Sam Selvon: Under the Kiff-Kiff Laughter

In 1994, as he is being transported by stretcher to a waiting airplane that would take him out of Trinidad to his home and family in Calgary, Canada, Sam Selvon dies on the tarmac. Like those who eat the cascadura, as the native legend says, he ends his days in Trinidad.¹ We shall never know, of course, but it is tempting to believe that he died there and then because he did not want to leave, he wanted to end his days there. His love for the island that, at an early stage of his life he had understood as “a world,” kept him there, in the place where he was born.² In that place, days of mourning followed, and he was given a grand farewell. He stayed.

The cascadura/cascadoo (hassar in Guyana) is a small, freshwater mudfish covered with a thick armour of curving scales. Almost prehistoric in appearance, it requires considerable skill in preparation and even in eating. Selvon uses the legend of the cascadura in an early short story, “Johnson and the Cascadura”³ and revisits it more fully in the novel, Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1990). The first two lines of Allistair Macmillan’s poem form the epigraph of that novel:

The landscape of that novel echoes the poem’s celebration of the “cocoa woods” and “stately immortelles” of that “lovely fragrant island.” The poem is one used in a primary school reader of the times and is well-known in Trinidad, as is the legend of return. Another echo of Selvon’s early colonial education shows up in the title of the novel, Turn Again Tiger, an echo of “Turn again Whittington,” from the British children’s rhyme and tale about Dick Whittington and his cat.

For me, it was an immense privilege to have known Samuel Selvon and to have laughed and limed with him on several occasions. My uncle, Robert, was a friend of his youth at Naparima College and his forever greeting to me was, “How Robert doing?” A wholly generous man, in soul and spirit, ever ready to heckle or crack a joke, but always with an underside of caring about the folks around him. Once our conversation turned to India and its pavement dwellers and he said with some heat, “If I was there, I sure I would just feel like dropping and sitting down right there with them.” I believed him.

In 1986 at a Writers’ Conference in London, Selvon was on stage reading from Moses Ascending (1975) when a woman walked onto the stage and slapped him twice. Here is a section from the passage he was reading, spoken by Moses:

The slaps resounded through the auditorium. He drew back, shocked, and did not react. Years later there was still chatter and gossip about the incident and many different takes on it. It was 1986 and I was not that surprised to hear many (male) writers voice the opinion afterwards that Sam had lost face by not simply slapping her back. Sam, as Susheila Nasta says in her afterword, was deeply hurt by the event and talked about it a lot. I remember his words to me a few years later about it. “Girl, you know how we grow up. I couldn’t do nothing. I never hit a woman in my life.” To me it was clearly a response to the disapproval at his inaction. Nasta says that the passage “has to be seen in the context of the novel as a whole which is utterly subversive and satirical and targets everyone – whether white, black, male, female, fellow writers…”

Moses Aloetta surfaces initially in The Lonely Londoners “One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet”⁶…as a witness to the movement of Caribbean people into London during the ‘50s and ‘60s, now known to us as the Windrush generation. Moses is irascible, flippant, no bleeding heart, far from it, but his engagement with the “fellars” involves him in their fortunes, their lucky breaks, their failures. The wit of his commentary, his candour, his hard-headed analysis of their predicaments helps him, and his friends ride over the frenzy of their daily lives, the hardship of survival, the racist acts they endure, while the questions continue to percolate underneath. “So what happening, man, what happening. What the arse happening, lord? What all of us doing, coasting lime…”⁷ Their bewilderment continues to echo in the fervent embrace of summer “as if life start all over again, as if it still have time, as if it still have another chance…the summer does really be hearts.”⁸ Selvon conjures up “the old Moses, standing on the banks of the Thames” as a prophet mourning the predicament of his country men, and by extension, everyone else. The existential questions about life and its meaning bedevil him, “As if, on the surface, things don’t look so bad, but when you go down a little, you bounce up a kind of misery and pathos and a frightening -what?⁹ In the two other novels with Moses as centre — Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983) — questions are also raised about futility and meaninglessness, with an almost bitter undertone of cynicism, at times.

Selvon’s philosophical questioning of the world must have begun at an early age. He is said to have expressed the desire to be a philosopher at age eight, at a time when the two professions for ambitious schoolboys were “doctor” and “lawyer.” His interest in philosophy was deep and in Ramchand’s introduction to the reprint of An Island is a World in 1993, we read a personal note in which Selvon states that “of all the books I’ve ever written it is the only one in which I set out consciously to express or try out some of my beliefs.” Ramchand asserts that, despite the lukewarm reception that this novel received when it was published, it is the novel behind all Selvon’s novels.¹⁰ I could not agree with him more; the philosophical questing is apparent from the beginning, inherent in Tiger’s quest for personhood in A Brighter Sun.

In this novel, the protagonist, Tiger, comes from the sugar-cane belt of Central Trinidad and moves to Barataria, an interesting urban outpost in the early stages of becoming a town, located on the Eastern Main Road, which linked the capital, Port-of-Spain, to the more easternmost settlements or towns such as Arima. This novel is rooted in the many changes, almost upheavals, taking place at the time, as Americans stationed at the Naval Base begin to construct a highway through Barataria to the eastern part of the country. Tiger and Urmilla emerge from rural central Trinidad smack into the busy life of a settlement in the middle of drastic change–market gardens, concrete houses, shops, huts with thatched roofs, middle class dwellers, peasants–a swirling locus of customs and people in transition. Selvon shows his prowess at characterization here: Tiger is thoughtful, inquiring, out-of-step with the ways of his surroundings, but never losing his footing, grounded in what has brought him to this point. In this, Selvon’s first novel, Tiger’s existential quest for meaning, for the answers to questions about the purpose for living and what is life about, begin to find form. Tiger is possessed of a sharp intelligence and native commonsense as well as a resistance to feeling embarrassed about his lack of sophistication in the milieu in which he finds himself. He remains anchored and searches out his terrain, one step at a time.

Much has been made of Selvon’s experiments in language, especially in The Lonely Londoners, one of the first novels to utilize the Creole language so fully in the text and one in which it attains poetic lyricism and depth. Selvon’s urban outlook on life, his ease in the Creole milieu of Trinidad and his skill in deploying elements of its vernacular culture–its language, picong and irony–were nurtured in the crucible of Naparima College and the city/town of San Fernando, where he was born and came to maturity. Port of Spain may be the capital city, but especially in the post-war period in which his novels were set, San Fernando had a more racially diverse population with a growing Indian middle-class, emerging from the educational enterprise of the Naparima/Presbyterian system of Education/Christianization, which began in 1868 and was aimed specifically at Indians in the early period, later opening itself to all comers at the secondary level. The education of the Indian community was managed by the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad for close to 100 years; Hindu schools only began to be established in the island in the 1950s. Part of San Fernando’s uniqueness and cosmopolitanism in Trinidad (small as that island is) arose from being the urban centre for the agricultural (sugarcane) sector as well as the location of the main oil refinery on the island at that time. Creolization occurred en masse, and the difference between urban Indians and their rural counterparts was beginning to be marked by wide cultural differences in customs, food and societal expectations.

Tiger emerges out of Chaguanas, in the heart of Trinidad’s sugar belt, as an illiterate Indian. His native curiosity propels him into learning to read and write, instructed by another peasant farmer, Sookdeo. His impulse towards becoming literate is propelled by a compulsion to find out about the world:

He informs Urmilla that “I will write down everything that happen.”¹¹ The urge to write, to record echoes as well in An Island is a World: “Whenever and wherever he thought about it, there was a brilliant beginning…As if he had all the time in the world, he locked each leaping phrase away”¹² and in Moses’s pondering at the end of The Lonely Londoners: “…over in France all kinds of fellars writing books what turning out to be best-sellers. He watch a tugboat on the Thames, wondering if he could write a book like that, what everybody would buy.”¹³

The West Indian migration to England in the 1950s was marked by hope, uncertainty and encounters with racism that most had never experienced before. Selvon offers in The Lonely Londoners, a version of the social history of the times, when the rough camaraderie between the “fellars,” their banter and solidarity, their shared understanding of class and colour and being “black,” a political term at the time that encompassed the diversity of Caribbean folk, kept them afloat, scrounging and getting by as best they could among the “Working Class.” “Wherever in London that it have Working Class, there you will find a lot of spades.”¹⁴ Between the hard times though, the rhapsodic “Oh what a time it is when summer come to the city…”¹⁵ memorializes that season in an unbroken stream-of-consciousness sentence of nine pages. A radical departure in Caribbean literary form during that period. The novel is an account of a specific time in Caribbean life, experienced by those who went to Britain but simultaneously by those who stayed at home and read the tale of their countrymen, understanding that “opportunities” in a wider world would be fraught with difficulty and perhaps, real danger too. The big question that the novel lays bare is the existential quest for meaning, the very real angst of Moses, the man-about-town, the guide and almost the anchor for the fellars shambling through their peregrinations in the city, the easygoing guy who, nevertheless, is driven to see the futility of the whole picture:

Behind it all, the unanswered questions about the meaning of life continue to surface throughout Selvon’s writing.

In A Brighter Sun, his first novel, Selvon begins to confront the ethno-cultural baggage of his antecedents through the persona of Tiger, who is contrasted with the Creole personalities of Joe and Rita, their neighbours, and Boysie, an Indo-Creole, proudly asserting his departure from “backward” Indian ways and functioning as a cipher to Tiger’s naïve questions about race. Boysie proclaims that “wite people is God in dis country…Black people like we don’t stand a chance.” Tiger’s obvious rejoinder is, “But man, I ain’t black. I is a Indian.” And Boysie explains, “As long as yuh ain’t wite, dey does call yuh black, wedder yuh coolie or nigger or chinee.”¹⁶ But the questions of race and identity, only a minor preoccupation of Tiger in his larger search for meaning, is not at all a concern of Foster, the urbanized Indo-Creole.

Many of the characters in An Island is a World are ethnically Indian, but function as Creoles within their urban environment, complete with the disdain for rural (Indian) modes and customs, their own attitudes to courtship and marriage subject to Creole norms and ideas of decency. When Reena gets pregnant, Rufus accepts without question his obligation to marry her. However, Selvon does register the marked difference between urban and rural Indian identities in the cameo-like episode describing the journey of time-elapsed indentures returning to India, after a hard-won battle with the colonial authorities to fulfil the promise of return. “They came towards the city the night before the ship was due to sail…In little groups of twos and threes they came out of the night…And anyone seeing them would never have thought they were about to embark on a long voyage.”¹⁷ The haunting poetry of these lines embody Selvon’s own grasp of the pathos of this return journey. Foster is taken to the wharf to see them by his friend Andrews, a Black painter and city councillor, who assumes responsibility and manages to secure them shelter for the night. Foster is led to think about how “He had nothing. He had been brought up as a Trinidadian – a member of a cosmopolitan community who recognised no creed or race, a creature born of all the peoples in the world, in a small island that no one knew anything about.”¹⁸ He observes the group with curiosity, at a distance, neither empathizing nor identifying with them, wondering at their desire to return to India, finding no easy resonance with the history of indenture that led to this voyage of return. Selvon’s Creole vernacular choices in writing stamps his characters as Black, in keeping with the political divisions current in the London of the time, ignoring the peculiar subdivisions of ethnicity within the surface cosmopolitanism of Trinidad.

However, as he himself has stated, he consciously set out to explore the preoccupations that consumed him, in An Island is a World. The protagonist, Foster, is a person in search of “being,” refusing to follow the hackneyed prescriptions for living that surround him. He is already aware that it is the meaninglessness of life that characterizes his disaffection and not the smallness of the colonial island that he lives in. The work ends with him desperately pleading with Jennifer, the young woman with whom he is planning to spend his life, to make him desire her above every other shade of meaning that he seeks, asserting a fullness in their coupling that will, and must, override the futility of existence. The prologue of the novel (really an epilogue) swings into a settled life with Jennifer as they sit having breakfast together–a Creole, island breakfast described in fine detail. This is a searching novel, ending impractically, providing no solutions to Foster’s malady, but beyond that, asserting that there are none to be found. One simply continues the act of living or leaps off a cliff, as Father Hope does when his perceived day of reckoning comes.

Adventurous in concept and unlike anything else being written in the Caribbean at the time, An Island is a World presents Foster breaking through the smallness of his colonial reality and functioning simply as a citizen of the world. His questions are not bound by the regard in which he, colonial man, is held. The few episodes with Americans in his work with them during the war years show his lack of concern with their obvious racism; instead, he asserts an indifference and handles their insults strategically.

Selvon employs the technique of doubling in the novel by using numerous plot twists between Foster and his brother Rufus, the long arm of coincidence playing no small part in the crossings and re-crossings, to the extent that he and Rufus eventually discover that they have had a sexual relationship with the same woman, Marleen. By the haplessness of circumstance, Foster becomes the father of her child and the name Julia, chosen for the child at random, turns out to be the same as that of his previous English lover, whom he has already helped to have an abortion.

In part, a dizzy-making plot, but it rolls out smoothly, this pseudo-bildungsroman, never stopping the search for answers and Selvon’s admirable craft allows its many parallels to fit together in unpredictable jigsaw fashion. His brand of humour is not in short supply either, as in Rufus’s wedding where, in a dramatically funny scene, Foster wangles a generous cheque for his brother, by trickery, from the reluctant Johnny, father of the bride. There is also the hilarious courtroom episode where a confused Patrick muddles his lines concerning the improbable act of adultery he is supposed to have witnessed.

By the following year, when The Lonely Londoners burst onto the scene, An Island is a World was relegated to the back shelves and never reprinted until, after years in Canada, it was brought to the attention of the publishers of TSAR¹⁹ and reissued in 1993. Yet this seems to be Selvon’s most probing, sensitive and bold novel, in its determined quest to grapple with the psyche of Foster, a protagonist like no other in all his work.

It may be said that Sam Selvon settled into writing the kind of novel that fate assigned him, after the relative lack of success of An Island is a World, finding a felicitous ease in the refuge of the vernacular and his unquestionable skill in deploying it, and riding that wave in the novels to follow, accepted as his trademark style, but perhaps longing still to tangle with the existential dilemma at the heart of the God-forsaken meaninglessness of existence.