Borders, Liminality and National Identity in Andrea Levy’s Short Stories

Born in London to Jamaican parents who arrived in London on board of the legendary Empire Windrush, Andrea Levy has penned works that are characterised by a critical negotiation with notions pertaining to ethnicity, national identity and culture of the Jamaican diaspora in the UK. Levy’s only collection of short stories, Six Stories & An Essay (2014), dramatizes the writer’s urge to come to terms with her family heritage to properly acknowledge Britain’s Caribbean history, violently blotted out from the main narrative of British history however integral to the “greatness” of the British Empire. This essay explores “The Polite Way That English People Have,” a story which interweaves Levy’s family history with the collective history of the Jamaican diaspora in the UK. Similarly, “Uriah’s War,” the last story of the collection, intertwines personal memories, ancestry and ethnicity with British national identity, a political issue that has to be contemplated within a larger project of plural and inclusive nations.