The Long Song Analysis

History may tell us when certain events happened, and it might tell us certain angles to those events. What history does not tell us are the interesting and exiting stories that were kept silenced. This is a main theme in Andrea Levy’s reflecting essay “The writing of The long song”, publicised in 2010.
In the essay we hear how Andrea Levy got her motivation and inspiration to her book “The long song”. She stumbles upon the idea, when she hears a young woman asking; how she could be proud of her ancestors, when they had been slaves? Levy finds this to be an interesting question, given that her own ancestors were Caribbean slaves.

Andrea Levy uses a circular composition in this essay. She wants us to feel and realize what she did. Therefor we hear about her making the story step by step, and ultimately coming to the conclusion of the question being asked by the young woman in the beginning. We are faced with the same problems, that she faced, for example the fact that she cannot interview people from that time in search for inspiration . She uses these problems to make her essay seem like a journey,
History lacks a nuanced perspective on the actions that took place, but this can be fixed through fiction, according to Levy . She is not trying to make a historical novel, as she claims . Even though history can contain exiting and important stories, it is, according to Levy, also important to create your own fictional reality within the historical reality. This is why so much of this essay is about her research, when her story is “made up”. In order to be reliable, and make an impact on the reader, both the historical premise and the fictional story has to be in touch. This is the beauty of fiction, and why we can learn from it, even though it is not true. As long as the morals and themes captivate the time it comes from, we as readers (as well as the writer) can achieve an understanding of the