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

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.