Of Selvon and Sentimentality: Diasporic Rememberings

I was fortunate enough to grow up at a time when Caribbean literature was taught in Caribbean schools. I read writers like Victor Reid, Jean D’Costa and Edward Baugh as part of my school’s curriculum. Samuel Selvon was one of the writers I encountered at school. Though he was not on the school’s syllabus, I found The Lonely Londoners in the folds of my school’s small library. My family was made up of teachers and after school I would linger on campus as staff completed additional daily duties after many other students had left. To pass the time I would read. Because of this I was eventually allowed to take several books out of the library at a time. The shelves of my school’s library became an extension of the bookshelves at home. I can’t say why I was initially drawn to Selvon’s book The Lonely Londoners. However, I remember being fascinated by the cover image. The volume I first found was the 1975 Panther edition. The image of the lonely man, gripping suitcases as he trod the lonely road, seemed to hold deep significance. Yet one could not immediately tell if this was a road of sorrow or of hope, of dread or of promise.

Pictured above is the cover of the 1975 Panther edition of Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.

His style too captured my attention, dressed, as he was, in a three-piece suit with tie and hat. He looked sharp. One could almost hear Trinity’s 1975 hit “Three Piece Suit” as he toasts on the record:

I didn’t understand then that this was a uniform against British racism, a demand for respect, dressed up as respectability. Yet perhaps the reason I was drawn to this image was that there was something of recognition in it. Like many other Caribbean people, my uncles were part of the Windrush generation. Three of them had sailed on ships, like Sam Selvon did, to that promise of better island shores. One of my uncles would leave very soon after arriving in England for the United States. We, in Jamaica, would receive Christmas cards with studio photographs enclosed. I would see my uncles and cousins dressed in cardigans and suits with shoes shined and trouser pleats starched with optimism. They looked to me like the man on the cover of Selvon’s book. Their stories were also similar to the ones we read about in the pages of Selvon’s novels.

The authors in this special issue narrate different ways of coming to know Selvon and his work and offer different points of entry into a dialogue about Selvon’s significance and meaning for them and for the wider Caribbean cultural and literary community.¹ They also reflect separately on his relevance both in the past and for readers today. Indeed, in returning to Selvon’s work in the context of the contemporary social landscape we are reminded for instance that he was at the vanguard of addressing issues around immigration, housing, war, and climate catastrophe in his writings. Take for instance the memorable opening of his novel The Lonely Londoners with its representation of the “unrealness” of the fog over London.

This narrative opening replays the long familiar literary representation of foggy London one that, as Jesse Oak Taylor (2016) notes, is imbued with sentimentality in the writings of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf among others. It is also one that recurs in many migrant narratives of arrivals where we see encounters with a “strange” land and the social production of the immigrant as stranger. However, Selvon’s opening passage, doesn’t simply replay the literary romanticization of the city, it also poignantly undercuts it, rendering it unsettling as if it could be “some strange place on another planet” (23). Additionally, as Kenneth Ramchand argues, Moses’ stained handkerchief in this scene shows “the force of race and color prejudice bearing against the immigrants (6).” The reader is made aware of an insistent kind of inhospitability of London. But we might also read Selvon’s writing of this fog “sleeping restlessly over the city” (23) as part of an eco-critical discourse about the making of Western industrial climate disaster. Resisting ideas of the present or the end of the 20^th century as the only problem-space through which we might study climate catastrophe, we can understand Selvon’s narrative opening as demonstrating the long historical causes of the environmental crises of the present linked to Western imperial industrialization and urbanization.² He also arguably attends to health outcomes through the powerful image of Moses’ stained handkerchief. While this image is spectacular, it is not the only moment of attention to questions of climate and the environment that we see in Selvon’s work. In reading Kris Singh’s contribution to this issue, we might appreciate Selvon’s writing of “the bush” as a counterpoint to the Western industrial capitalist urban space that we see portrayed in his London novels. Taken together, the pieces in this special issue reflect on the power of the representations that Selvon has offered us as readers. The discussions gathered here also offer renewed thinking on why reading Selvon matters to us today, more than one hundred years after his birth.

In the interview with Ramabai Espinet as well as in her personal essay shared in this issue, she talks about coming to know Selvon’s writing, as a young person, through witnessing the mid-twentieth century boom in Caribbean writing or what Frank Birbalsingh would, in 1977, call “the West Indian Literary Renaissance” and the impact that encountering his work had on her. Espinet also offers key insights into Selvon’s narrative formation through the stories that she shares about San Fernando, where they both lived, and where Selvon grew up, and its workings as a social, political and cultural space. Espinet’s mode of remembrance is both personal and critically perceptive yet also rejects the form and tone of the academic analytical essay. She describes her intention as shaping a “mood of reminiscence” that should invoke “a sense of Selvon’s spirit haunting the page.” She is not attempting to resurrect Selvon in her essay (i.e. to reproduce his particular style, voice or tone). But instead, Espinet desires to remember him as influence for the stylistic possibilities of a distinctly Caribbean “mood of reminiscence” sensed, for instance, in the aliveness of “old talk” as a way of recalling the past and shaping historical memory.

One of the things that Espinet asks us to consider is Selvon’s distinctiveness as part of his generation of writers. It is worth attending to her depiction of Selvon as one of the most philosophical writers of his generation. Espinet imagines that “Selvon’s philosophical questioning of the world must have begun at an early age”. Here she contests a view of him as writer whose work is simply marked by humorous depictions of island and diasporic life. Beyond the humor and “kiff-kiff” laughter, Espinet notes, we have to attend to the hopes, sorrows, disappointments, aspirations and desires that coalesce in the precise texture of the characters’ lives that we encounter in Selvon’s writing. Espinet’s call to attend to “Selvon’s philosophical questioning of the world” is also taken up by other writers in this issue who explore to varying degrees the queer affects of Selvon’s sensibility in discussions marked by considerations of the production of what Sarah Ahmed (2005) theorizes as “bad feelings.” They offer useful explorations of anger, alienation and “feeling backward” in relation to his work.³

In her essay, Simone Dalton talks about discovering Selvon’s writing as part of the secondary school syllabus in Trinidad and explores what it meant to encounter his writing as “part of the transitional generation as those in charge attempted to widen the distance from the British colonial beginnings of the education system in the country.” Dalton’s experience of coming to Selvon’s work in this context of formal schooling differs from Ramabai Espinet’s initial encounters with his writings outside the formal classroom context. Dalton’s essay documents what this meant not just for herself but also for others of her generation. In her discussion she surveys the thoughts of other people who were part of her educational cohort and reflects on the content as well as the practices of postcolonial education in late twentieth century Trinidad and Tobago.

However, Dalton’s piece is not sociological. Here we encounter meaningful considerations of the question of literary genres. Even as she delves into what it meant to read Selvon’s A Brighter Sun with its depictions of 1930s Trinidad, Dalton also discusses what it means to see Selvon’s stories about rural and folk life in Trinidad enacted onstage. Her essay urges readers to consider the immediacy of theatre as a mode of literary celebration and commemoration, the calypso and play of it all. There is also a sense of the orality of Selvon’s prose which also informs Dalton’s reflections and remembrances. Also included here are questions about the place of non-fiction memoirist prose as part of our literary landscape. Dalton poignantly recalls that in 1993, Selvon returned to Trinidad to write his personal story.

Not only does Dalton offer us a piece of life-writing, but her writing is also self-consciously reflective about the form and possibilities of creative non-fiction. She raises questions about archival traces through these reflections about autobiography as a missing element of Selvon’s oeuvre. As readers we are left to reflect on what this would have offered us in terms of knowledge of Selvon as a person and a writer.

Questions about the archive and memory also shape Cornel Bogle’s discussion, which centers on an infamous incident involving Selvon. In 1986, during the Caribbean Writers’ Conference in London, Selvon was slapped onstage by a Guyanese woman. Bogle examines separate accounts of the incident including those offered by literary critic Susheila Nasta as well as by Selvon’s friend and contemporary Austin Clarke. We might also add to this list of accounts Ramabai Espinet’s own reflection offered in her essay included in this journal issue. Bogle attends to the ways in which this story has been referenced and passed on in oral exchanges and in convivial sites of reflection on Caribbean literature but not always written down. While critics have noted the centrality of orality to Selvon’s practice, Bogle asks us to think about how orality shapes the mythography of Selvon himself. He also turns to the single time that Selvon has addressed the incident in print in “A Special Preface by Moses Aloetta Esq. (1991)” which uses satire to talk about this painful incident. Bogle notes the literary terms of distancing enacted by Selvon in his choice to address this real-life encounter through the voice and persona of Moses Aloetta. Much like Dalton’s discussion, Bogle seems to ask what else might be gained through an embrace of the autobiographical mode. Throughout the essay as well as in his concluding paragraphs he notes absences and how these operate in the remembering of this event. We see this for example when he comments “I require more evidence to attest to Selvon’s motives.” Bogle raises questions about what it means to look for Selvon in the archives and focuses on the modes of remembering and disremembering that one might find. Using a gendered analysis, he raises questions not only about Selvon but also about the missing voice of the woman at the center of this incident in attempts to remember this event in Caribbean literary historiography.

Both Kris Singh and Nalini Mohabir also interrogate the past and the archives in their reflections. They each ask questions about Selvon’s vision of history and how we might understand history as a force animating his fictions. History as referenced here is not just about the documentary texture of Selvon’s depictions. Rather they each raise questions about the past and the ethics and constraints of historical memory to explore visions of modernity. Recalling the adage that geography is the handmaiden of history, their reflections are also grounded in a counter-indexing of land, nation, territory and diaspora.

Kris Singh, for example, examines Selvon’s narration of modernity by turning to its symbolic antithesis, “the bush,” to offer a critical analysis of how narratives of progress are made and mobilized. Singh’s essay foregrounds the importance of cane and the socio-geography of the cane field as important to the rooting and routing of the vision of the transnational modern that we glimpse in Selvon’s work. While Selvon’s urban fictions including his well-known novels of the Moses trilogy (The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending and Moses Migrating), offer a particular vision of the metropolitan modern and of the modern transnational Caribbean subject, it is through a turn to narratives of village life in some of Selvon’s early fiction that we can see the force of what Singh describes as “the liberal narrative of modern progress and its production of backwardness.” Singh asks us to contemplate what is left in modernity’s wake. His essay attends to its exclusions, foreclosures and death drives. But the wake here is also, as Christina Sharpe reminds us, is “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship” (3). Singh attends not just to the bush (landed space) but to indentureship (the crossing of dark waters) and its economies of unrecompensed labor as part of the making of modernity. He examines how narratives about Indenture are consistently framed by binary logics of backwardness and progress even as they disrupt and unsettle these discursive logics.

Nalini Mohabir’s discussion of Selvon’s work interrogates the politics of the making of the modern nation state and the narrative production of sentimentality and nostalgia. Her discussion focuses on the politics and the history of return journeys, particularly in the mid twentieth century moment of political decolonization, as part of the messy unravelling of modernity’s (and the modern nation state’s) binary logics of backwardness and progress. She asks us to contend with what ships of return and migration might mean in that moment and grapples with the complex and shifting ways in which nation, belonging and home as concerns return and resurface in Selvon’s writing throughout his career. Selvon’s work, she suggests, offers “reflections on the meaning and directions of home, as well as fractures of belonging,” an alternative archive to trace the webs between India, Trinidad, and Britain.

Mohabir’s call to consider “the meaning and directions of home” (emphasis added) in Selvon’s work is also relevant for reading all the pieces assembled here. In 2023, (marking 100 years after Selvon’s birth) Penguin classics published a commemorative volume titled Calypso in London which collected some of Selvon’s short stories. The volume was divided into two sections “Trinidad” and “London.” In noting this structure, we can consider how this might be read as a reprise of Selvon’s earlier published short story collection Ways of Sunlight which is also organized into a similar structure and contains some of the same stories. This organizational structure also recalls some of the paradigmatic ways in which Selvon has been read, either as a Trini-Caribbean writer or as part of the body of post war migrant writing in Britain. We might also note how the force of the Windrush narrative is evident, in the framing of the text in this way (i.e. through reference to these locations), even as, at the same time, as I have argued elsewhere, that we see “the reterritorialization of Britain” with its insistent “state doctrine and practice of border control” resulting in the harassment and deportation of Windrush arrivants and their descendants (Cummings 2020, 595). As Mohabir reminds us, reading Selvon today in the current and ongoing “hostile environment” of contemporary Britain demands that we grapple with the “unmasking of migration myths (e.g., ‘a better life’) in the wake of the Windrush Scandal in 2018…and the enactment of punitive measures against African-Caribbean people (whether migrant or not).” The essays and reflections assembled here further complicate the unidirectionality of the Windrush story (Trinidad to London) in relation to Selvon’s life narrative and urge us to think more deeply about directions of movement and of home. Ramabai Espinet, for example, importantly fills in some of the details about Selvon’s time living in Alberta, Canada. Like Austin Clarke in A Passage Back Home: A Personal Remembrance of Samuel Selvon, she pushes us beyond a singular directional narrative of migration from island to metropole to further engage complexities in Selvon’s life trajectory. Simone Dalton also reminds us of returns as part of Selvon’s life story and like Espinet, she asks us to consider the problematic of return. Nalini Mohabir and Kris Singh also trace specters and remembrances of India in his work reflecting on the unsettledness of questions of home and belonging.

It is also worth noting that all the contributors recall and engage Selvon’s writings from Canada as locational space even as they are not invested in the Canadian nation state as a site and nexus for articulating terms of belonging. Part of the socio-historical and literary-political context of the production of these essays, is that they importantly serve to repudiate the insular whiteness and parochialism of the Canadian literary landscape which, as Amanda Perry has noted, banished Selvon from literary visibility and in many ways foreclosed literary promise and prospects. According to Perry:

Selvon’s friend and colleague, Austin Clarke, critiques this as a “parochial disposition of the Canadian, and in particular the Western Canadians, towards literary interlopers” (105). Ramabai Espinet also furthers an analysis of this question, in the interview in this issue, when she notes “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.” But while Perry’s intervention makes the key point of naming Canada’s “frosty reception” of Selvon, these essays are not expressly interested in claiming Selvon as part of Canadian writing or history. They are instead oriented to questions about his “practice of diaspora.”⁴ They engage modes of diasporic remembering mapping narrative interfaces and movement for example between San Fernando and Barataria, Port of Spain and London, Alberta and Ontario, all as part of Selvon’s life-worlds, while also focusing on the tender sentimentality of return and longing as a key part of the diasporic experience of Selvon’s life.

These discussions collectively also invite and prompt deeper reading and re-readings of Selvon’s oeuvre. While his London stories remain his most celebrated, circulated and reprinted works of fiction, these essays do not dwell on these texts. Instead, they turn to a range of other texts and sources to foreground other key questions incited by and embedded in Selvon’s writings. For instance, Ramabai Espinet offers some engagement with Selvon’s London narratives but devotes more time to exploring the philosophical vision of the world that emerges in A Brighter Sun, Ways of Sunlight, Those Who Eat the Cascadura and An Island is a World. Her discussion also makes a case for a reconsideration of the significance of An Island is a World in Selvon’s oeuvre. Simone Dalton focuses on the writing of place and memory in A Brighter Sun. Cornel Bogles discusses memories of Selvon offered by others as well as Selvon’s “A Special Preface by Moses Aloetta Esq. (1991)”. Kris Singh examines the geographies of cane in the short story “Cane is Bitter” and the novel The Plains of Caroni. Nalini Mohabir traces Selvon’s “thoughts on return, over decades: in his novel, A Brighter Sun (1952); “The West Indian Patchwork” an essay written for the Royal Geographical Society (1955); his novel An Island is a World (1955); his play “Home Sweet India” (produced for the BBC in 1970); and his address “Three into One Can’t Go – East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian” at the seminal East Indians in the Caribbean Conference (held at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus in 1979). Each of these discussions seeks to engage a wider world of Selvon’s thought and imagination. They remind us that his gaze was not primarily turned towards Britain or London. In fact, even in reading Selvon’s London stories we can note ways in which he was always much more interested in how the world met there than in London as a place in and of itself.⁵ These essays articulate a diasporic, worldly Selvon, always moving beyond and complicating easy stories of nation and belonging as part of his ever shifting social, historical and existential inquiry into what it means to be and belong in the world in the wake of Empire’s intimacies.