The Long Song Analysis

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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, in order to make it exiting. The composition, which starts and ends with the same question, gives the reader a sense of connections between the many points that Levy makes. The question, whether…show more content…
It is about fiction in general, and how it can enlighten us, and make us understand what we otherwise would have not. Where the history books only touches the surface of what happened, fiction can give us insight, even though it is not factional correct. Fiction gives us depth, and stories to support the facts. It completes history, and evokes feelings so that history is no longer just factional words in a book, but legacies and story that we can relate to. When doing this slaves’ history is not just stories about misery and pain, but also about the beauty that occurred even in the darkest

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