'Back To My Own' By Andrea Levy

Karina Perez

Lauck

English Lit

16 May 2023

How British Colonization Complicated the Idea of Home

Home can have many different meanings for all of us. Home can be a safe space where you can be yourself without worrying about what other people may think of you. Where you celebrate your greatest accomplishments and your biggest failures with the people who will always be there for you. But during the British colonization era, many homes and countries were forever altered. Many countries and cultures were forever changed or deleted from history because of colonization. As well as the people who lived there or were forced to move there. It complicated the idea of home because, whether it was over time or by force, it made the idea of what a home

That made many people give up their customs and traditions or simply forget them as time passed. In "Back to My Own Country: An Essay" by Andrea Levy, she tells of growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood surrounded by white children while being of Jamaican descent and her struggles to figure out her identity while being torn between two countries. In her essay, she writes about not associating with Jamaica and how she didn’t know how to be black. She states, "I didn’t feel I had the right qualifications... My upbringing was so far removed from all of that, I felt sure I would be found out as an imposter." Andrea Levy didn’t know anything about her culture or where she came from until she decided to visit Jamaica, where she got to learn the history of Jamaica, which gave her the inspiration to write and find out who she is and where she came

Things such as the color of your skin or thinking that Britain was this great place full of opportunity stuck. Andrea Levy’s family was fair-skinned, and as the text stated, "In Jamaica, this had had a big effect on my parents’ upbringing, because the class system, inherited from British colonial times, people took the color of your skin very seriously." They isolated themselves from darker-skinned Caribbeans and wanted nothing to do with them for fear of being associated with them and drawing attention to themselves. Also stated in the text, when Andrea Levy’s parents lived in Jamiaca, they were middle class and lived in large houses with servants, but once they emigrated to Britain, they were on a lower income and were even homeless and starving at times, but her parents said that they had to be grateful for what the country had offered them and didn’t complain. Although they had better lives in Jamaica, they were told of the greatness of Britain, so they left everything behind to get an opportunity for work and advancement. Such ideas and ways of thinking stay for such a long time that they are seen as normal and are hard to come