Crossing Over and Shifting the Shapes: Sam Selvon’s Londoners

Abstract

Although a sense of the need to migrate clearly affected early writers born in the Caribbean such as the Jamaican Claude McKay, who left in 1912 for the United States, and the Trinidadian C. L. R. James, who arrived in Britain during the 1930s, the period immediately following the Second World War was particularly important for the arrival in London of a number of talented young West Indian artists. As Henry Swanzy, the producer of the influential BBC Radio programme Caribbean Voices observed, London had become a ‘literary headquarters’, a place where writers from the various islands were meeting for the first time and attempted, paradoxically perhaps, to establish a firm West Indian cultural identity. Yet, as he also notes, the imaginations of these writers were not formed within the ‘grey world city’; their ‘mental furniture was strangely different’.⁵ The status of London as such has always been a point of controversy in the criticism of postwar Caribbean literature.

Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in the 1950s … We simply thought that we were going to an England which had been planted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and place of welcome … It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time.

George Lamming¹

By openly fighting tradition we perpetuate it … revolutionary literature is a filial impulse, and … maturity is the assimilation of the features of every ancestor.

Derek Walcott²

you took the small language used by the island for picong and calypsoes and stretched its vowels across the mouth of the world.

Cecil Gray³

Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel dispersed, I become centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes, paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is ‘coming home’ with a vengeance

Stuart Hall⁴