shows that in Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song the enslaved Jamaican woman’s voice plays a central role: the heroine deliberately attempts to interrupt, parody, and reject (M)aster narratives. Yet, there are limits to the enslaved woman’s voice, as the novel’s Afra-Caribbean polyphonic narration demonstrates. Analyzing the narrator’s speech, even after emancipation, reveals the constructed nature of the text and that the framing of narrative authority, despite being multi-layered, remains problematically enclosed in, figured through, and contained by the name of the Father and violent, colonizing, masculine parameters. Thus, the novel imagines matria as a space that reunites mothers and daughters and as a time that restores subjectivity and speech to Caribbean women.