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| Panther Books UK, c 1975 |
The Old Moses, standing on the banks of the Thames. Sometimes he think he see some sort of profound realisation in his life, as if all that happen to him was experience that make him a better man, as if now he could draw apart from any hustling and just sit down and watch other people fight to live. Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot. As if a forlorn shadow of doom fall on all the spades in the country. As if he could see the black faces bobbing up and down in the millions of white, strained faces, everybody hustling along the Strand, the spades jostling in the crowd, bewildered, hopeless. As if, on the surface, things don’t look so bad, but when you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening –– what? He don’t know the right word, but he have the right feeling in his heart. As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they 'fraid to cry, they only laughing because to think so much about everything would be a big calamity –– like how he here now, the thoughts so heavy like he unable to move his body.
The Novel: The Lonely Londoners, a 1956 novel by Trinidadian immigrant Samuel Selvon, is first and foremost a tale of exile. The exiles whose lives and problems Selvon so sympathetically explores are not political undesirables or religious refugees but ambitious young men of Caribbean origin who, thanks to the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act –– a piece of legislation which granted any person born within the British Commonwealth the right to reside in any part of Britain as a means of rebuilding the nation's war-depleted workforce –– began to arrive in London in great numbers during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s seeking a higher standard of living and opportunities unavailable to them in their impoverished island homelands. What the new arrivals found for the most part was not prosperity but a xenophobic Britain clinging stubbornly to the memory of its pre-1939 past, a nation where people of colour were actively resented, vilified and treated as third-class citizens by its paranoid and occasionally violent white majority. These men, or 'the boys' as Selvon ironically identifies them, became in effect double exiles –– unable to remain in the Caribbean for economic reasons but equally unable to find acceptance in a First World nation which viewed them, along with anybody else who wasn't white, as unwanted interlopers.
The novel begins with Moses Aloetta, a West Indian immigrant who has been in London for nearly ten years, boarding 'a number 46 bus… to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train… he get a letter from a friend in Trinidad who say that this fellar coming by the SS Hildebrand, and if he could please meet him at the station in London, and help him until he get settled… So for old time sake Moses find himself on the bus going to Waterloo, vex with himself that his heart so soft that he always doing something for somebody and nobody ever doing anything for him.' The evening journey to the station is a familiar ritual to Moses, one that seldom fails to raise questions about the wisdom of remaining in the grey, fog-bound English capital instead of returning to the tropics where he'll no longer be treated like an unpaid welfare officer, helping the helpless so that they too can one day feel as uneasy and conflicted about their new environment as he does.
These thoughts are interrupted by the arrival of his Jamaican friend Tolroy who has come to the station to meet his newly-arrived mother. 'A old woman who like she would dead any minute come out of a carriage,' Moses sees, 'carrying a cardboard box and a paperbag. When she get out the train she stand up there on the platform as if she confuse. Then after she a young girl come, carrying a flourbag filled up with things. Then a young man wearing a widebrim hat and a jacket falling below the knees. Then a little boy and a little girl, then another old woman, tottering so much a guard had was to help her off the train.' Rather than sailing from Kingston alone, as Tolroy expected her to do, his mother has brought the entire family with her –– a situation quickly noted by a white newspaper reporter who, to the great distress of Tolroy and the undisguisable amusement of Moses, interviews and photographs the newcomers for an article he's writing about the problem of 'excessive immigration.'
Despite the humour of this episode, much of which is provided by Tolroy's mother and his outspoken aunt or Tanty, its message is depressingly unambiguous. Moses and his kind are not welcome in Britain and the 'fellar' he came to the station to meet and assist –– Henry Oliver, better known as Sir Galahad –– is in for a rough time of it. Galahad is yet another ‘test’, or immigrant, whose life will also become a daily struggle to find work, shelter and some kind of stable future in a country where none of these things can be taken for granted if the person seeking them happens to be black.
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| Longman UK first edition, 1956 |
What follows is less a traditionally structured novel than a vivid portrait of a society on the brink of what would prove to be far-reaching and irreversible social change, resulting in the birth of what we now know, comfortably or not, as multiculturalism. Through the eyes of Moses and 'the boys' –– the optimistic, London-loving Galahad who devises a means of catching Trafalgar Square pigeons so he can cook and eat them in his room, the Nigerian ex-law student Cap who’s always trying to borrow money he never repays and has sex with a male prostitute dressed in drag whom he unwittingly mistakes for a woman, Big City who dreams of winning the football pools but never learns how to fill out an entry coupon, Harris the well-spoken pseudo-gentleman who carries a rolled-up umbrella and a copy of The Times everywhere he goes in a farcical effort to assimilate –– we're shown a city that is simultaneously magical and forbidding, filled with temptation and delight but also rigorous in its austerity, a place that becomes a fog and smog shrouded necropolis during the winter months, only to come gloriously alive again with the return of warmer weather when the girls ‘throw away heavy winter coat and wearing light summer frocks so you could see the legs and the shapes that was hiding away from the cold blasts.’
Unlike the jaded and melancholy Moses, Galahad is still new enough to London to feel humbled by the sight of its famous streets and landmarks. While the white inhabitants of London distrust and fear him and his fellow 'tests' –– all of whom they automatically assume to have emigrated to England from Jamaica, no matter which part of the Caribbean they happen to have come from –– he develops a genuine affection for the city, almost unable to believe that he, an untravelled 'fellar' from Trinidad, can actually go to famous places like Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and make a date to meet 'a nice piece of skin [a white girl]… under the big clock in Piccadilly Tube Station.'
But sexual acceptance, while gratifying in its own way, is not the same thing as unconditional tolerance. While some white girls will date and even sleep with black men this is sometimes more a case of them seeking a bit of novelty in their humdrum lives than it is of permanently overcoming deeply ingrained racial and social prejudices. In time even the irrepressible Galahad finds himself falling victim to despair, turning on himself in an attempt to define the causes of racism and the problems it creates. 'Colour,' he says while studying the back of his hand one night in his dingy basement room, ‘is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell can’t you be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white?… I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! Look at you, you so black and innocent, and this time so you causing misery all over the world!'
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| Penguin Modern Classics UK, 2006 |
The plight of Galahad, Moses and their fellow immigrants is underscored by the very distinctive language employed by Selvon to tell their respective stories. Doing this in what critic Susheila Nasta describes as their own 'creolized voice' gives the narrative an authenticity and linguistic verve it may have lacked had it been composed in standard British English. Like all exile communities, Moses and his friends cling to their language as a means of remaining connected to their culture –– to feel, in other words, less lonely, less forsaken, less ground down by the hostile realities of life in a place where the colour bar sees them treated abominably by employers, landladies and even by children unused to seeing black men walking the streets or working as conductors on London's famous red buses.
Surprisingly, this was not how Selvon originally pictured himself writing the book. 'When I wrote the novel that became The Lonely Londoners,' he once told an interviewer, 'I tried to recapture a certain quality in West Indian everyday life. I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.' The book does shoot along, aided by a picaresque, sometimes very fluid style of writing which manages to combine humour and youthful exuberance with a gnawing undercurrent of sadness if not futility.
What makes The Lonely Londoners all the more exceptional as a piece of fiction is the fact that none of the questions it raises about race, exile and acceptance have been successfully answered by any British government since it was first published more than six decades ago. Immigrants continue to be feared, resented and marginalised in Britain as they are in all Western nations, paving the way for the poll that saw 51.89% of the British population vote in favour of the UK leaving the European Union in 2016. The massacre of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Buddhist government of Myanmar and the election of Donald Trump –– whom most in-the-know pundits insisted could 'never' become the US President –– serve as further proof that racism is alive and well in the twenty-first century and will only continue to thrive as climate change and health crises like the current coronavirus outbreak combine to make many parts of the world uninhabitable.
It's important to remember that major race riots broke out in many English cities, including London, Birmingham and Nottingham, just one year after The Lonely Londoners was published, with neo-fascist white supremacist organisations like the Union Movement, the League of Empire Loyalists and the White Defence League actively encouraging their members to confront and physically assault immigrants to show them exactly how unwelcome they were in Britain. Something tells me, each time I re-read the haunting words of Moses which open this post, that he would be no more optimistic about his chances of being accepted in 2020 than he was in 1956, despite the fact that people of Caribbean descent now comprise 4.2% of London's total population. Selvon's genius lay in his ability to personalize the dilemma of exiles like Moses and Sir Galahad, emphasizing their humanity and the corrosive psychological impact that racism has on the hated and their fear and ignorance-driven haters alike. It remains one of the most moving novels of exile ever written, shedding much needed light on the plight of those whose lives and hopes for a better future are generally ignored by conservative politicians and a tabloid media eager to portray immigrants, legal or otherwise, as the criminal scum of the earth.
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| SAMUEL SELVON, 1961 |
The Writer: In May 1948 a confiscated Nazi ship, ceded to Britain as part of its war reparations and rechristened the MV Empire Windrush, docked in the Jamaican port city of Kingston. The ship was travelling from Australia to England, carrying a mixture of Polish war refugees and British military personnel, but was only half full for what would be the final leg of its voyage. This fact prompted some enterprising person to place an ad in a Kingston newspaper offering cheap passage to the 'Mother Country' for anyone wishing to seek employment there under the terms established by the recently passed British Nationality Act.
On 22 June 1948 the ship berthed at Tilbury Dock on the Thames, bringing 492 immigrants from Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and many other Caribbean nations to the cold and, for the most part, inhospitable city of London. The arrival of these immigrants, who were subsequently dubbed 'the Windrush generation' by the English press, opened the floodgates to what quickly became a tidal wave of Caribbean immigration and ultimately led to the UK becoming the multicultural if deeply divided society it is today.
One of these new arrivals was a twenty-seven year old journalist and writer named Samuel Dickson Selvon. The sixth of seven children born to an Indian family which could trace its roots back to Madras on the father's side and to Scotland on the mother's side, he had been born on 20 May 1923 in Barataria, a small village on what were then the outskirts of San Fernando, largest city in the dual island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Although poor, his shopkeeper father was able to send him to the city's prestigious Naparima College, where he was educated until financial necessity obliged him to leave school at the age of fifteen to help support his family. Selvon joined the Royal Naval Reserve when war broke out in 1939 and spent the next six years on ships assigned the vital task of patrolling the Caribbean Sea, finding distraction from the monotony of naval life by writing poetry while off duty. His naval duties also brought him into contact with US service personnel who had come to Trinidad to build the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway, experiences he later fictionalized in his debut novel A Brighter Sun (1952) which explores rural life and the changes inflicted upon the local population by the construction of what was deemed by the US Government to be a vital piece of military infrastructure.
Selvon relocated to Port of Spain in 1945, where he found a job on the capital's oldest daily newspaper The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian as a reporter and occasional literary critic. Working for a newspaper also allowed him to publish many of his own short stories in its pages under a variety of colourful pseudonyms including Ack-Ack and Big Buffer, which in turn led to much of his work being printed in small Caribbean-based reviews and magazines. Although he married in 1947 and soon became the father of a daughter, this did not prevent Selvon from sailing for the greener literary pastures of England when the opportunity to do so presented itself in 1950. 'I was just swept up by exaltation,' he later recalled. 'I was as naïve as any immigrant coming out of a small island to live in a country like England.' After obtaining a clerical post at the Indian Embassy and finding accommodation in the economically depressed (and therefore affordable) London suburb of Notting Hill, he began to spend his evenings trying to finish A Brighter Sun.
Perhaps without realising it, Selvon's arrival and subsequent success in London –– his first novel was favourably reviewed and later became a standard text in English schools, while his short fiction and poetry found a welcome home in small literary journals like Bim and then in mainstream publications like The New Statesman and London Magazine –– helped to shape what, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, became an offshore artistic renaissance known as the Caribbean Artists Movement. Thanks to intra-Commonwealth immigration, the UK became home to many poets, musicians and novelists –– among them future Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul –– who, through their work, would help to define the Caribbean identity and raise public awareness of how West Indian immigrants were treated by Britain's largely racist white majority. This process was aided, in Selvon's case, by his ability to successfully adapt his work for radio, with many of his stories and plays reaching a wider audience via BBC broadcasts over a period of several decades. His achievements become even more remarkable when you stop to consider that he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis in 1953 and took a year to fully recover from the disease.
The 1955 publication of Selvon's second novel An Island Is A World earned him the first of two Guggenheim scholarships and saw him develop an international reputation that, in time, would see him awarded a fellowship in creative writing at the University of Dundee and become a popular speaker on the academic lecture circuit. He continued to publish novels and story collections throughout the 1960s and early 1970s with Moses Ascending, a sequel to The Lonely Londoners, appearing in 1975.
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| SAMUEL SELVON, c 1983 |
Three years later Selvon left England for Canada to accept a post as visiting professor at the University of Victoria, taking a job as a janitor at the school once his academic term there had expired. He was subsequently offered a post as writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, a job he retained for the rest of his life despite the fact that his work was little known and apparently little read in his second adopted homeland. This may explain why he didn't publish his next novel –– a sequel to Moses Ascending titled Moses Migrating –– until 1983. Although this was to be his final novel, he went on to publish a collection of his shorter prose and two drama collections before dying from respiratory failure in the lounge of Trinidad's Piarco International Airport on 16 April 1994.
Selvon was not only a great and distinctive writer, he was also a great man, beloved by everyone who came into contact with him during the course of his long and, in some ways, unlikely career. As his obituary so tellingly expressed it: 'There was an element of Selvon himself in the Moses of his London books, wandering with the immigrant tribes in the wilderness of Bayswater and Marble Arch. Yet there is also an element of self-parody. Selvon was the most gentle, self-effacing of men, hardly a Moses. The pressures of late success would have been hard to cope with, had he not been protected by his many friends worldwide. To the end he remained extraordinarily unaffected by fame, a warm and sensitive personality whose art and persona formed a seamless whole. It is fitting that, after a life of exile, he should have come home to end it in Trinidad.'
The tragicomic tale of Moses Aloetta continues in the sequels Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). Thankfully, some of SELVON's other novels –– including A Brighter Sun (1952) and The Housing Lark (1960) –– are now back in print.
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| Alternative title, c 1960 |
