Essay – The Writing of The Long Song Everyone have somethings he or she are ashamed of or proud of. It could be all from the way they look or the way they talk to who their ancestors were. One’s heritage is not something that can be changed or erased, but can and should be accepted and is not something that you should feel ashamed of. That is also what Andrea Levy is trying to convince her reader about in her essay “The Writing of The Long Song”, which was published in 2010. Levy explain how the idea behind her book “The Long Song” formed. The essay is well structured. The beginning resembles the end. It starts with her telling about a conference, how it made her want to write a book and her research for the book and ends with her talking …show more content…
Carmicheal, and you just didn’t get it!” (Page 9-10, line 223-225). She ends the question with an exclamation mark instead of a question mark, to emphasize her rhetorical question. We can see a little bit of irony as well from that quote. Slave ancestry is one of the main theme Levy focus on in the essay, as well as pride. It started by a woman, who shamed another woman by being a descendant of a slave, which inspired Levy to write her book “The Long Song”. The whole idea at first was to write a historical book, but after she learned that, she could not find much of the history of the slaves, she decided that she wanted to write a novel instead, but still based on the same theme. She wanted to give the slave ancestors a voice, and touch a subject not many people have written or talked about. “Writing fiction is a way of putting back the voices that were left out.” (Page 8, line 131-133). She felt that there they were not able to say anything about how unfairly they as slaves have treated, some maybe even against their own will. That was what inspired Levy write this book, to give them a voice, so that their descendants could get to know and learn about their ancestors and even be proud of