'Tricksters of the Water: Sam Selvon's West London and the Migrant Experience'

Maber, Peter and Patel, Karishma (2023) 'Tricksters of the Water: Sam Selvon's West London and the Migrant Experience'. In: Cultures of London: Legacies of Migration. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781350242012 (In Press)

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Abstract

Sam Selvon, one of the best known writers of the Windrush Generation, moved to London from Trinidad in 1950. This essay reads his now celebrated novel The Lonely Londoners (1956) alongside his 1957 collection of short stories, Ways of Sunlight, as a way of charting Selvon's innovative engagement with form. The stories in Ways of Sunlight are divided into two sections, ‘Trinidad’ and ‘London’, which demonstrate both continuity and difference: a bewitched mango tree becomes an enchanted London plane in Ladbroke Grove; the relatively understated accents of the Trinidad stories become the eye dialect (or nation language) readers are more familiar with in The Lonely Londoners. Two related Trinidadian traditions: the figure of the trickster, and the spirit of carnival run throughout the London stories, including in 'Calypso in London’ and, more ambivalently, ‘Obeah in the Grove’, where the West Indian protagonists attempt to get revenge for the discriminatory housing practices in 50s Notting Hill. Turning to The Lonely Londoners, this essay argues that these West Indian influences are further integrated into Selvon's form, but that greater ambivalences arise. The use of language in particular gives rise to tensions between orthography and the vernacular, with the text conspicuously bare of the diacritics or punctuation that might allow for recitation. Selvon's prominent use of hiatus, as phonological ambiguity, is read as a figure for the uncomfortably migratory and hiatal lives of the Windrush generation characters, who never find rest as they move from place to place in London, constantly and harshly dislocated. Their vernacular is corralled into an orthographic form unable to express its rhythms, one at odds with its conventions, and this is a disjunct the reader experiences throughout. Even so, Selvon's prose allows for gains as well as losses in its openness: the gaps carry with them transformative possibilities, refashioning London in the image of its new arrivals as the ultimate trick.

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