“He Had a Sympathetic Understanding of Everybody”: Remembering Sam Selvon — a Conversation with Ramabai Espinet

Nalini Mohabir (NM):: We would like to begin with the Canadian Presbyterian schools in Trinidad. Could you tell us about your experience of school in Trinidad, in San Fernando. What was on the syllabus? What was that experience like? We think that’s an experience both you and Selvon would have shared.

Ramabai Espinet (RE):: Very much, because it was in San Fernando where he was also educated. I wasn’t born in San Fernando but I grew up there. We went through the same system of colleges and schools: Naparima. So Naparima College was his secondary school, and I went to Naparima Girls. This was at different times. He was good friends with my uncle at Naparima. He was a name in my family circle though I did not meet him until later. [He] was very much, I think, a product of that Naparima College experience which is marked by certain things: a wicked sense of humor, a lot of irony, heckling, but also, a gentleness, a kind of — I hate to use the word — gentility, but really very good manners and “broughtupcy”. He always had an old-fashioned kind of courtesy about him. I can’t think of a better way to describe it. But he also had a sympathetic understanding of everybody. That was his response to life. I remember, he told me once, in commenting on the increasing presence of vagrants on the streets of Port of Spain in the 80s, “When I see those fellows on the pavement the first thing I think of is going and sitting down with them and just being part of it and understanding it.” He said much the same thing about pavement dwellers in India. His work is marked by that sympathetic understanding and identification with everyone that he writes about. And it doesn’t matter if it’s, you know, a rapist like in Those Who Eat the Cascadura, or someone like Prakash, in the same book who is perplexed and doesn’t know what to do about his love and fascination for the woman, Sarojini.¹ But what I find is he gets into the insides. He’s a writer from the interior of a character’s being, even if it’s a minor character. I’m saying that’s also who he was, as a person, in my assessment of him, my understanding of him.

And he was someone that you would love very much if you met him. He was totally extroverted, but also such a jokester, a prankster. That was my response to him, I was just very fond of him. When he went to Calgary, he was simultaneously a writer in residence and a janitor. You remember he was a janitor at the University of Calgary?² Did he think anything of it? No, not for a minute. That was just where life had landed him. He took it on. And he became great friends with all the guys he worked with. I think that’s the same quality that he brought to his writing.

Ronald Cummings (RC): Do you remember when you first met Selvon?

RE:: Yes. At York University, although I didn’t really meet him then, he came as a visiting speaker.

I read your interview with Frank Birbalsingh, where he was talking about when he first introduced Caribbean Studies in the English Department at York.³ Well, in 1973 at York I took a course titled “West Indian Literature” with Professor Dick Ewen. Ewen had lectured at the University of the West Indies at St. Augustine previously, under some sort of Commonwealth exchange. He fell in love with Trinidad and discovered the new writing that was emerging – Lamming, Naipaul, Selvon, Walcott. He perceived that something different was happening in English Literature. At York you were assigned to a college and had to take one course offered by that college. I took that course with him at Bethune College and encountered many other West Indian students in a variety of disciplines. It was great – here we were seeing our own experiences on the page and for many, becoming aware for the first time that “West Indian Literature” existed. The arguments that emerged and the friendships were both powerful. And that was when Selvon came to visit York. Someone in the audience asked, “What are you reading now and which author would you recommend to us?” I remember it vividly because I heard Sam repeat it many times when asked this type of question, “Boy, I doh read nah, I does only write.” Selvon was still in London and was invited because he was just so fabulous as a writer. And you know, again, there’s that gentle kind of vision in his work. Deadpan, but gentle. He didn’t have any dramatics with it or anything like that. But yes, that’s the first time. I did a graduate course with Frank later.

NM:: Which Selvon texts were taught in that course at York?

RE:: I think it was either A Brighter Sun or Turn Again Tiger. I had read these books as they came out. I was a teenager just hungry for Caribbean writing. I do remember reading in a magazine, it might have been Kyk-Over-Al, a Derek Walcott poem about the sea and another about “corn cake” and I was just blown away. So, in that way, I was familiar with Selvon and some other Caribbean writers before reading their work at university. It wasn’t that I was being introduced to one of his texts, for the very first time, you know what I mean?

RC:: Your early readings of Caribbean literature, would this have been extracurricular reading, as in material not on the school syllabus? In asking that question, I am also curious about what was on your school syllabus. Was there any Caribbean literature included?

RE:: Not a single drop of anything Caribbean. I did my G.C.E. A-level exams in 1966, so there would have been nothing at all on the syllabus.⁴ But if you were an avid reader, as I was, the books were in the library, so it was all extracurricular. But I was very aware that something was happening in terms of writing in the West Indies. Related to that was the fact that we were studying, for A-levels, Yeats and the Irish Renaissance, and again I read everything I could find about that. I’ll explain.

We had a great library at Naparima College. I was at the Boys’ College, not at Naparima Girls because if you were doing science you had to go there. I don’t know if you have heard of James Lee Wah who is legendary in Trinidad drama circles? He was a teacher at Naparima College, but so much more, because he did so much in the arts; he established the Drama Guild in San Fernando. He was involved in drama at the College and he was also the College Librarian, so he got material from everywhere. If you studied William Blake, which we did, you also had access to Swedenborg’s drawings. Lee Wah got everything that was coming out, as it came out. This wasn’t the Public Library; it was the school library. It was just so rich.

In terms of the syllabus, we had an excellent array of texts: from [Geoffrey] Chaucer to [William] Shakespeare, [John] Donne, [Andrew] Marvell, [John] Milton…and [W. B.] Yeats was studied in the section called “The Moderns.” I just fell in love with Yeats. But also, the idea of the Irish Renaissance and what was happening there was so inspiring because I saw a parallel between that and what was beginning to happen in the Caribbean. And I was old enough at the time to understand the great tragedy, which I personally experienced as a tragedy: the death of the West Indian Federation. That to me was the moment when we could have built something like the awareness and literary consciousness that was happening in Ireland. We could have built something across our different islands like that. But I still saw it beginning, with all the people who were around and writing. I mean, we got Bim from Barbados, we got the books published in London.

I left Trinidad in ‘68, but during that period, (in those two years, after A-levels) I really became aware that a lot was happening, and this would have been a kind of precursor to 1970 and the coup in Trinidad and the assertion of Black consciousness. Lloyd Best returned from his studies abroad and began to form the Tapia Movement. So, it was a very exciting time. You could feel it in the air. I can think of so many people who were the participants later in that kind of conscientization. And of course, it was an anti-colonial movement. I mean, I was somewhat aware of the folks who had written before (but not from the syllabus, mind you), like CLR James. Beyond the Boundary is one of the best books ever written. And it’s not about cricket only. It’s such an analysis of the educational system. What was on the syllabus was also The Romantics. There were three papers: The Romantics, The Moderns, and then a sort of survey course of everything that went before. Only British though, there were no Americans on it, though the library had Whitman, Frost, Emily Dickinson and others.

RC:: You have talked about how Naparima shaped you and shaped Selvon. I wondered if there are ways in which you see San Fernando, more broadly, as a formative source for writing. I mean, when you read Selvon, do you recognize spaces and people from San Fernando, even if the work is not set in San Fernando?

RE:: Types, more than actual people. Types. San Fernando’s position is peculiar in a way, it’s the heart of the sugar belt, but it’s also an urban and industrial center because they established the oil refinery around the corner from San Fernando, at Pointe-à-Pierre, a small area outside of San Fernando. So, San Fernando was the hub for Pointe-à-Pierre, Marabella and a lot of other small urban centers. I don’t even think they would be called towns.

But just beyond that, to the north is Chaguanas, which is like the heart of Naipaul territory, and to the East would be the sugarcane fields. So, it was an urban center in the middle of a cane area. The road that leads to one of the best and most used beaches in Trinidad, Mayaro, goes along that route. To get to Mayaro from San Fernando you go through wonderful winding roads, cane territory, and the little village of Tableland. You go through beautiful landscapes, because you’re driving along a hilltop, and the cane lands are in the valleys on both sides. The architecture of the cane lands is stunning — there’s always a shady palm-covered oasis in the middle where I think workers would sit and have lunch and rest. And then there’s the cane all around it. It’s quite scenic, never mind the amount of labor that produced it and the labor that it’s allied to. It is still beautiful.

So, San Fernando was very much a hub and at the time, there were so many little movements. For people doing visual art there was an Arts Society, and there were others who would get together reading and writing poetry. Michael Anthony wrote the novel, Green Days by the River. Many of the political activists at that time came from San Fernando, people such as Michael Als and Wayne Davis, who published their work later on.⁵

But at the time, just out of school and young, I experienced it as a wonderful, exciting time. And also, the Drama Guild was functioning. James Lee Wah was the head of the Drama Guild and frequently produced and directed plays that won island-wide drama festival competitions. One of the memorable ones was Called to the Bar by Melville Foster. A lot of actors came out of San Fernando. Of course, something parallel was happening in Port of Spain too, but San Fernando had a different vibe.

NM:: Thank you. I want to return to the 1960s. I know you were still young, but I’m just wondering since Selvon was published beginning in the 50s, if by the 60s, whether he was part of that kind of anticolonial landscape that you describe. Were people reading him? How did he fit into that cultural milieu of the 1960s as you were growing up and encountering his books?

RE:: It’s hard to separate Selvon and Naipaul. They were the two prominent writers from Trinidad. So, I would say that there were a lot of reactions to both Selvon and Naipaul from folks at home, including from my family. These readers were mostly Naparima type people and they, including my father who repented later, would say, “Well, Naipaul come from riches, what the hell Naipaul know about people like us?” You know they felt that he was bad-talking Trinidad. In the Middle Passage Naipaul quotes a woman who recognizes him and flings in his face this taunt, “They must be does talk so by you, they don’t talk so by me.” (Espinet laughs.) People were aware of the existence of these writers, but they were mere curiosities. They weren’t on the curriculum so I think high school students as well as others would hardly see their work as “literature.” Don’t forget though, that at the same time we knew they were talking about us. I think this happens in every small place. When “we” are being talked about, we are not grateful at all. We just think it’s bad-talking and that was very much the case.

NM:: I know that you’ve described going to the libraries and seeking out books that weren’t on the curriculum. What was the first Selvon book that you sought out?

RE:: Well, I sought out everything, I read everything that was there at the time as they were published. So yes, the Tiger books were there. I was, at the time though, more interested in Naipaul. So, I read Naipaul’s books as soon as they came out and were put in the public library. There was a special West Indian section in the Public Library, but it was not available to the public. The librarians were not interested in exposing books to the general public, partly, I think, because of the risk of theft. There was a West Indian section that was in a locked cabinet, and you had to ask for the books. So, you had to know what to ask for. It wasn’t like they were trying to spread it around. I think because of the cussing and the sort of lax sexual morality, (let’s put it that way) you could get it, but you had to ask for it. People who didn’t know the names of the books wouldn’t know what to ask for. So, in that way, there was a kind of containment.

RC:: That cabinet could provide such a rich metaphor for talking about the relationship between Caribbean literature and publics.

I want to come back to something you had mentioned in the previous response, which was about the question of language. I wondered if you might say something about Selvon’s use of language. What did that offer to you as a writer later when you were coming into writing? What did you see as useful and important about Selvon’s use of Caribbean language?

RE:: Well, I was writing since I was very young, but the question of writing in the way that we spoke on an everyday basis did not occur to me. But I should mention other popular aspects of our Creole writing such as a daily column in the ‘60s published in the Evening News. It was a witty column written by Kitty Hannays, a journalist. Kitty was truly talented. The name of the column was Macaw (a play on the term “maco” meaning a nosey gossip). Every day she produced a column about life in Trinidad, written in Creole, lavishly funny and entertaining. I must have been reading those columns since I was about twelve or so, and I looked out for them every day. So, what Selvon and Naipaul and Hannays were emphasizing in their writing was that we had a language. And I think that’s one of the most brilliant things that Selvon has done in that poetic novel, The Lonely Londoners. Perhaps because he was a supporter of the Federation, like most other artists and thinkers in the region, I think he took the language we speak and turned it into a kind of Caribbean idiom. He was forging a poetic idiom. It wouldn’t have taken account of all the different Creoles, because we were not exposed to them. I think, if the Federation had survived, we might have had a very different history. We would have been more exposed to the differences instead of jeering at each other’s language, as calypso does so well. You know that calypso, by Blakie? The calypso is about Grenadians and the way policemen in Trinidad were rounding up “illegals” who were identified by their language. The line is: “The police telling dem say hog yuh stupid man/And as he bawl out hag/Is licks in de police van.”⁶ I can think of many other instances where language is the identifier.

I think in the diaspora we are freer as writers to use many different Creoles. But at that time, people used the Creole that they knew. So that the texts that came out of Jamaica like Roger Mais’s, work used their own Creole. But there was an understanding that it was Creole and that it was a language. On an everyday basis though, we still used the word “dialect” or viewed our vernacular with disdain as “bad English.”

NM:: Since you brought up diaspora, I was wondering about the kinds of conversations you would have had with Selvon in the diasporic space of Canada, around the negotiations of identity in Canada, or how he experienced diaspora in the UK or maybe how the experience of Canada might have shifted his understanding of diaspora.

RE:: I think Canada was relatively hostile to him. I don’t think that space was provided for him. Most of the time I interacted with him, he was not interested in talking about theoretical matters at all. He was a veteran limer. He would lime and heckle and you would relax with him. I was interested in knowing him and who he was. So, I don’t think those questions arose.

There was, I think, about a week when I met Selvon every day at the University of Calgary. This was in the 90s and Victor Ramraj who taught in the English Department there, invited me to a conference and to read my work. Sam was very encouraging. I don’t know if you know of Desh Pardesh?⁷ I, along with some other women, wrote and staged a play called Beyond the Kala Pani and Sam said “Girl, dat ting good, dat ting good”. That is the kind of way he would respond. I don’t think that I ever talked to him about diaspora and the differences. I didn’t have literary conversations with him because I didn’t interview him, which is a pity. I just limed with him. I know he felt that it wasn’t a literary move he made by coming to Calgary, he simply migrated there with his family. But I think he felt that there wasn’t a place for him in Canada. And apart from, TSAR [Toronto South Asian Review] and being published there, I don’t think he was embraced.

NM:: Is it partly the difference in identity formations? In the UK there was a broad understanding of West Indian, whereas in Canada maybe people like yourself and Selvon were thought of in relation to a kind of South Asian-ness? Even staging a play on the Kala Pani at Desh Pardesh becomes an interesting space.

RE:: There’s a big change in the way Caribbean people were viewed in England in the Windrush era, because everybody was Black when they went there; that was a political formation and that provided space. And that was my understanding of things while I was still in Trinidad, based on what was happening in Britain. So, when I came to Canada that was very much my political outlook. I identified as Black because politically, that’s where I placed myself. South Asian was a more theoretical term that occurred later.

I came to Canada in the late ‘60s and lived in different parts of the country. I got involved with the Black movements in Toronto in the ‘70s. I worked in the Black Education Project (BEP) and several others. I met a lot of people there who are still my friends and that’s how it was for a couple of decades in Canada before everything sectioned off into their various ethnicities. I would say that OSSICC [Ontario Society for Studies in Indo-Caribbean Culture] put Indo-Caribbean on the map. This was mainly Frank Birbalsingh’s doing, but I and a few others were involved over several years. But before that, there was no place for people from the Caribbean who were of Indian descent because we were not South Asian, and South Asians made that very clear at an early stage. At the university level, I found that the South Asians from India whom I met did not consider Caribbean Indians to be Indians. Much has changed since then but at the time they were not particularly friendly. I can’t think of a single South Asian friend that I had then. Most of my friends at university were Black people from the Caribbean, Black and mixed race or Caribbean and Latin American folks. Perhaps some white Canadians and other ethnicities too, but not South Asian.

The term South Asian is a very fraught category, especially now that there is more understanding of the role of indentureship globally, in terms of the world economy. Interesting too that the term Indo-Caribbean is used widely in the diaspora and has found its way into academia but has not been taken up in the Caribbean itself. That’s a big discussion and very political. I don’t particularly want to get into it, but I can see why Sam couldn’t find a literary place here. There wasn’t a category for him. And Canada as you know, works on the notion of categories.

RC:: I am thinking as well about the literary friendship between Austin Clarke and Sam Selvon.⁸ Clarke himself had a hard time, so I am wondering what Sam Selvon’s story might have to tell us about Canadian literature circles and formations. And perhaps a related question, which also links into your own writing journey, is what kind of work did small independent presses engage in and make possible? Here I am thinking about TSAR [Toronto South Asian Review], which you mentioned, and others like Sister Vision Press which published your own work. How did they help in terms of shifting that landscape?

RE:: Fantastic work! They both did fantastic work! And TSAR is still going strong as Mawenzi House. And Sister Vision, well those folks are my friends.⁹ I knew them from before the press even existed. Sister Vision is no longer in business but, definitely, there was a dent made, but a dent that had to be worked for, and worked for, at every turn.¹⁰ There was a famous Writers’ Union (The Writer’s Union of Canada, TWUC) meeting in Vancouver in the mid-nineties, when everything just blew up. Makeda Silvera of Sister Vision Press was there, and she was outspoken about being marginalized by the Canadian literary establishment.

Sister Vision was strongly activist in raising this issue, and of course it tied in with Black feminism. So, Sister Vision Press claimed more space in the literary landscape than M.J. Vassanji took up with TSAR, although they also published many writers of colour. There was a different type of politics involved as well; Sister Vision was allied with feminism and the gay and lesbian movement. But it also was very clearly about Black women and women of color — those were the works they were publishing. There were few other publishers at the time accepting these works or encouraging them in any way. Anansi was one but it was very hard to get one’s work even looked at by them without a footing in the literary world. Austin Clarke and Harold Sonny Ladoo both overcame this hurdle because they happened to have well-placed literary friends.¹¹

And yes, about the friendship between Sam and Austin, I know Sam nicknamed Austin “Copper Plate” because of his handwriting. Austin’s handwriting was like calligraphy – very beautiful and well-formed. A few of us got together and had a celebration of Sam a few months after his death. It was a memorable celebration, and that’s where I heard the story of “Copper Plate” from Austin. That evening was wonderful: Roger McTair, Rita Cox, and I organized it at the Parkdale Library. At the time, we had been organizing yearly Christmas literary soirées that were held close to Harbourfront, where Roger lived, and we were able to use his building’s party room. This was in the ‘90s and we called ourselves the three Rs [Roger, Rita and Ramabai]. It was such fun. All the writers (of colour) we could locate in Toronto and its environs were invited. It was always a fab Christmas party. You wish these things could continue; I don’t even know why they didn’t. There was no falling out or anything like that. It did last though for a few years.

It was Andaiye [the Guyanese feminist activist] who said once, “All the organizing in the Caribbean has to do with two or three degge-degge woman running up and down.” And it’s true. It’s the same people doing the same things all the time until they get exhausted, or life intervenes.

But yeah, I think Austin and Sam had a profound literary friendship. And that’s the quality Selvon had. He was able to have good friends, and he wanted these friendships. He really gave of himself genuinely to his friends. It was more than a sympathetic understanding; he really empathized with people. If he talked to you, you knew he didn’t come to you with barriers. Nothing like that; he was just Sam. There was really an openness about him that lent itself to real friendships.

RC:: In terms of the context of Canada, did he ever share anything with you about surviving out in Calgary?

RE:: Coincidentally, yes. I lived in Calgary for a year, let’s say by happenstance, in the late ‘70s. So, I knew Calgary then, as a small town, and I experienced it as one of the most racist places in the world that I have ever encountered. And one of the things I did at the time was end up with my partner at the races a lot. So, when I met Sam again, I said, “Sam we must go to the races,” and we did go. A small group of us went to the track. I had a system at the racetrack, home-grown but accurate a lot of the time, and I picked the winning horses in many races that day. It was such great fun. And Sam said, “But girl, you is ah expensive woman. How you win so much money? Oh my God!”

But I was telling him at the time that I had encountered many racist events at the track especially when we had enough money to go to the clubhouse. The clubhouse was more relaxed; you could eat, spread out your racing forms, have a drink etc. But it was a tacit agreement that only white people should go there. And I was often taken for a “native,” so I did encounter a lot of things like “Oh, natives are coming up here now” and comments like that. I don’t know how to describe it; I can’t say it was not unpleasant. I enjoyed betting on horses and when incidents like that happened, my tendency was to ignore it because I felt they couldn’t stop me. Sam understood all of that, as we chatted a lot that day. But it was 20 years later, and Calgary had changed, not really for the better, I thought. I felt it was more like the South in the United States. There was a vibe to it that I had to puzzle out because I could not believe a place like that still existed. So, I think he would have come up against a lot of that type of racism. Well-camouflaged at that point but still there. However, he didn’t talk much about his experiences there. I had known something of his struggle, but I didn’t really ask him.

NM:: Thank you for sharing that. I want to come back to that celebration of his life at Parkdale, and I think you were also part of an event held at York University after he died that also celebrated his life.

RE:: It was the same weekend… I think it went over two days; I don’t think it was all on one day. The panel discussion was at York University and was published afterward in ARIEL¹² The celebration at Parkdale was a day later.

NM:: What are some of your memories or highlights of that memorial?

RE:: It was just splendid. I remember Roger McTair saying afterward, “This was the best of us,” and I wrote it down because it encapsulated so profoundly what it was. This was the best of us. And everybody was there, Jan Carew came in for it. Jan and Austin spoke personally about their friendships with Sam. Ken Ramchand wrote a memorable piece. Errol Sitahal, the brilliant Trinidadian actor, read it at the event. The whole evening was like an extended performance. I read Brackley and the Bed. I wish it was all recorded, but it was not.

It was not only an evening of performance, but we had an informal dinner before. We all brought stuff and had a real Caribbean dinner in the staff room of the library before going out for the performance. I can’t remember all the people who were there, but there were lots of Trinis and folks from the rest of the Caribbean. Althea, Sam’s wife, (who is immortalized fictionally in the haunting My Girl and the City) came from Calgary and was very moved by it. Many people read and shared stories about Sam.

“It was the best of us,” as Roger McTair said.

NM:: What do you see in Selvon’s legacy relative to some of the other writers of his generation? You mentioned that people often put Selvon and Naipaul together, even though they are such different writers.

RE:: Well people, meaning Trinis. I don’t know why Trinis are made like that, but they always have to choose. You have arguments up to now about who is better, Kitchener or Sparrow? And it’s like, who is better, Naipaul or Selvon? And everyone takes a side. But this also acknowledges the significance of these writers in terms of something meaningful to the population, the everyday person, because they are both everyday names. I would say, it seems that more people in Trinidad prefer Selvon because they think he did not bad-talk them. You know Selvon died on the tarmac of Piarco airport because — many of us said at the time — he did not want to leave. This is where his blood and bones came from, and he wanted them to stay there. And I would say what appeals to people, and why I think they love him is not only that he did not bad-talk them, but also because of his unbounded love for the landscape, the people, the country, the way of life. What we created there, I think, infuses his work and it comes over to people in that way. I don’t want to compare these two writers because I think they are completely different and occupy different trajectories. Naipaul has tackled some of the most fearsome subjects in our history and experience. One such subject is a portrait of Abdul Malik [Michael X]. In Guerrillas the depth and complexity of Naipaul’s exploration of this character and his context, is nothing short of profound. I think Selvon comes at his writing from another angle and says an island is everything (a world) and I love all of it. And that’s him.

I was re-reading Those Who Eat the Cascadura recently and I just could not believe he used two and a half pages on rain. And it made me think about the difference between that rain and Ladoo’s rain, the rain that was an assault, while this was rain that came from a different place, that was both fierce and tender, and again, so much love infuses Selvon’s writing.

RC:: Can you say a little bit more about Selvon’s legacy and why it is important to remember him today?

RE:: He was so observant and attentive to everything that was Caribbean. Broadly, because I think he understood it broadly, and also narrowly in terms of the details. I think his legacy, is “love for an island.” Phyllis Allfrey is the one who used this phrase “love for an island,” in her poem of the same title.¹³ Love for an island is what Selvon embodies, and I think this is part of his legacy.

He is not afraid to tackle anything, including an island as a world; when he says this is where I am trying to put my belief systems, my philosophical ideas, my ideas about landscape. In fact, it’s in the same vein as Walcott’s broken vase. Here, you have something that is scattered, and there, you have the incredible mosaic that it has become. And that is timeless. His writing is also historical because it’s fixed within a certain time and space that no longer exists. There have been such vast changes. But that tender engagement with the Caribbean and his ease and comfort with its language will be his legacy.

RC:: You talked a bit about the celebration, the commemorations, and mournings here in Toronto, in Canada, and I wondered if you might reflect more broadly around the time of his passing about the things that were happening globally to remember him. In Trinidad, in Britain, was there a wider sense of mourning around Selvon’s life and death?

RE:: I think there was a very wide sense of mourning among Caribbean communities at home and in the diaspora because he was seen so much as a Caribbean man. We didn’t have Zoom at the time, so I only knew about his funeral in Trinidad through different avenues. It was truly an artist’s funeral, with artists from all over the country performing and a large crowd present to bid him farewell. I believe the kind of send-off he had in Trinidad would have delighted him. I think the sense of mourning was widespread and came out of the idea that he had celebrated the Caribbean, this unique time and place and language, and people were grateful to him for that.

But I don’t know if his legacy for younger readers and critics might be as lasting just because his anti-colonial sentiments are more subtly expressed than is customary in the present. However, the sexual politics portrayed in the wide variety of relationships explored in his texts are by no means apolitical. His engagement with language is also a deeply political act. But the world has changed, and now Creoles are accepted more widely as languages in their own right.

So I would say his legacy, like every writer, probably like every person, is a mixed one, but he will be remembered for his elegiac response to the Caribbean that was so genuine, and the poetic transmutations of language that came to a head in The Lonely Londoners, which I think is one of the most beautiful novels of the Caribbean experience. And it is very much writing that must be heard. He also had a rhythm, almost a subsumed pan rhythm that was present in his language. I think it’s peculiarly Trinidadian, the tone of it—well, every Creole has its own rhythm—but there’s something about Trinidadian Creole, which I’ve heard be described as “singsong”. I don’t think of it as “singsong” at all, and it’s the rise and fall peculiar to that language that he captures so well. Samuel Selvon remains very dear to my heart.