The imperfect longing: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the dance of doubt

Abstract

This paper explores the social and narrative construction of immigrant identity and diasporicity in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. The stories of the immigrant men in this novel rely on the scaffolding of the narratives by Moses Aloetta, an early migrant to London from the colonial space. Moses depicts the experience of movement as part of a larger lyrical analysis of exclusionary practices embedded in language practices that the men defy in order to claim London as home. The treatment of London as a site in which inclusion is negotiated and the center becomes the eccentric reverses conventional configurations of space whereby the men's stories become the elocutionary point of view in which adaptation and contingency become the locus of life and living. The Lonely Londoners offers an aesthetics of modernity and migration located in speech acts – the ballad, the episode, and the lark. This literary creation of a diasporic imaginary calls attention to the various, sometimes conflicting ways in which the idea of home can be invoked and maintained.

Keywords:

• Sam Selvon
• The Lonely Londoners
• Black Atlantic
• immigration
• diaspora
• language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This list includes the reproductions of such immigration in contemporary authors such as Andrea Levy (b. 1956) and Caryl Phillips (b. 1958) who have made their mark on British literature through the recuperation of immigrant stories in many of their works. Caryl Phillips’s describes his reaction to reading Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners as one that generated “…a sense of being inside and outside Britain at the same time. The literature was shot through with the uncomfortable anxieties of belonging and not belonging […] [that] underscored my life and the lives of many people of my generation in the Britain of the 1970s and early 1980s” (234) in Phillips, Caryl. Spring 1998. “Following On: The Legacy of Lamming and Selvon.” Wasafiri, Vol. 29: 34–36. Reprinted in Phillips, Caryl. 2001. A New World Order: Selected Essays. London: Vintage International: 232–238.

2. In 1955, immigrants from the West Indies had increased to 18,000. Just a decade later in 1965, those numbers had jumped to 850,000 or 2 percent of the total population in the UK.

3. Derrida engages Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time ([1927] 1962) in order to develop the idea of the limit as a point of closure, border and demarcation – the negation of the being’s other. This leads to Derrida's proposal of the idea of the trace or remnant as alternate ways of thinking spatially about being, nonbeing and difference.

4. In opposition to the first wave of immigrants in 1948 who arrived in the port of Tilbury, the train has become the new point of entry to the metropolitan space. The ship of Selvon's immigrants has already docked in Southampton and brought the newly arrived to Waterloo station, one of the London Underground's stops. As an historical counterpoint, the missing ship – now a metaphor for arrival – voids the text of the significance of slaver ship and the reality of the slave trade. While the ship is absent from The Lonely Londoners, the replacement of the ship with the train is still a significant marker of another facet of modernity: industrialization, the global market, and genocide.

5. At that time, there were no immigration restrictions for citizens from one part of the British Empire moving to another part since Britain's 1948 Nationality Act gave UK citizenship to people living in her colonies, including the West Indies. The arrival of MV Empire Windrush at Tilbury Dock in London on 22 June 1948, with its 492 West Indian passengers, is regarded as a landmark event in British post-war history, marking the beginning of immigration to Britain from Commonwealth countries and colonies (For the complete document of the British Nationality Act, 1948 [11 & 12 Geo. 6.], see chapter 56: http://www.uniset.ca/naty/BNA1948.htm).

6. Feagin's work calls attention to the all-pervasive institutions of cultural transmission out of which formal structures of representation and information operate. I would like to thank my colleague Susana Loza for bringing Feagin's work to my attention. It has added tremendously to my thinking on racial representation by offering a new model for evaluating how racialized thought and racism dominate everyday life and how it is deployed to confer privilege and virtue (see Feagin 2010).

7. The question of the Colour Bar is addressed early in the novel (Selvon 1956, 7–12) at the Waterloo station when a white British journalist asks several of the newly arrived why so many Jamaicans (and their families) are coming to England. This question is posed regardless of actual national origin and with no real attention paid to the answer. New immigrants and their families were the subject of national news and legislation as well as a racialized resentment that found its ultimate portrayal in Enoch Powell's ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on 20 April 1968 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html).