This is the second in a series on men who shaped Trinidadian and Caribbean literature. After C L R James, I turn to Sam Selvon, known to generations of Trinidadian schoolchildren as the novelist of Trinidad villages and postwar, Windrush immigrant Britain, writer of A Brighter Sun, The Lonely Londoners, Ways of Sunlight and the Moses books.
Samuel Dickson Selvon was born in San Fernando on May 20, 1923, the sixth of seven children. His father was a first-generation Christian Tamil Indian immigrant from Madras. His mother was a Christian Anglo-Indian, with a Scottish father and an Indian mother. He was educated at Naparima College in San Fernando and left school at 15. During the Second World War, he served as a wireless operator with the local branch of the Royal Naval Reserve from 1940 to 1945.
After the war, Selvon moved north to Port-of-Spain and worked for this paper, the Trinidad Guardian, from 1945 to 1950, first as a reporter and later on its literary page. He wrote stories and descriptive sketches under names including Michael Wentworth, Esses, Ack-Ack and Big Buffer. Much of that early writing was later collected in Foreday Morning, edited by Kenneth Ramchand and Susheila Nasta.
In 1950, Selvon left Trinidad for London. He did menial jobs and later became a clerk at the Indian Embassy while writing in his spare time. His stories and poems must have immediately stood out as this unknown West Indian’s stories began appearing in London Magazine, New Statesman and The Nation. He also worked with the BBC and wrote television scripts, including Anansi the Spiderman and Home Sweet India.
Selvon’s Britain in the first Windrush years, after the 1948 British Nationality Act had given colonial subjects the right to enter and settle in Britain. The Lonely Londoners came out in 1956, eight years after the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury in June 1948 with 1,027 passengers, more than 800 of whom gave a Caribbean country as their last place of residence, during the years when hundreds of thousands of West Indians left Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and other islands for Britain, settling in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bristol and other cities, working in transport, factories, hospitals and public services.
The London through which Moses and Galahad move in The Lonely Londoners was shaped by these realities. West Indians had trouble finding lodgings, discovering that landlords routinely advertised rooms with signs stating “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” or simply refused to rent to “blacks or coloureds”. They encountered employment colour bars, were frequently stopped and harassed by police, and found themselves the targets of a growing hostility towards black immigration.
That hostility erupted in August 1958 when white Teddy Boy gangs, young men in drape jackets and drainpipe trousers, roamed Notting Hill armed with iron bars, knives and makeshift weapons. They hunted black residents, attacked men and women in the streets, smashed windows, vandalised homes and hurled bricks and bottles at houses where West Indian families lived. For several nights, black residents barricaded themselves indoors or organised to defend their neighbourhoods. Similar attacks occurred in Nottingham earlier that summer, revealing that hostility towards Caribbean migrants extended well beyond London. Although Britain had invited Caribbean migrants to help rebuild the country after the war, sections of British society responded to their presence with fear, resentment and racial violence.
A Brighter Sun was published in 1952. The novel follows Tiger, a young Indian Trinidadian labourer, through marriage to Urmilla, work, land settlement and the building of the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway during the war years in Trinidad. The book later became a standard CXC English literature text across the Caribbean. An Island Is a World followed in 1955. The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956. Ways of Sunlight came in 1957, Turn Again Tiger in 1958 and Those Who Eat the Cascadura in 1972.
I first read The Lonely Londoners after Selvon died in Trinidad in April 1994. Moses Aloetta goes to Waterloo Station to meet Henry Oliver, called Sir Galahad, newly arrived from Trinidad. Galahad comes into the cold with thin clothes and would have to quickly learn how things work in London. Moses, Cap, Big City, Five Past Twelve and the others move between Bayswater rooms, cafés, labour exchanges, women, cigarettes, rent money and winter streets. Men drifted in the fog between rented rooms, employment offices and cafés, their wages barely covering rent, food and transport.
Selvon later said that he first wrote The Lonely Londoners with the narrative in standard English and most of the dialogue in dialect, then rewrote both narrative and dialogue in dialect and “the novel just shot along.”
The London in the book is Waterloo, Shepherd’s Bush, Bayswater, Notting Hill, winter fog, cold rooms, black men walking from one address to another looking for work or lodging, white women curious about black men, white landlords suspicious of black tenants, men cooking food from home in cramped kitchens, men sending money back to the Caribbean, men reading letters from Trinidad and Jamaica in rented rooms, and touchingly, men loving London as tenderly as they loved their women.
Selvon returned to Moses in Moses Ascending in 1975. Moses has bought a decaying house in Shepherd’s Bush and is trying to become a landlord and memoirist, renting rooms to immigrants while London changes around him. Moses Migrating followed in 1983 and takes Moses back towards Trinidad and Carnival.
Selvon married twice: first in 1947 to Draupadi Persaud, with whom he had one daughter, and later in 1963 to Althea Daroux, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. He died on April 16, 1994, at Piarco International Airport from respiratory failure caused by bronchopneumonia and chronic lung disease. His ashes were interred at the University of the West Indies cemetery at St Augustine.
Sam Selvon held creative writing posts at the University of Dundee, the University of Victoria and the University of Calgary, where he became writer-in-residence. His honours include Guggenheim Fellowships in 1955 and 1968, Trinidad and Tobago’s Hummingbird Medal Gold in 1969, honorary doctorates from UWI and Warwick, a posthumous Chaconia Medal Gold, and NALIS’s Lifetime Achievement Literary Award in 2012.
CLR James wrote about race, power, Empire, slavery and revolution, while Selvon went close to the bone with Moses at Waterloo, Galahad under the big clock at Piccadilly Tube Station, the boys laughing because they were “fraid to cry”, the paltry rations in the cupboard, the winter rooms, the English ignorance that made every West Indian Jamaican, and that question Galahad asks near the end of The Lonely Londoners:
“Lord, what is it we people do in this world that we have to suffer so? What it is we want that the white people and them find it so hard to give? A little work, a little food, a little place to sleep. We not asking for the sun, or the moon. We only want to get by, we don’t even want to get on.”
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
