Making sense of memory in the writings of the Caribbean diaspora: Sam Selvon’s London calypso

ABSTRACT

This article examines Sam Selvon’s use of the conventions of Trinidadian calypso in his novel The Lonely Londoners. It considers Selvon’s use of calypso in the creation of a narrative voice expressing the dilemma of Caribbean immigrants in London as paradigmatic of the ways in which aesthetic experimentation traces new trajectories of migrant experience, thus problematizing binary visions of cultural displacement. Particular emphasis is placed on Selvon’s use of narrative voice to integrate the sounds of calypso, producing a sonic background that gives aesthetic shape to the discordant experiences of his characters. This use of calypso transforms the novel into a cultural performance of memory through which two aesthetic forms, the novel and calypso, become the locus of a remotivating of collective memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Sam Selvon
• calypso
• collective memory
• voice
• creolized language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The work of the anthropologist Jack Goody (1986) has been highly influential in the study of the distinction between writing and orality, making it possible to have, by contrast, a clearer perception of the functioning of orality. Walter Ong’s (1982) study has also been widely used in examining the effects of orality in literary texts. The notion of voice in psychoanalysis and the applications of this concept in literary contexts can be found in Dolar’s (2006) discussion. The French historian Alain Corbin (1999) has devoted attention to the relation between sensual experience and history in his investigation of sound in relation to the use of church bells in France after the French Revolution.

2. This idea has been developed with respect to Caribbean culture by Edouard Glissant (1997). Glissant uses the term “detour” to identify various subversive strategies.

3. Keith Warner (1983) points out that in Calypso, repetition “ensures that the calypsonian has his audience in full control, not unlike the repetition used by the preacher” (35).

4. Dolar has explored the ambiguous relation between sound and meaning in the notion of voice as an approach to the definition of voice in psychoanalysis. His discussion of voice in relation to language (2006, chap. 1, “The Linguistics of the Voice”) suggests interesting perspectives on the way in which a writer may tinker with the intelligibility of language as a way of emphasizing its complex relationship to sound.

5. Fabre (1988b) has drawn attention to this feature of Selvon’s use of dialect: “Stylistically, The Lonely Londoners is an achievement because it maintains a mellow, humorous, mildly satirical tone which manages to endear the West Indians to the reader without ridiculing the British too much. The distance between conflicting audiences is thus bridged. [...] Selvon’s problem lies less in stressing West Indian specifics than in reducing the distance between the European reader and the protagonists” (217).

6. Jean-Jacques Lecercle (2015) has brilliantly demonstrated how Selvon produces “a form of poetic subversion of the Standard dialect by a dialect that is socially and politically dominated by other dialects” in his analysis of a line from The Lonely Londoners. He shows how the use of Trinidadian English reinforces the laconism of the sentence “Only thing, Harris face black”, thus giving the sentence “an illocutionary force” (n.p.).

7. Bakhtin (1981) refers to the idea of creating an image of a language in his discussion of discourse in the novel: “If the subject making the novel specifically a novel is defined as a speaking person and his discourse, striving for social significance and a wider general application as one distinctive language in a heteroglot world – then the central problem for a stylistics of the novel may be formulated as the problem of artistically representing language, the problem of representing the image of a language” (336; emphasis in original).

8. According to Richard Allsopp (2003), this use of the word “lime” can probably be traced back to World War II: “The term seems to have originated in Trin during World War II, evidently applied to white American sailors from the naval base who hung around bawdy-house areas in groups. The verb to lime seems to have been a popular (shifted) back-formation from ‘limey’, as a Derogatory term for a white person of low class” (348).

9. Fabre refers to this function when he talks about “a mellow, humorous, mildly satirical tone which manages to endear the West Indians to the reader without ridiculing the British too much” (1988, 217).

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Notes on contributors

Kathie Birat

Kathie Birat is emeritus professor of American, African American and Caribbean literature at the University of Lorraine, France. She has published numerous articles on writers from the English-speaking Caribbean. Her most recent publication on Caryl Phillips, “Historicising Emotion in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips”, appeared in Polygraphiques in 2018, and articles on the poetry of David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar were published in Sillages critiques (2018) and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2018). She has also published a special issue of Commonwealth: Essays and Studies on Caryl Phillips (40 (1) Autumn 2017), a chapter in Vanessa Guignery and Christian Gutleben (ed.), Traversée d’une oeuvre: Crossing the River de Caryl Phillips (2016), and has co-edited Literature and Spirituality in the English-Speaking World (2014).