The Lived and Learned Narratives of the Past: Memory in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

In his Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (1925) Maurice Halbwachs makes a simple distinction between collective memory and history: while memory is the lived history, history is the learned version of the past. Andrea Levy’s last novel The Long Song (2010) revisits the lived history of the Afro-Caribbean community that is sidelined in the learned history. Told by a former slave named July, the novel is set in early 19th-century Jamaica in the years before and after the abolition of slavery. Despite her editor-son Thomas’s questioning and requests for an account of key historical events, July’s story is an attempt to unveil what is left unsaid about plantation life in conventional historiography. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’s distinction between history and memory, this paper aims to examine how the novel foregrounds the memory of the Afro-Caribbean community and reconstructs the past in multi-faceted versions to challenge the received version of the past in Western historiography.