Andrea Levy and historical novel, Fruit of the Lemon

What is it about?

Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon is an unusual historical novel in terms of its relationship to the emplotment of history. On the one hand, Levy’s novel takes as its subject the historically specific dilemma of belonging faced by the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in Britain during the 1980’s. On the other hand, the narrative itself provides no explicit sense of this historical time frame. The nuclear family tree that opens the novel does not provide birth dates and, consequently, the Jackson family is not overtly associated with the Windrush generation of immigrants to Britain. However, the novel does connect the development of its main character, Faith, to an identifiable historical context via markers of popular culture, By engaging and disengaging from the narrative of this history, Fruit of the Lemon points to the contemporary decontextualization of the public sphere while locating commodities as an alternate source of identification. The reader is forced to engage in a process of contextualization via pop culture and commodities, which Faith herself eventually embraces.

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Photo by Cristina Anne Costello on Unsplash

Photo by Cristina Anne Costello on Unsplash

Why is it important?

I argue that Fruit of the Lemon links the identity crisis of the main character, Faith, to the workings of globalization, specifically the co-opting of multiculturalism. The novel portrays a British society wherein consumer multiculturalism does not translate into racial tolerance, but rather creates what I term a “regime of color-blindness” that violently dislodges the contexts of colonialism and racism.

Perspectives