The Lonely Londoners: Metropolitan Subjectivity, Post-Colonial Identity and Redefining British-ness
Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners is a charming text that paints an image of the simultaneous romance and bleakness of 1950’s London, particularly to its Black and working-class peoples. Set after the second world war, the novella follows our protagonist, Moses Aloetta, a Trinidadian-born man who migrated to London years before the characters of his story. Considered a veteran of the city by those who know him, newcomers are often referred to him to show them its ways. Despite his reluctance, he meets Galahad at Waterloo station, and before long, is laughing with him over a mutually shared knowledge of back home. We embark with them, as well as the characters Cap, Tolroy, and the latter’s family who belatedly joins him in England from Jamaica, on an adventure of restless survival, banter and celebration of the lonely city.
This text brilliantly portrays the influences of both our abstract reason - informed by subjective experiences - and our concrete environments, on our conceptions of reality, especially the realities of the British diaspora that seem at odds with colonially-propagated visions of Britain. Selvon paves an inclusive linguistic approach which highlights the perspectives and subjectivity of particularly Black Londoners. This subjectivity is empowered through Selvon’s navigation of the metropolis - a probable microcosm of ‘reverse-colonial’ exploration, explorations of the conflict in identity for postcolonial subjects, and questions about what constitutes ‘British-ness’.
Metropolitan Subjectivity
Besides the multiculturalism implied by the setting of a world-famous metropolis, London also serves as a great background onto which Selvon could project the ambivalence inherent to the diasporic experience. The city, contradictorily, is both a port of opportunity as well as an atmosphere of division where large migrant populations and the working-class are in close proximity, but out of reach of, the Houses of Parliament, media companies and the urban rich (we learn quickly that ‘newspaper and radio control this country’ - beacons against media domination like this are peppered throughout the novel).
The novel poignantly opens: ‘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, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus...’ Not only are the lines between the narrative voice and that of our protagonist’s, immediately blurred, but so too is the bridge narrowed between narrator and reader. By narrating in the same creolized English that Moses uses, Selvon emphasises a Black, working-class (note the bus) perspective, in so doing ‘bringing about a reassessment of whether literature (as traditionally conceived) should continue to be a privileged discourse’ (Thieme, 1986).
Note the beautifully subtle embedding of free-indirect discourse here by Selvon which in fact intimates Moses’ feeling of ‘unrealness’ rather than any objective narration of a grim evening. Bill Schwarz usefully notes that ‘to be colonized in the Caribbean - celebrating Christmas with images of snow... was to live with a kind of permanent unreality, for reality always seemed to be elsewhere, in London…’ Indeed, the ‘reality’ of racist discrimination is so at odds with the images propagated to Britain’s colonised countries: Moses experiences a work place protest orchestrated by white employees threatening their boss to quit unless Moses - the only black employee - is fired.
‘London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers. Them rich people who does live in Belgravia and Knightsbridge… and them other plush places, they would never believe what it like in a grim place like Harrow Road or Notting Hill’ (Selvon, p. 60).
In the above passage, the boundaries of class are, crucially, outlined. But if we view London as a microcosm of the colonial project, with the characters Tanty Bessy and Cap being, inadvertently, ‘reverse-colonisers’ of the city, then we can see how Selvon extends his creative license in order to fantasize a reality in which his characters, who represent the otherwise voiceless, are enabled to appropriate the power of the coloniser. They transgress these boundaries and celebrate their legacy without the protections of class or ‘good’ English. In this way, the characters Tanty and Cap present a hopeful allegory of resistance as well as questions about what constitutes British-ness.
Post-Colonial Identity and Redefining British-ness
The character Cap serves as a fascinating beacon of resistance; descended from a wealthy Nigerian family, Cap comes to England to pursue Law school, but after blowing his money on women and ‘the best cigarettes’, stops receiving stipends from home. Moses reflects on his friend: ‘It have some men in this world, they don’t do nothing at all, and you feel that they would dead from starvation, but day after day… they laughing and they talking as if they have a million dollars, and in truth it look as if they would not only live longer than you but they would dead happier.’ Cap’s avoidance of steady work clearly accords him the freedom to roam the city as his own, without operating in the same oppressive paradigms as those who are subjected to lower-paying jobs by discriminatory employers.
The rampant misogyny of some of the novel’s characters is a topic on which thousands more words could be written, but I will touch briefly on the gendered allegory of colonialism in relation to our character Cap. The empire is figuratively masculine in its subjugating force; indeed the literal rape and murder of colonized peoples by colonial soldiers is parallelled by the depletion of colonised lands by the imperial mission to pilfer resources. Cap’s womanizing endeavours, then - he affairs with ‘the Austrian’ and an English woman - invoke a sense of ‘reverse-colonisation’ whereby his male privilege in these relationships accord him a kind of remedial power over white women. We should remind ourselves of Selvon’s emphasis on subjectivity, and therefore be careful of assuming that the attitudes of his characters - often misogynistic - can be equated to the author’s own. We should also acknowledge that the fictional representation of such a concept as reverse-colonisation, cannot be extrapolated into real-world situations where structurally, it cannot be possible.
‘Moses tell Galahad… about Cap, ‘is fellars like that who muddy the water for a lot of us… One worthless fellar go around making bad, and give the wrong impression for all the rest.’ But this is uncharacteristic of Moses, who displays an awareness of the ill logic against anti-black discrimination against migrants: ‘The Pole… have no more right in this country than we. In fact, we is British subjects and he is only a foreigner.’ We might say, then, that such an inconsistency attests to Selvon’s achievement of psychologically complex characters who, despite experiencing prejudice themselves, might inflict it on others through their internalisation of such harmful attitudes. Selvon avoids a uniformly positive representation of his characters in order to emphasise their own subjectivity, and to leave room for each unique manifestation of his characters’ postcolonial identities. In doing so, he rejects the expectation for migrants to assimilate or integrate as British subjects, and paves a more inclusive idea of ‘Britishness’ which takes into account the contributions of postcolonial peoples to, as well as their subjectivity in, British culture.
Finally, beloved Tanty Bessy, Tolroy’s grandma, ‘become a familiar figure to everybody, and even the English people calling she Tanty. It was Tanty who cause the shop-keeper to give people credit.’ Again, the allegory of reverse colonisation is suggested here by the way Tanty invites herself to England, and influences the lives of ‘even the English people’; she does not wish to assimilate, nor shows any awareness of the social pressure to, yet enacts a certain power in asserting her identity. Tanty’s character achieves a more subtle sense of cultural conquest that the reader might overlook; she is painted as merely an unaware elderly. Her lack of racial or class consciousness, much like Cap’s, allows her to be a free spirit untethered to her social subjectivity.
The novel ends full circle with invocations of another harsh winter: ‘In the grimness of winter, with your hand plying space like a blind man’s stick in the yellow fog… the boys coming and going, working, eating, sleeping, going about the vast metropolis like veteran Londoners’ (Selvon, p. 134). Clearly, being ‘veteran Londoners’ includes ‘the boys’’ simultaneous embracement and resistance of their harsh realities. Perhaps it isn’t that an alternative definition of British-ness is offered, but rather, its definition is made fluid and even, at times, necessarily elided; subjectivity is at the heart of the human experience, and Selvon deconstructs common assumptions of British-ness mainly through linguistic and cultural decolonisation, in order to expand the possibilities of postcolonial identity.
Sources:
Bill Shwartz, ‘Creolization West One. Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners’ in Anthurium: A Carribean Studies Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2 (2014) https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol11/iss2/3 p. 1.
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin, 2006).
Susheila Nasta, Introduction to Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin, 2006).
Thieme, John, “The World Turn Upside Down”: Carnival Patterns in “The Lonely Londoners” in The Toronto South Asian Review, Volume 5, Issue 1 (1986) https://www.academia.edu/910365/The_World_Turn_Upside_Down_Carnival_Patterns_in_The_Lonely_Londoners p. 194.
Image: British propaganda poster for WWII. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_British_Commonwealth_of_Nations_-_together_44-pf-437-2016-001-ac.jpg
