Going Home: The Cultural Orphans of Sam Selvon's "The Lonely Londoners"
Last night I dreamed that the world ended. I was standing in the ocean, surrounded by people speaking a language I couldn’t understand, and all at once there was a mighty fireball in the sky and a burst of sound, and I thought to myself: well, this is it as the flames engulfed me, at which point I woke up.
I have had sibylline dreams before and if this one should come to pass I simply would not be surprised.
Of course, the notion of the ‘home’ has been much in contention forever but especially now. Homeland, ‘belonging’. Who gets to claim their home.
The same nation that would rename the Nakba a ‘resettling’ is the one whose governmental authorities are posting ‘deportation ASMR’ videos on official channels. The AfD are sending fake one-way plane tickets as promotional material. Nigel Farage is bafflingly at large. There’s only so many times you can consult Said and Baldwin and Fanon and Gilroy etc. ad infinitum before you decide your time is as well spent chewing wallpaper paste because what does it matter anymore and so on.
Except, of course, for the fact that it does matter. All of it matters very much.
Today, for you, an old essay on the hermeneutics of “home” in Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners. I have also linked an interesting podcast about Selvon and his work below it. It (this piece) addresses its reader with the complete certainty that they have already read the book. Incidentally, you should. When I say ‘it matters very much’ part of that is an investment in the development of empathy which fiction can impart to people, and this is why I believe much of our— that is, you and I, and anyone who can be brought to side— work must be in wading against the tide of ‘art is anti-functional’ in a perpetually dysfunctional charade.
And AOB — Mitko thoughts upcoming. I have less to say about it than I thought I would because as it turns out I had already read it about 6 or 7 years ago. Alas. But it will be with you very shortly indeed.
And now, over to Sam Selvon. By the way, it’s a miracle I didn’t get home as ‘an irrevocable condition’ in. Evidently I was tightly constrained by the 2,000 word limit.
The idea of ‘home’ is bound tightly up with that of nationhood; the ‘homeland’, the ‘mother country’, the ‘motherland’, suggesting one’s nation is synonymous with the home made macrocosmic, the place where one truly belongs. There is an ‘ideological overlap between homes and nations as possessions with territorial borders’ (Kim Evelyn 136). Ironically, for the colonial migrant the very notion of ‘home’ is what negates their ability to belong anywhere. The word becomes both a threat— “go home”— and a supposedly permanent identity for which they are punished. There is, in texts concerning decolonisation (though in a manner, don’t they all?), a difference between having a home (a mutable nationhood, subject to changes, and able to be multiple), and being home (a static and essentialised nationhood). Sam Selvon’s 1956 The Lonely Londoners examines exactly this in the lives of ‘the boys’, a group of West Indian Windrush migrants in London, who are pushed up against the essentialist and racialised views of nationhood and home held by the British public and colonial authorities who sought to ‘reify the idea of a homogenous (white) Britain’ (Evelyn 130). Ultimately, Selvon’s radical solution is to decolonise this imperial mindset by suggesting that home is an active and dynamic process subject not to race or country of origin, but the purposeful claiming of space.
The novel begins by straddling that liminal space which exists between Britain and the West Indies— Waterloo Station, final point of the long journey taken by West Indian migrants, where Moses Aloetta awaits the arrival of new Trinidadian migrant, Henry Oliver Esquire, known informally as Galahad. The station is itself a blended, borderless atmosphere; the ‘fog sleeping restlessly’ and the ‘lights showing in the blur’ suggest its shifting nature, which perhaps is ‘not London at all but some strange place on another planet’ (23). But here is the entrance to London, ‘centre of the [British] Empire’, and its cultural dominance is apparent even in the onward-rolling first sentence (John McLeod 5). The specificity of the ’number 46 bus’ taking its route past ‘Chepstow Road’ and ‘Westbourne Grove’ assumes their enduring cultural relevance, whilst the arrival is ’a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train’, the only specificity here provided being the name of an island (23). The ambiguous status of the ‘boat-train’ becomes grammatically a thing caught between the two; even the mode of transportation is confused beside these London absolutes. Throughout the novel, these landmarks and place names iconic of the British Empire— Waterloo, Bayswater, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street etc.— are granted a mythical status amongst the West Indian community as representative of that colonial myth pushing Britain as the glorious ‘mother country’ of its colonial subjects (Henry Eliot 00:30:08). Selvon himself was reportedly ‘very attracted to the idea of finally being united with England, his “mother country”’ when he made that journey to London in 1950 (Susanne Pichler 47).
The valorisation of “English values” is typified in the case of Harris who ‘like English customs and thing… when he dress, you think is some Englishman going to work in the city’ (111). Harris demonstrates what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o would term a ‘colonised mind’; he has internalised the values of the coloniser, and attempts to skirt their disdain for him by expressing them himself (David Ellis 214). His attempts at assimilation, however, are doomed. Moses knows that ‘you can’t put on any English accent for them or play ladeda’ to please white Londoners (108). This mocking ‘ladeda’ returns just three pages later in a description of Harris who ‘like to play ladeda’, and the simplicity of what follows has a caustic finality— ‘Only thing, Harris face black’ (111). This undoes any effort he makes; there is the inescapable fact of his being West Indian, being black, and therefore not ‘an Englishman’ in the view of white British-born citizens. The unspoken rule of being at home in colonial Britain is to be white.
Nor does the West Indian identity have the same stability as being British. The name ‘West Indies’ is a colonial creation laid over multiple culturally distinct islands, which had been variously under colonial rule since the seventeenth century— and still were when the book was published. If, as David Ellis suggests, postcolonial relationships might be ‘characterised by the power to name on the one hand, and the passive acceptance of naming on the other’— though the term ‘passive’ might better be replaced with ‘enforced’— here the power rests in the imperial invention of the West Indies, and the places within it which bear colonial names; Kingston, Port-of-Spain, San Fernando and Pont-Pierre are a few referenced in the text (214). The colonial identity is applied atop the colonised land— to name is to possess, and the British Empire have linguistic control of both ‘sides’ of a colonial’s home. West Indian can, paradoxically, only be a British identity, because it was both created and enforced by the British Empire. George Lamming wrote that ‘no islander from the West Indies sees himself as a West Indian until he encounters another islander in a foreign territory… in this sense, most West Indians of my generation were born in England’ (214).
A 1955 British Pathé documentary acknowledged that West Indians were ‘citizens and, as such, [were] entitled to the identical rights of any member of the Empire’ (00:00:30). Despite this, West Indians would arrive in England to experience an ‘enforced ontological transformation from British subject to foreign immigrant’ (Ellis 215). They were denied well-paid jobs even where they had superior qualifications to other (white) applicants; there were signs declaring “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” on lodgings’ windows which denied them the physical space of a home; and they were subject at any time to racist attacks; alongside a lack of government or police protection (Marcus Collins 400; Eliot 00:26:19).
In arriving to London, migrants from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, etc., the various national identities covered by the term became extraneous to British authorities, even to the point of interchangeability. West Indian migrants were ‘always asked when they were going “home”’, despite the fact that those asking would not truly have known where this ‘home’ was (Collins 398). When Moses takes Galahad to the Labour Exchange, he explains that on his form will be written ‘J—A, Col.’, indicating that Galahad is Jamaican— but ‘the English people believe that everybody who come from the West Indies come from Jamaica’ (46; 28). In the text, too, they blur initially into the homogenised group which the narrator terms ‘the boys’— children culturally orphaned by the refusal of their ‘mother country’. They are understood not as citizens, but as that Other, a stranger whose home is neither in Britain, where they are denied the life of a citizen if not the legal status, nor in the confused and uncertain ‘home’ of the West Indies where Selvon believed that there was a lack of ‘oneness’ (Alison Donnell 62).
This sense of in-betweenness is, of course, as much racial as it is cultural; it was “no Blacks” written in windows, not “no West Indians”, and it is the “Col.” on Labour Exchange forms which prompts rejection, not ‘J—A’. The boys are not discriminated against simply for being migrants, since as Moses points out there are plenty of white migrants from Europe who do not face the same treatment, though were were many who were little better off (40). It is ‘the body that looks “foreign”’ which is permanently othered, ‘[n]o matter what passport one carries’ (Susan Friedman 191, emphasis my own). To the British public, home is something you are, an immutable substance of sameness or difference which is carried in visual markers. To return to that brutal ‘Only thing, Harris face black’, the key distinction here is the focus on his face. Selvon might easily have written ‘Harris black’. Instead, by marking the bodily nature of his blackness, this detail reminds the reader that Harris’ skin colour is a characteristic rather than merely characteristic.
This is something Selvon insists upon throughout the novel. ‘Colour, is you that causing all this, you know’, Galahad laments to his hand— again, a body part, emphasising that skin colour is a matter of the body alone, ‘Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white?’ (88). The darkly comic suggestions of ‘blue, or red or green’ point out the inherent ridiculousness of creating divisions by such arbitrary distinctions as colour. Galahad’s exclamation comes after a child in the street cries, ‘“Mummy, look at that black man!”’, a moment which Kim Evelyn compares to Frantz Fanon’s ‘”Look! A N-gro!”’ in Black Skin/White Masks, making visible the ‘third person’ into which black people are forced as the ‘other’ of whiteness (Evelyn 141; Fanon 91). Here, the white Briton takes the essentialised whole of Galahad as defined by his blackness, emphasising also his otherness with ‘that’, creating of him an object where he is, in fact, a subject of the same nation as this child (87). Though of course, Galahad is the one subjected to the nation.
Having dissected the insupportability of an essentialised identity, Selvon turns instead to the active creation of a home. With the naming of place in such contention, the boys’ renaming of London landmarks (The Hill, The Gate, The Water) gives them their own power over the city. Eliot and Nasta point out that this gives them a rural, regional sound (00:27:58). They are demoted from the mythical to the topographically literal landmark. In making their own linguistic claim of familiarity, the boys are able to ’stak[e] an identity in the city’, thereby relocating themselves from stranger to citizen and disrupting the apparently essential power of colonial naming (Eliot 00:17:12). The Empire is named back. Tanty’s efforts, too, bring cultural exchange to the Water— her renaming of ‘credit’ as ‘trust’ is enough to persuade a shopkeeper to change his practice (79). The earlier mentioned homogenising force of ‘the boys’ is undone by the individualising element of the ‘ballads’ describing the unique lives and particularities of each ‘boy’ as they are named in turn.
Yet Selvon’s clearest declaration of home and belonging for the boys is in his diasporic ‘homemaking’. With housing discrimination, and the general public concern over West Indians ‘taking’ housing space, it would have been contentious enough for the boys to have their own space (Ellis 224). However, Moses’ room, sacred space of the ‘Sunday morning get-togethers’ is the antidote to the lack of community from which London otherwise suffers. In the past, present, and future covered with their ‘oldtalk’, ‘what happening, when is the next fete’, they create an enduring space for themselves; a temporal certainty within a precarious space, with ‘London and life on the outside’, and the sharing of an in-between home within (138; 140).
Overall, although The Lonely Londoners is hardly the ‘hymn of praise to [Selvon’s] adopted city’ Jerry White suggests it to be, and although Selvon is acutely aware of how alienated the West Indian experience is in this unmaternal ‘mother country’, here he begins to pick apart the pressures which colonisation has placed on the sense of belonging and home for those from the colonies (9). Where a ‘home’ has been denied to the boys, Selvon has suggested an alternative vision of it; both in what the parameters of belonging might be, and in how it might be achieved. On the final page, Moses ponders returning ‘home’, but decides instead to write a (this?) book; if he cannot yet be a treated as a subject of this nation, he will be a subject of its narrative.