Under the skin of British History bodies in transit in Andrea Levy's "Small Island" (2004)

Abstract

Although most of West Indians had British citizenship and believed they were answering the call of their "mother country" for which many of them had served in World War II, they soon met hostility and discrimination from the white population in the UK. The brutal episode of the childbirth, with Queenie's asking Hortense, whose wedding dress is all soaked in placenta blood, to cut the umbilical cord is a shocking mise-en-scène of this new world order. The same destabilising quality that is attributed to the female body can be granted to the "black body", which in the colonial discourse is constructed as ugly, dirty, defiled, impure, contaminated or sick. The connections between Queenie's middle-class home and her white female body conjure up the idea of a nation equally permeable and fragile, and dismantle the fantasy of ethnic absolutism operating at the heart of the British empire.