Small Island and the Immigrant Experience, Essay Example

The background of the novel, ‘Small Island’ (Andréa Levy) takes place in 1948 Britain and examines class, race and prejudice in a post-war England (specially London) when a new society comprised of immigrants begins to form. Gilbert Joseph, a newly wed from Jamaica who served in the RAF during W.W II   and expects to come home a hero knows that he will have to struggle for a prosperous life in London, but finds himself considered a second class citizen because of his color. Nonetheless, abetted in reaching England by his wife who pays for their passage there, he is determined to make his British life a success. Hortense, his naïve wife, has more of a difficult time.  Brutally rejected time and again in her attempts to take up a teaching career and treated prejudicially by white working-class neighbors, she has a tough time making herself understood and finding friends:

Her breath rose in desperate gasps as she mumbling repeated over, ‘They say I can’t teach.’ Softly delivered in my ear, Hortense informed me that she was required to train all over again to teach English children. And I remembered the last time I saw Charlie Denton. My old RAF chum grinning on me because he was happy he said, oh, he was tickled pink that he had become a teacher of history. Now, let me tell you, this man once argue silly with me that Wellington had won the battle of Trafalgar Square. And yet there was he, one year’s training, and they say he can stand before a classroom of wriggling boys to teach them his nonsense.  (p.50-51)

The presence of their affable and helpful British landlady, Queenie Bligh, who took them in is soon worsened by the return of Queenie’s long-missing husband, Bernard, a banker newly returned form his post in India who is displeased to find that he has to share premises with black boarders. Racist, he is portrayed as opposite to his friendly, open-minded ‘Queen’.

All of the four different voices tell the story in their own way, and as they tell it we see the different aspects of prejudice and bias that emerge: the disquieting and harmful ramifications of prejudice (harmful not only to the target but also to the perceiver in that he makes erroneous judgments (Allport, 1954; Bargh, 1994)); we see the tough time that refuges have to face and endure in overcoming misconception of a culture who finds them alien, and the author’s masterful rendering – particularly by having the protagonists tell the story according to their own perspective in their particular individual manner – gives us an insight into what it is to experience unjustified bias. Of all the characters, Queenie turns out to be perhaps the most sympathetic. Raised a farmer’s daughter, she is warm, open-minded, fair, and understanding. She is the ideal character whom immigrants would like to meet.  And her sexual affair with the black Michael Roberts aptly sums up the irrationality of racist discrimination:

This woman was a beauty — he couldn’t get enough of her. He liked the downy softness of the blonde hairs on her legs. Her nipples were the pinkest he’d ever seen…. The zebra of their legs twined and untwined together on the bed. Her hands, pale as a ghost’s, caressed every part of his nut-brown skin. (p.47)

‘Zebra’ – black and white. That is the color of a diverse society. And when respecting and acknowledging the possibility of living in coexistence with people from other colors, we can experience a passion and excitement and satisfaction and breadth of experience that is otherwise missing. When this ‘zebra’ experience, on the other hand, is rebuffed, social experience resembles that of Mrs. Bligh’s sexual experiences with her husband: she “usually worked out what she could make for dinner during sexual relations with her husband” (ibid.).  With tolerance for cultural diversity absent, ‘Small Island’ aptly deserves its title: it becomes ‘small island’ for the individuals retreat unto and into themselves.

Levy’s novel expands with implications. We observe how truth become multi-faceted and is seen in different ways according to the one telling it and the one perceiving the situation. Gilbert imagines that all these ‘white’ people are zoning in on his wife crying and relishing the situation. From the following passage, we see an immigrant’s anger and how real bigotry can cause one to imagine racist innuendoes even in situations where it may not exist:

I wanted to tempt these busybodies closer. Beckon them to step forward and take a better look. For then I might catch my hand around one of their scrawny white necks and squeeze. No one will watch us weep in this country. ‘What you all see?’ I shouted on them. ‘Go on, shoo.’ (p. 52)

One interesting aspect of the novel is the way that Hortense eventually turns out: appearing snobbish in the outset (due to her mistaken high principles about British conduct), she turns out to be sweet, likeable, and trusting. The book starts and ends with Hortense’s monologue and observation. One ponders whether this might not serve as message too about the implications and ungrounded ness of negative stereotyping. A foreigner might appear alien and threatening to the other. Closer acquaintance with the individual’s qualifications and characteristics may reveal the opposite to be the case (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Rather than unpleasant and disquieting, the individual may turn out to become someone whom people would cherish as their friends. Hortense indicates the irrationality and unfairness of mindless bigotry and racism. She tells about the time when she was compelled to redo her education, she the well-educated woman from a colonial Empire who was scrupulously educated in the British ways

Closer review reveals that the narrative also alludes to another side of immigrants that is not apparent during the first perusal of the story. Immigrants often, although not always, immigrate to another country with naïve expectations of potential fortune and success in their new country. Gilbert, although aware that not all would be easy, expected that he would be recognized a hero for his wartime activities. Hortense, more “British than the British’, having been brought up in British colonial Jamaica expected formal manners and a formal Victorian style of standards. Her exaggerated expectations are smashed when she sees – and experiences the reality and is rejected in her job attempts and endeavors to acclimatize time and time again.

Earlier in the book, Hortense recalls her friend, Celia Langley, who had told her “When I am older, Hortense, I will be leaving Jamaica and I will be going to live in England” (p.18). And she had invariably said “Hortense, in England I will have a big house with a bell at the front door and I will ring the bell.” And now here she was herself in England:

Standing at the door of a house in London and ringing the bell. Pushing my finger to hear the ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. … What you think of that, Celia Langley? There was I in England ringing the doorbell on one of the tallest houses I had ever seen.

But when I pressed this doorbell I did not hear a ring. No ding-a-ling, ding-a-ling. I pressed once more in case the doorbell was not operational. The house, I could see, was shabby… and a woman’s voice started calling, “All right, all right, I’m coming! Give us a minute.” (pp.18-19)

The book consequently is about two themes:  fundamentally it seems to deal with the stereotypes and discrimination that immigrants often unfairly face in a new country, and the rationalizations that people, often unconsciously indulge in when practicing these stereotypes. The book’s secondary and less conspicuous message is the unfounded and illusorily high expectations that immigrants may have about their prospective country and their subsequent disappointment when experiencing reality. And yet, the book is far from depressing: I find it a realistic portrayal of the life that most immigrants face: the unfounded expectations – true- but also the ceaseless struggles against apparent insurmountable difficulties, and the fact that, slowly but surely, fortitude and perseverance will sway those difficulties. The challenge of becoming acquainted with and acclimatized to a new country, of emotion and wit, suffering and optimism. Gilbert’s wit and strength in dealing with his challenges is a stimulus to anyone facing the difficulties of making an alien environment ‘home’:

Hortense recounts how she accidentally walked into a broom cupboard thinking that to be the exit, and how the staff had, consequently, ridiculed her.  Says he to her:

‘What you do when you come from the cupboard?’ I carefully carried on.

‘I left the room.’
‘You say anything to the women who were laughing on you?’
‘What was there to say?’
‘You must tell them that was an interesting cupboard.’ (p.51)

Well done, Gilbert!

This is the life of every immigrant and the life that every immigrant has to endure in order to achieve the success in his new country that Gilbert and Hortense hoped to and deserved to achieve.

And it is also the recounting of colonialism, racism, war and the rationalized irrational and psychological pain that people inflict upon each other. Overhanging the whole is Gilbert’s question – the poignant question that every immigrant faces when rejected by a new country that he hoped to call home: “How come England did not know me?” (p.22)

Work Cited

Allport, G. The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.,1954.

Bargh, J.A. “The four horsemen of automaticity: Awareness, intention, efficiency, and control in social cognition”. In Robert S. Wyer, Jr. (Ed.), Handbook of Social Cognition (pp 675-694). Hillsdale, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1994.

Fiske, S. T., & Neuberg, S.L. “A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: Influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation”, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 1-74, 1990.

Levy, A. Small Island. New York: Picador, 2005.