Eating Dirt, Being Dirt Backgrounds to the Story of Slavery

Andrea Levy's award-winning novel about slavery, The Long Song (2011),¹ layers historical and fictional material to produce a rich text of women's experience on a slave plantation in Jamaica. As a descendant of Jamaican immigrants to Britain, Levy draws upon the same black trans-Atlantic experience of cultural and ethnic hybridity that informed her novel Small Island (2004). Additionally, she taps the reservoir of slave memoir, testimony and narrative that survives in journals and reports from the early 19th century. The anonymous Marly; or, A Planter's Life in Jamaica (1828)¹ as a contemporary, fictionalized account of Jamaican plantation life shares many motifs with Levy's novel. This study examines one small square of this narrative palimpsest: fictional accounts of the striking fact of pica, the consumption of non-food items, often dirt. It will ask how this phenomenon from the age of slavery worked its way into early plantation literature (Marly), from there into fictional slave narrative in general, and ultimately into Levy's novel, where it forms a structural motif. After analyzing historical and modern accounts, I posit that eating dirt may constitute far more than pathology or taboo and represent a means of negotiating power for the powerless: those of the African diaspora, especially its girls and women.