Breaking Historical Silence: Emotional Wealth in Joan Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy' The Long Song

"Epilogue"I have crossed an oceanI have lost my tonguefrom the root of the oldonea new one has sprung.

—Grace Nichols, I Is a Long Memoried Woman

"Echoes"Voiceless?              Less?The spirits mocked.Youcannotaffordto        be          voiceless.Voice                 more or lessvoice           more voiceamplifiedthroughterminal stumpsof seventy five millionmutilated tonguesforever            everamplifiedincluding yours                         yours                                yours                                    yours.

—Joan Anim-Addo, Haunted by History

Fiction has often proved a fruitful means of bringing to life words persistently left unrecorded in official historical accounts. In the specific context of Black British literature, recovering lost stories has been a main thematic concern. As Paul Gilroy argues in his seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, the telling and retelling of stories of loss, exile, and migration have been central elements in the memory of black people that have served to "invent, maintain and renew identity" and, therefore, constitute a collective, shared cultural identity (198). Moreover, for Gilroy, returning to slavery through the imaginative possibilities of fiction has offered black authors "a means to restage confrontations between rational, scientific and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless and bestial African slaves" (220). This article examines Joan Anim-Addo's short story "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy's novel The Long Song as nuanced representations of female experiences of slavery which highlight the above-mentioned confrontations. These two works by contemporary Black British women writers put an emphasis on emotional wealth and, therefore, question orthodox notions of wealth and riches, as well as political, philosophical, and anthropological accounts that justified slavery through a rhetoric of dehumanization and constructed slaves as mere objects of commercial exchange. Levy's The Long Song and Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" present alternative portrayals of the social fabric of slavery by foregrounding the experiences of female slaves and highlighting the importance of emotional wealth. The characters' emotional wealth is directly connected to their abilities to open alternative emotional spaces in order to counter the devastating real spaces surrounding them. In this respect, I argue that the space opened up through maternal love becomes the driving force behind their heroic deeds of survival.

These literary works reveal an alternative conception of wealth to the notion favored in capitalism and the discourse of Enlightenment through which "slavery, in its many guises, was the expectation, and racialized persons categorized as 'Indians' and 'Africans' or colonized 'others' were targeted for life-long experiences within it" (Beckles 779). Adam Smith's theories had a great impact on the economic discourses of the time and though he had published against the institution of slavery in Theory of Moral Sentiments, he did so "not on moral grounds, but as just one more artificial restraint on individual self-interest" (Gosh 3681). Therefore, "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and The Long Song appeal for a consideration of wealth in a light which does not pivot around the idea of individuals engaging in enterprises with the purpose of advancing their self-interest or around the validation of the mere accumulation of material possessions. By contrast, the short story and novel under analysis underline slavery as a dehumanizing experience and endorse an alternative conception of wealth, whereby wealth becomes paramount to what makes us human: emotions. This second consideration, much more fruitful, allows for the de/ construction—in the Derridean sense of making visible and extinguishing a power struggle by uprooting significations from a binary logic—of this double conception of wealth intrinsically present in discourses of slavery which constructed slaves as emotionless.

Joan Anim-Addo, both a writer and an academic, has argued in her critical work Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women's Writing that "slaves were perceived as chattel property equated in law with 'removable personal property' such as domestic or dumb animals. In contrast to the European constructed as 'master,' the status of the African of the period was enshrined in...