UNIVERSITY OF LINCOLN

The Legacies of Modernism in the Windrush Novel

being an Independent Study submi ed in par al ful lment of

the requirements for the degree of

BA (HONOURS) ENGLISH

by
Benjamin Herbert

March 2016
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 Abstract

Literary cri cs looking at the Windrush genera on have o en iden ed the presence of modernist

quali es amongst the literature the genera on produced. This study outlines the speci c poli cal

and ideological aims mo va ng the incorpora on of modernist techniques within the literature

produced by West Indian writers during the nineteen- ies. The paper focuses on George Lamming

and Samuel Selvon, who arrived to Britain in 1950 aboard the same ship. The primary texts focused

on are George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), and Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956).

The study gives a background of Britain during the nineteen- ies, giving a broad overview

of the social and literary debates which form the context in which the novels are produced. In this

contextualisa on a de ni on of modernism is presented, alongside the zeitgeist of Britain in the

post-war period and how the anxie es of na onal iden ty inform the debates of literary form taking

place in the decade’s literary discourses. The West Indian’s status in post-war Bri sh society is shown,

and established links between post-colonial and modernist literature are iden ed.

George Lamming is viewed as incorpora ng modernism into his c on to produce a

sophis cated text which contradicts the colonial ideologies applied to the colonial subject, and as

remodelling the West Indian iden ty in a manner which contradicts the West Indian’s percep on as

the colonial Other. Samuel Selvon’s novel is analysed on the terms of its addressees, and is revealed

to empower the West Indian by producing elements of community, and to reveal the migrant

experience to the Bri sh public.

The study concludes that the incorpora on of modernism into the literature of the Windrush

genera on is an e ort to reduce the essen alism between the West Indies and Britain, and to

produce a framework in which the West Indian migrant can iden fy as both West Indian and Bri sh

unanimously.

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 Introduc on

On the 22nd of June 1948 the SS Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury Dock, Essex, carrying with it 492

passengers from the Caribbean islands. The docking of the decommissioned troop ship marked the

beginning of the mass migra on from the Bri sh colonies, contribu ng par ally to Britain’s

contemporary self-concep on as a mul -cultural na on. In the years between 1951 and 1961 the

Caribbean popula on in Britain rose from 17,218 to 173,6591. Among the es mated total of the

250,000 migrants who travelled to the ‘mother country’ were George Lamming and Samuel Selvon,

who migrated to Britain in 1950. Lamming and Selvon were part of a group of fellow Caribbean

writers who emigrated to Britain during the nineteen- ies, including V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey,

Derek Walco and E. K. Braithwaite, among others. The ies represents a decade in which the

publishing of the West Indian novel in Britain ourished (with over 70 produced between 1950 and

1962), to the extent that in 1958 a Spectator review of Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight speculates upon the

emergence of a “West Indian School”2. When read in the historical and literary contexts of their

produc on the speci c poli cal aims of the West Indian novels are revealed. As members of a West

Indian literary circle, George Lamming and Samuel Selvon contribute to a body of literature, which

becomes representa ve of the Anglophone Caribbean in London, through an overt a lia on with

the legacies of literary modernism within the framework of decolonisa on.

As highlighted by Astradur Eysteinsson, modernism represents “a highly troublesome

signi er” due to the variety of movements and styles which are prac sed under the term3. Peter

Nicholls suggests a cri cal tendency to reduce modernism to “a sort of monolithic ideological

forma on”4. S ll, Malcom Bradbury contends that “we use the term historically” to iden fy “a

dis nct stylis c phase”5. Bradbury con nues that any de ni on of modernism, “shall have to see in it

a quality of abstrac on and highly conscious ar ce, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away

1Margaret Byron, Post-war Caribbean Migra on to Britain: The Un nished Cycle (Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), p.
78.
2 Francis Wyndham, ‘Ways of Sunlight’, Spectator (28th of February 1958), p. 273.
3 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 24.
4 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. vii.
5Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, in Modernism: A Guide to
European Literature 1890-1930, ed. by Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books,
1976), pp. 19-55 (p. 22).

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 from familiar func ons of language and conven ons of form”6. Without risking the slippage of

categorising modernism based on its ideological inten ons, as highlighted by Nicholls, the term can

be understood historically to refer to a period of formal experimenta on. The Hungarian Marxist

cri c Georg Lukàcs characterises modernism as the “rejec on of narra ve objec vity [favouring] the

surrender to subjec vity”7. Lukàcs argues that the realist novel balances between the poles of

‘abstract’ and ‘concrete poten ality’, allowing for the produc on of poli cally engaged literature,

whereas in modernism “the dis nc on between abstract and concrete poten ality vanishes”,

meaning the text cannot be engaged poli cally as it priori ses issues of an ontological rather than

social nature8. However, Stephen Spender argues the modernist writer opposes the writer of

“contemporary” c on, who, although cri cal, “fundamentally […] accepts the forces and values of

today”9. Thus, the modernist writer rejects the poli cs of his contemporaries. Peter Childs typi es

modernism as seeking “to modify if not overturn exis ng modes of representa on, partly by pushing

them towards the abstract or introspec ve, and to express the new sensibili es of [the] me”10.

Modernism then, refers to a stylis c phase in which experimenta on and subjec vity were used to

produce literature with the poten al for progressive poli cal engagement.

The Britain to which the West Indians arrived revealed the ‘mother country’ imagined by

their colonial schooling as illusion. With an amassed debt of £21 billion following the Second World

War, and ra oning con nuing un l the summer of 195411, Britain was struggling to compete with

America and Russia, who were revealing themselves to be the key players of the Cold War12.

Furthermore, in the years immediately following the war Clement A lee’s Labour government

(1945-1951) was engaged in its process of social reform, seeking to topple upper-class hegemony

and break the barriers of tradi onal Bri sh class, which included the crea on of the Na onal Health

Service, expanding access to a university educa on, and the na onalisa on of basic industries and

6 Bradbury, p. 24.
7Georg Lukàcs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. By John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin
Press, 1963), p. 24.
8 Lukàcs, p. 24.
9 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 77.
10 Peter Childs, Modernism (Oxon: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.
11 Niall Ferguson, Civilisa on: The Six Killer Apps of Western Power (London: Penguin Group, 2012), p. 309.
12 Norman Mackenzie, Convic on (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959), p. 22.

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 public u li es13. As Malcom Bradbury phrases it: “in the a ermath of war Britain went through a

deep and fundamental revolu on, a shi of social power”14. The combina on of internal social and

poli cal reform and the loss of status as an interna onal superpower, coupled with the invasion of

American popular culture perceived by some as cultural colonisa on, le Britain anxious to

reconsolidate its image of na onal iden ty. Nick Bentley observes that “one of the important

historical contexts informing 1950s English society, poli cs and culture is that of the changing

construc on of na onal iden ty”15. The post-war anxie es regarding na onal iden ty are

iden able via the inward turn to domes c a airs exhibited by the cultural produc on of the

decade, for example in the literature of the Angry Young Men and The Movement. Whether focusing

on working or upper-class sensibili es, post-war Bri sh c on found its unity in its mo va on to

promote “a conserva ve image of na onal iden ty”16.

The socio-poli cal context in which the Windrush authors were wri ng informs the style of

Bri sh culture produced during the decade. O en referred to as one of the Angry Young Men, but

more commonly associated with The Movement, John Wain describes the ies cultural ethos as

being “directed towards the recovery of a na onal character”17. Moreover, J. Dillon Brown iden es

that within the literary arena the debates about cultural na onalism were “most frequently framed

as a confronta on between modernism and realism”18. The conserva ve consensus regarding

modernism during the decade is perhaps best summarised in William Cooper’s 1959 analysis of

experimentalism: “experimental wri ng is an a ack from the inside on intellect in general, made by

intellectuals so decadent they no longer mind if intellect exists”19. In a decade in which the

sensibili es of tradi on were valued then, European modernism was seen as detrimental to an

image of tradi onal Bri sh ra onalism. Indeed, the a ributes of modernism were consciously

13 Andrew Thorpe, A History of the Bri sh Labour Party (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 120-142.
14 Malcom Bradbury, The Modern Bri sh Novel (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 358.
15 Nick Bentley, Radical Fic ons: The English Novel in the 1950s (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 36.
16Robert Hewison, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Poli cs since 1940 (London: Methuen, 1995), p.
45.
17 John Wain, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’, Twen eth Century, 16 (1957), 226-236 (p. 235).
18 J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlo esville: University
of Virginia Press, 2013), p. 23.
19William Cooper, ‘Re ec ons on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel’ in Interna onal Literary Review,
ed. by John Wain (London: John Calder, 1959), II, pp. 29-36 (p. 36).

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 rejected by The Movement writers, whose literature was rooted in these very quali es of ra onalism

and empiricism20. A central gure among The Movement was Kingsley Amis, who represented “a

con nuously in uen al presence” towards the tradi onal sensibili es of the decade21. Amis himself

expressed an outspoken dislike for European modernism, and is branded by Bernard Bergonzi as

being “asser vely an -modern, an -experimental [and] an -cosmopolitan”22. Epitomising Bri sh

tradi onalism, Amis exempli es the conserva ve distaste for the foreign, which, within debates of

literature, was associated with European modernism.

This was the Britain to which the Windrush writers arrived. The cultural scene in Britain was,

however, arbitrated in advance for the authors through the BBC Overseas Service’s literary broadcast

Caribbean Voices, edited and produced by Henry Swanzy. George Lamming re ects on Swanzy: “no

comprehensive account of wri ng in the Bri sh Caribbean during the last decade could be wri en

without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian

novel”23. Swanzy’s role in congrega ng the group of Caribbean writers in London is undoubtable.

Indeed, Swanzy can be seen as a primary gure in establishing the poli cal and ideological aims of

the writers contribu ng their work to the broadcast (including Braithwaite, Selvon, Lamming, Salkey,

Walco , Mi elholzer, Harris, Anthony, and Mais), speci cally to seek poli cal autonomy, remodel the

conceived image of the West Indian, to have their commonwealth status recognised, and to create a

dis nct literature that was iden able to their fellow West Indians. Swanzy argued: “this need to

discover tradi on is the trouble of all pioneers: you don’t always realise it, but you are making your

own tradi on”24. Alongside Swanzy’s call for a unique West Indian literature there are a number of

reasons why the tradi onally Bri sh sensibili es of realism demonstrated by their Bri sh

contemporaries was not adopted: for instance, their racial Othering by the Bri sh ci zens who

received them. Donald Hinds relays the colonial ideologies which reinforced the concep on of the

West Indian as the primi ve Other, no ng there were many things “believed about the West Indies

20Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fic on in the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980), p. 4.
21Harry Ritchie, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959 (London: Faber and Faber,
1988), p. 64.
22 Bernard Bergonzi, The Situa on of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 162.
23 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), p. 67.
24 Henry Swanzy, Caribbean Voices, BBC Overseas Service, 27th July 1947.

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 which produced ‘instant social prejudice’. For instance, […] the people lived in trees […] they wore no

more than a loin cloth [and] the women nursed their babies in public”25. Problems of racial

discrimina on is a theme common to both Lamming and Selvon’s c on, alongside other c onal

and historical illustra ons of the Windrush experience. Gikandi argues exile is a dominant trope of

high modernism: “Caribbean writers cannot adopt the history and culture of European modernism,

especially as de ned by the colonising structures, but neither can they escape from it”26. Elleke

Boehmer in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature argues for the need to “recognise that aspects of

colonised and colonial expatriate reality were dis nc vely, perhaps in some cases even de ni vely

modernist”, drawing the link between the diasporic literature and the modernist form27. To iron out

the di erences, however, between the postcolonial and the modernist text would be to a en a

history of the metropolitan’s imprin ng into its cultural frame nonmetropolitan forms. Moreover, it

bears to men on that, within the frame of decolonisa on, Lamming’s and Selvon’s sense of exile

would remain di erent to that of, for example, Joyce, Eliot or Pound. Finally, Brown recognises, in

contrast to realism, “the cosmopolitan interna onalism associated with modernism – characterised

by a desire to transcend or at least complicate the strict segrega on of na onal borders –seems a

promising alterna ve”, highligh ng the quali es of modernism as adequately de ned to narrow the

essen alism of na onal and racial di erence28.

On the one hand, adop ng the form of modernism over the increasingly popular and

tradi onal realist form suggests a refusal to assimilate fully to the contemporary Bri sh cultural

trends. Moreover, in signalling a dis nct di erence to the Bri sh literary trends of the decade, the

Windrush authors create a dis nct literary voice for their fellow expatriates to iden fy with. On the

other hand, and as we shall see in the chapters on Lamming and Selvon which follow, the formal

techniques of modernism are incredibly well suited to illustrate the e ects of, challenge, and displace

the racial discrimina on the West Indian was subjected to.

25 Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1966), p. 174.
26Simon Gikandi, Wri ng in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1992), p.3.
27Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 119.
28 Brown, p. 32.

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 George Lamming, The Emigrants
As a writer of prose and poetry, as well as being a successful essayist, George Lamming is o en

considered to be one of one of the most important literary gures coming from the Caribbean. Born

in Barbados, George Lamming emigrated to Britain in 1950, and a year a er his rst novel In the

Castle of My Skin was published in Britain, Lamming’s second novel The Emigrants was released in

1954. The Emigrants relays the stories of a diverse group of West Indians, following them from their

voyage from the Caribbean islands and throughout their rst few years within the Bri sh capital. The

novel itself was not completely well received, mostly due to the literary experimenta on employed

that so much contrasted with the popular realist novel that was domina ng the literary trends of the

decade. A 1955 review of Lamming in the Times Literary Supplement by Arthur Calder-Marshall

describes the novel as “unnecessarily di cult to read” and that it is “di cult to classify”29. A review

in The Times notes that in the novel Lamming’s wri ng is “badly out of hand” and condescendingly

ponders whether perhaps the short-story form’s disciplines would be be er suited to allow Lamming

to regain his dignity30. While the density of Lamming’s prose was received in a mostly nega ve

manner, a 1954 Spectator review comments “Mr Lamming does not restrict himself to a

straigh orward descrip on but, at moments of extreme tension, moves into drama c monologue,

into poe c incanta on and into the sort of stream-of-consciousness wri ng that Joyce has made us

familiar with”31, thus beginning the alignment between Lamming and literary modernism.

Contemporary assessments of Lamming also link his di culty to modernist technique; Caryl Phillips

in the Times Literary Supplement highlights how during the ies “Lamming was con nually

analysed and discussed as a di cult author who, like William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce

[…] was discussed with form to the detriment of meaning”32. Despite this mixed recep on, such

reviews typify Lamming’s rela onship with literary modernism. The formal techniques of modernism

o er Lamming a means to ar culate the West Indian’s experience as the Other in Britain, while

serving also, alongside his sophis cated and complex prose, to contradict the ideological

29 Arthur Calder-Marshall, ‘Caribbean Voices’, Times Literary Supplement (5th August 1955), p. 452.
30 ‘New Fic on’, The Times (15th September 1954), p. 10.
31Elizabeth Jennings, ‘”The Be er Break” Review of The Emigrants, by George Lamming’, Spectator (1st October
1954) 411-412, p. 411.
32 Caryl Phillips, ‘Arrivals in the Slipstream’, Times Literary Supplement (31st October 2014), 11-12, p. 12.

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 construc ons colonial discourse applies to the colonial subject. The modernist di culty associated

with Lamming’s c on is a conscious e ort which demands an engagement among his readers,

ensuring that Lamming’s white Bri sh readers acknowledge the damning e ects of colonialist

ideology upon the West Indian, rather than receiving his prose as an artefact of anthropology or in

terms of primi vism. Appropria ng modernism during a decade in which realism was the popular

form creates a West Indian voice which exhibits characteris cs of Bri shness, while upholding an

empowering West Indian divergence.

Despite cri cal recep ons of George Lamming’s The Emigrants cas ng the di culty of the

novel, and indeed the remaining body of his work, in a wholly nega ve light, the author responds to

such cri cisms in an interview conducted by Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander in a posi ve manner,

commen ng that “this means I have to be read more slowly than would be the case with some

writers, which I think is a good thing”33. Lamming’s allusion towards the bene ts of slower reading in

his response aligns his thoughts with those of Virginia Woolf, who urges that readers “must stop, go

back, try out this way and that, and proceed at a foot’s pace”34. Woolf’s no on is that the readers of

modernist c on must not read as if they are trying to reach an end point, reading more

appropriately to the realist literary form, but must proceed slowly and unpack the meaning that is

hidden in the text. Indeed, in the opening pages to The Emigrants Lamming draws the reader’s

a en on towards the mode of reading to which both Woolf and himself are in opposi on: “you do

these things out of habit… you read it out of habit too… that’s the habit… being lazy perhaps”35. Like

Virginia Woolf, Lamming’s sugges on regarding the expected passivity of his readers seems to be

directed towards the reader of realist c on, meaning that with his opposi onal stance Lamming

posi ons himself alongside earlier modernist writers. Lamming’s opinion of habitual reading further

echoes Woolf’s asser on that “authors are only able to help us if we come to them laden with

ques ons and sugges ons won honestly in the course of our own reading”36. In her statement Woolf

suggests readers should not read passively, but should instead engage with a text and draw from it

33Ian Munro and Reinhard Sander, Kas Kas: Interviews with Three Caribbean Writers in Texas: George
Lamming, C.L.R. James, Wilson Harris, 5-21, Aus n, African and Afro-American Research Ins tute, University of
Texas at Aus n, 1972, p. 11.
34 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), II, (p. 32).
35 George Lamming, The Emigrants (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), p. 14.
36 Woolf, p. 10.

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 ins nctual conclusions. Both Woolf and Lamming’s posi oning of themselves suggests that literature

should be engaged with in order to excite a response in the reader. In terms of Lamming’s literature,

his intended response is an an -colonial highligh ng of the West Indian’s posi on in Bri sh society.

Moreover, an engagement with the literary prac se of high modernist di culty permits Lamming to

forge a West Indian iden ty which challenges the ideological construc ons colonial discourse applies

to the colonial subject. Partha Cha erjee argues that na onalism of the coloniser seeks to represent

itself in the image of Enlightenment, and therefore to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal

depends upon an unenlightened Other37. A lia ng with the style of modernism allows Lamming’s

c on, through its sophis ca on, to remodel a West Indian iden ty which disrupts the colonial

presump on that the subject is unthinking, which had distorted the Bri sh populace’s percep on of

the West Indian and strengthened racial stereotypes.

Lamming’s and Woolf’s stance regarding the bene ts of a dense and di cult prose is

resonant of Roland Barthes’ dis nc ons between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. Barthes argues that

the ‘readerly’ text is a product which makes up the mass of literature, whereas the ‘writerly’ is

“produc on without product” as it is the reader who produces a text’s meaning38. Barthes posits

that the reader of a ‘readerly’ c on is “plunged into a kind of idleness”, whereas the goal of a

‘writerly’ text “is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text”39. Based

upon both Woolf and Lamming’s appraisals of engaged reading and modernist di culty the

‘readerly’ can be understood as the realist form and the ‘writerly’ the modernist. By employing

modernist technique Lamming produces a ‘writerly’ text which ensures his audience are engaged.

Moreover, by denying idle reading, Lamming hopes that his Bri sh reader will produce an

understanding of the West Indian that is contrary to colonial ideology. J. Dillon Brown describes the

di culty of Lamming’s literature as “a hallowed modernist e ort […] to transform uncri cal,

passively recep ve readers into scep cal, suspicious ones, alert to the cultural, ideological, and

poli cal frames within which the narra ve is produced and received”40. Brown’s analysis corresponds

37 Partha Cha erjee, Na onalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Deriva ve Discourse (London: Zed, 1986),
p. 17.
38 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), p. 5.
39 Barthes, p. 4.
40 Brown, p. 74.

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 to Lamming’s asser on that his readers are forced to remain engaged, rather than passive, in order

to overcome the modernist di culty of the prose. Furthermore, by demanding an engaged reader,

Lamming is able to expose the poli cs of colonial discourse and the ideologies serving to distort the

Bri sh public’s percep on of the West Indian. Lamming’s a lia on with modernism is intended to

produce and engagement that ensures his texts, on the one hand, are not received as an

anthropological artefact, and on the other, to form a West Indian iden ty which is acknowledged as

sophis cated.

The plot of The Emigrants depicts the lives of a heterogeneous group of West-Indian

migrants’ journey to London and years that follow shortly a er their arrival to the city. In doing so

the novel provides a variety of examples of the di erent experiences that the Caribbean living in

ies Britain would have undergone. In order to meander between the lives and perspec ves of a

mul tude of characters Lamming’s novel progresses in a fragmented episodic structure, in the

process of which it shi s into a variety of di erent narra ve forms, including standard prose, free-

verse, and drama c dialogue, as well as experimen ng with rst and third-person narra ve voice.

Lamming’s experimenta on with the novel form posi ons him more so with his modernist

predecessors, who in adherence to Ezra Pound’s ‘Make it New’ experimented with form (seemingly)

at the expense of content. In order to demonstrate the disorienta on and confusion the Caribbean

would have felt on their arrival to Britain, Lamming shi s from standard-prose into fragmented free

verse to describe his characters’ train journey from the Plymouth Docks into London. Lamming’s

verse is reminiscent in its structure of T. S. Eliot’s ‘A Game of Chess’ from The Waste Land, which is

widely regarded as a seminal modernist text. Lamming exchanges Eliot’s barman’s yells of “HURRY

UP PLEASE ITS TIME”41 for the train conductor’s shouts of “WILL PASSENGERS KEEP THEIR HEADS

WITHIN THE TRAIN” or “PASSENGERS MUST NOT OPEN DOORS BEFORE ORDERS” (Lamming, p. 120).

The juxtaposi on between the impera ve orders of the train conductor and the free-verse suggests

a clash of cultures and the migrant’s struggle to assimilate quickly enough to the fast pace of urban-

Bri sh life. Furthermore, the disrup ve impera ves, alongside the fragmenta on of the verse, serves

to disorientate the reader, mimicking the feeling of the West Indian. By appropria ng T. S. Eliot’s

work Lamming further associates himself with the modernist form. Bill Ashcro , Gareth Gri ths and

41 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’, in The Waste Land and other poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 21-41
(p. 29, l. 141).

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 Helen Ti n de ne appropria on in terms of postcolonial theory as a method “in which the

dominated or colonised culture can use the tools of the dominant discourse to resist its poli cal or

cultural control”42. Lamming’s appropria on of Eliot’s poem, a recognisable contribu on to Bri sh

literary culture, signi es a desire for the West Indian’s commonwealth to be recognised, yet

refashioning the text for the West Indian sensibility ensures the migrant’s cultural heritage is not

surrendered. By adop ng a modernist technique Lamming maintains a sense of di erence between

the West Indian and Bri sh cultures that resists the control of the metropolitan ‘centre’, as his refusal

to assimilate to the Bri sh literary trends and write in the realist form is metonymic of a refusal to

assimilate fully to Bri sh culture. Addi onally, appropria ng established high modernist Bri sh

literature allows Lamming to incorporate intelligence in the West Indian iden ty he is forging, which

is not included in more established depic ons of colonial subjects.

In the same sec on Lamming also renders the disorienta on of the West Indian on arriving

in a disenchanted Britain by juxtaposing Caribbean dialect with English speech. Tornado ques ons:

“is there anything ain’t ra on in dis country”, to which an English passenger replies: “Things haven’t

been the same since the war, where do you chaps come from?” (Lamming, p. 111). On the one hand,

the juxtaposi on between the modi ed syntax and ‘tradi onal’ English containing lexicon with

tradi onally Bri sh connota ons serves to further fragment the structure, mirroring the migrant’s

struggle to adapt to the metropolitan. On the other, the jarring contrast acts to recreate the

disorienta on of the West Indian for the Bri sh reader. Thomas Davis notes that “Lamming seems

intent on amplifying the strangeness of English daily life”, which he does through defamiliarising

normal Bri sh customs43. In his essay ‘The Mind of Modernism’ James McFarlane describes how

modernism introduced “a restructuring of parts, a re-ordering of fragmented concepts [and] a re-

ordering of linguis c en es to match what was felt to be the new order of reality”44. In modernism

fragmenta on served to mirror the changes in the European mind, in which instability was a

prominent feature. Lamming uses experiments with style and form to create a disorienta ng and

42Bill Ashcro , Gareth Gri ths and Helen Ti n, Post-Colonial Studies, The Key Concepts (Oxon: Routledge,
2007), p. 15.
43 Thomas S. Davis, ‘Late Modernism: Bri sh Literature at Midcentury’, Literature Compass, 9.4 (2012), 326-337
(p. 334).
44James McFarlane, ‘The Mind of Modernism’, in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, ed.
by Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 71-93 (p. 80).

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 di cult narra ve episode, the instability of which re ects for the reader the feeling of the West

Indian in Britain. Like the West Indian, the reader must move slowly through an area of confusion to

reach their nal des na on.

The most striking theme of the Lamming’s novel is the frequency with which the West-Indian

characters are forced into a state of self-aliena on. In Wri ng in Limbo Simon Gikandi suggests that

the journey which the West-Indians undertake “is intended to func on as a metaphor of the ul mate

quest for the fantasy of the empire”; the colonised West Indian travels to the mother country to ful l

the Bri sh iden ty promised by their colonial educa on and accultura on45. Thus, by situa ng

themselves within the mother country the migrants put their iden ty into a state of contesta on, as

the promises made by the colonial school of a ful lled Bri sh iden ty are revealed to be hollow.

Therefore the migrant can only relate to the metropolis through a sense of displacement due to a

denied ful lment of iden ty and an estranged denial in terms of their own cultural heritage.

Throughout The Emigrants Lamming employs the technique of introversion popular within

modernist c on to explore the consciousness of his characters and to illustrate moments of self-

aliena on. The rst example we get of this is during the Good Friday celebra ons in Guadeloupe,

when the rst-person narrator, who we are informed is from Barbados, while relaying his

surroundings remarks: “The city was like a circus” (Lamming, p. 10). The connota ons of vibrancy

and excitement inherent in the simile con rms the energy amongst the city during the fes vi es.

However, like the audience of a circus, the narrator remains an impar al observer due to his

iden ty’s schizophrenic posi oning between West Indian and Bri sh cultures. The narrator’s removal

from his own culture is again exhibited in the metaphor describing the city as “wildly fascina ng; a

ame held in the hand, charged with colour and spark of re, but unconsuming” (Lamming, p. 10).

The oxymoronic no on of the city being fascina ng yet unconsuming signi es the distance from the

Caribbean the narrator feels following his Bri sh accultura on. Moreover the content of the

metaphor connotes a pain within the narrator that he is unable to address, signalling the denied

cultural iden ty inherent in the West Indian’s experience of colonialism.

Lamming uses introversion in combina on with other formal techniques to exemplify further

a state of self-aliena on. The narrator’s descrip ons of Guadeloupe feature a super uity of

meaningless phrases with no point of reference to the text that displace the narrator to the extent

45 Gikandi, p. 91.

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 that the reader can no longer tell what is real. Gikandi observes that “Lamming presents us with a

world in which representa on has been emp ed of signi cant meanings”46, and indeed even the

narrator is le ques oning his own reality: “suddenly it was no longer Good Friday and we might not

have been in Guadeloupe” (Lamming, p. 23). The defamiliarising nature of Lamming’s content due to

his formal innova on once again aligns him with Pound’s no on of making in new regarding formal

experimenta on. However, Glyne A. Gri ths argues that “Lamming’s c on is no less concerned

with aesthe c ma ers than it is with a content rooted substan ally in ideological and poli cal

thought. His c on consistently draws together the aesthe c and poli cal because Lamming

understands these modes of thinking and being in the world as being interdependent rather than […]

mutually exclusive”47. While Gikandi’s comment suggests that Lamming’s form sacri ces his

meaning, Gri th argues that the two remain equally strong as Lamming is conscious of the pair’s

being intertwined. Indeed here it seems that the excessive language is a symptom of the narrator’s

displacement, and like the narrator the reader becomes trapped amongst linguis c illusions. The

language cons tutes the self, and Lamming expects his readers to draw meaning from the self he

presents alongside the language which constructs it. Such methods of reading bring us back to

previous discussions regarding di culty. Lamming ensures that the reader has to acknowledge and,

to a degree, experience the displacement of the West-Indian that is caused by the contradic on of

their colonial educa on with the same coloniser’s imperialist ideologies. Lamming’s di culty means

that the West-Indian remains centred and is not marginalised or objec ed in an anthropological

manner.

Lamming’s investment in demonstra ng the self-aliena on his characters experience is

achieved through his repeated employment of interior monologue as a method of exploring the

depths of his characters’ consciousness. Indeed, such a focus on introversion o ers itself as a

poten al reason for the nega ve responses of Lamming’s Bri sh contemporaries, describing the

novel as long-winded and lacking plot. Such a focus in terms of content directly contests the

expecta ons of the realist novel which was regaining popularity. Lamming’s a en on to the

intricacies of the human mind and rela onships further aligns him with Virginia Woolf, who, in her

46 Gikandi, p. 92.
47 Glyne A. Gri ths, ‘Marxism: Reading Class in Anglophone Caribbean Literature’, in The Routledge Companion
to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. by Micheal A. Bucknor and Alison Donell, pp. 285-294 (p. 291).

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 novels such as Mrs Dalloway, pays a en on to the complexity of thought. In her descrip on of “an

ordinary mind on an ordinary day” Woolf explains such complexi es of the psyche no ng: “the mind

receives a myriad of impressions – trivial, fantas c, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of

steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall they

shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday”48. For Woolf represen ng these sensi vi es

opposes “the accepted style”, which presents itself as an explana on for the appeal to Lamming,

who is consciously opposing the accepted style, which, as when Woolf was wri ng, was realism49. In

The Emigrants Lamming explores the intricacies and sensi vi es of thought needed to overcome

colonial ideologies regarding the West Indian and to disrupt the essen alism between cultural

iden es. An explora on of the sensi vi es of the mind is iden able in the passage describing the

basement barbershop. For the emigrants the barbershop represents a space of safety in which they

can regain a sense of community in their escape from the harsh and aliena ng environment of

London; a community from which the migrants are racially excluded. Most representa ve of acute

thought and demonstra ng a self-conscious understanding of his place among his companions is the

barber, who re ects: “These men who sat or stood about the room, wai ng to be shaved, were his

immediate community, and any word, a tude, gesture, was an occasion for thinking” (Lamming, p.

128). Using free-indirect-discourse to withdraw the novel into the barber’s thoughts allows Lamming

to show West Indians as re ec ve and with a sensi ve complexity that contests colonial ideologies

depic ng the Othered West Indian as unenlightened. By depic ng the West Indian as an enlightened

and conscious thinker Lamming is engaging in the produc on of what Homi K. Bhabba labels a

counter-narra ve: “Counter-narra ves of the na on […] con nually evoke and erase its totalising

boundaries – both actual and conceptual- disturb[ing] those ideological manoeuvres through which

‘imagined communi es’ are given essen alist iden es”50. Producing a narra ve which disrupts the

essen alism between na ons seeks to reduce racial stereotyping and discrimina on produced by the

racial subjuga on of the West Indian following colonial discourse. Moreover, Brown refers to

Lamming’s c on as a “poli cal gesture aimed at preserving a West Indian (racial, poli cal, cultural)

48 Woolf, p. 106.
49 Woolf, p. 106.
50Homi K. Bhabba, ‘DissemiNa on’ in Na on and Narra on, ed. by Homi K. Bhabba (London: Routledge,
1990), pp. 291-322 (p. 300).

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 di erence while countering English exo cism that tended to read the West Indians as simple [and]

unthinking”, trea ng Lamming’s modernist techniques as a poli cally mo vated response to

colonialism51. A lia ng with modernism means Lamming can maintain a West Indian di erence by

not fully assimila ng to Bri sh culture. Moreover, a modernist introversion to the mind func ons to

remodel West Indian iden ty as Enlightened, directly rejec ng colonial ideologies of the West Indian

as unintelligent, while also disrup ng the essen alism between na onal cultures ensuring that the

West Indian in Britain can iden fy as Bri sh and West Indian simultaneously.

A similar example of introversion as a technique demonstra ng sensi vity and re ec on can

be found in The Emigrants in an awkward conversa on between Collis and the English character Mr.

Pearson. Despite any prior prejudices he may have had Mr. Pearson a empts to welcome Collis into

his home. His a empt appears successful un l a phone conversa on, which the reader is le to

assume discusses the mistake of a West-Indian at Pearson’s factory, sours the atmosphere. The

omniscient narrator notes “Nothing was the same a er that call” (Lamming, p. 138), indica ng the

damages caused by a collec ve stereotyping of a racial group. The narrator also relates how for

Pearson the conversa on is reduced to “an encounter between a de ni on and a response”

(Lamming, p. 139), where the noun “de ni on” indicates the reduc on of Collis’s iden ty to a model

of the Othered West Indian predetermined by colonial discourse. Pouchet Paquet discusses the

characters as being “trapped by inherited colonial a tudes”52, allowing Lamming’s no on of reading

out of habit to be applied to the reading of individuals as well as literature. Overall the scene

provides readers with an example of the nega vi es concerning stereotyping dictated by colonial

ideology. In Lamming’s cri cal work The Pleasures of Exile the author rereads Shakespeare’s The

Tempest through an an colonial lens. In his work Lamming compares the rela onship between

Prospero and Caliban with that between the master and slave, and the coloniser and colonised,

commen ng: “Prospero is afraid of Caliban. He is afraid because he knows that his encounter with

Caliban is, largely, his encounter with himself”53. The coloniser fears addressing the colonised as he

must address the colonial history that forged their rela onship, as well as any guilt that surrounds it.

Therefore Pearson’s reduc on of Collis can be understood as a refusal to address any guilt

51 Brown, p. 77.
52 Pouchet Paquet, The Novels of George Lamming (London: Heinman Educa onal Books, 1982), p. 40.
53 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison and Busby, 1984), p. 15.

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 surrounding their na ons’ colonial interac ons. The binary dis nc on between the coloniser and

colonised is analogous with the colonial dichotomy of the ‘familiar’ West and the ‘strange’ Other.

Edward Said asserts the imagined Other “has helped to de ne Europe (or the West) as its contras ng

image, idea, personality, experience”54. The Western iden ty, then, is fashioned in its essen al

di erence to the Other, and anything less than an essen alist di erence would fashion a crises of

iden ty for the Westerner. Reducing Collis to an Othered stereotype signi es an anxious e ort by

Pearson to maintain his Bri sh iden ty as the superior Westerner. Using free-indirect-discourse

Lamming introverts the novel into Collis’s consciousness to show him as re ec ve: “Collis understood

that he did not then exist for Mr. Pearson, and he understood too that Mr. Pearson didn’t exist for

himself” (Lamming, p. 139). A modernist introversion allows Lamming to portray the West Indian as

understanding the complexi es of colonial interac on, and again to disrupt the essen alism of

colonial discourse by depic ng the West Indian as engaged in conscious thought. Brown

characterises Lamming’s c on as “a pointed invita on to consider Caribbean people as intelligent,

conscious shapers of language, and hence as thinking beings in their own right”55. On the one hand

this is applicable to Collis’s interior re ec ons which, contes ng colonial ideologies of the Othered

subject’s primi vism and barbarity, challenge the essen alism between the West and the Other. On

the other, it can be read in terms of Lamming’s modernist a lia on which consciously shapes a

dis nct West Indian literature that is metonymic of the West Indian voice within Britain.

While Lamming uses encounters between West Indian characters and those with more

Eurocentric a tudes to show the intelligence and understanding of the West Indian, he also shows

the nega ve e ects distant, disinterested and observing encounters can have upon the iden ty and

self-percep on of Caribbean individuals. Lamming shows the disturbing e ects of an dispassionate

observing approach towards the end of the novel when Dickson, thinking his landlady is a racted to

him sexually, realises that she and her sister “only wanted to see what he looked like” (Lamming, p.

256) in a manner closer to anthropological study. Adhering to modernist formal experimenta on

Lamming breaks his prose into juxtaposed rst and third person fragments to symbolise Dickson’s

mental breakdown and descent into madness. The juxtaposi on of narra ve voices embodies the

displacement Dickson feels from humanity following his dehumanising experience, and also serves to

54 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 1.

55 Brown, p. 83.

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 emphasise the feeling of observa on in separa ng his voice from that of the narra ve. Dickson

fran cally re ects: “The women were consumed with curiosity. They devoured his body with their

eyes. It disintegrated and dissolved into their stare”. Lamming’s chosen verbs signify the reduc on of

Dickon’s iden ty to the colonial Other. The interac on exempli es Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the

“sensi sing ac on” which takes place when a black individual makes contact with the white world;

Fanon explains: “If his psychic structure is weak, one observes a collapse of the ego. The black man

stops behaving as an ac onal person. The goal of his behaviour will be The Other (in the guise of the

white man), for The Other alone can give him worth”56. Dickson is le only able to understand his

iden ty as it regains “its life through the re ec on of their mirror” (Lamming, p. 256), implying that

following an event reinforcing colonial ideology the West Indian too perceives himself as he colonial

Other. Lamming’s formal experimenta on plays a vital role in rela ng the distressing mental state of

Dickson. Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane observe that “experimentalism does not simply

suggest a presence of sophis ca on, di culty and novelty in art; it also suggests bleakness,

darkness, aliena on [and] disintegra on”57. Primarily then, modernism o ers Lamming an

empowering means to appropriate the high culture of the Britain as a method of disrup ng the

ideologies which promote an essen al di erence between the coloniser and colonised. In addi on,

the formal techniques are suited to suggest the disillusionment, aliena on and hopelessness which

the West Indian in ies Britain experienced due to their colonial Othering.

Appropria ng the formal techniques of modernism during a decade in which the Bri sh

novel form was predominantly realist metonymically represents a refusal to fully assimilate to the

cultural prac ces of Britain at the expense of the West Indian’s cultural heritage. Moreover, adop ng

a form that is recognisably Bri sh but not popularly accepted at the me in which Lamming was

wri ng signals characteris cs of Bri shness in the West Indian iden ty while maintaining a vital

di erence. For Lamming, the complexi es of the modernist form allow for the crea on of a di cultly

dense prose which demands of its readers a constant engagement, ensuring Lamming’s Bri sh

readers acknowledge the problems of the West Indian’s racial subjuga on which are revealed in the

an -colonial text. The formal techniques of modernism, including fragmenta on, introversion, and

the resultant complexity are also suited to reveal the disillusionment and aliena on inherent within

56 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 154.
57 Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘The Name and Nature of Modernism’, p. 26.

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 the West Indian’s experience in Britain due to their colonial Othering, but also, to disrupt the

ideologies of colonialism surrounding the colonial subject by incorpora ng an intelligence and

sophis ca on in the model of West Indian iden ty that Lamming creates, which disrupts the

essen alist di erences between the coloniser and the colonised, or the Bri sh and the West Indian.

The dis nct West Indian literature which Lamming creates represents the dis nct voice of the West

Indian in Britain, and by disrup ng the essen alism between the West and the Other, or the Bri sh

and the West Indian, Lamming creates the possibility of an iden ty which can meander between the

two.

Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

In 1950, Samuel Selvon arrived in Britain aboard the same boat as George Lamming. Two years later

he achieved commercial success with the publica on of his rst novel A Brighter Sun (1952). Prior to

comple ng Turn Again Tiger (1958), the sequel to his rst release, Selvon published, in 1956,

arguably his most popular novel The Lonely Londoners. The novel relays the stories of a group of

mostly male, working class West Indians seeking to achieve economic and social security in the city.

Contemporaneously noted for his light-hearted c on, Selvon’s novels are o en accredited as simple

Caribbean folk-tales. Indeed, re ec ng on his fellow West Indian writers it is George Lamming who

describes Selvon’s work as “essen ally peasant”, claiming the “taste” of his prose is owed to “no

ar ce of technique, [and] no sophis cated gimmicks leading to the mu la on of form”58. Similarly

to Lamming, Frank Birbalsingh in 1977 argues “what one misses of intellectual interest and technical

control in Selvon’s work, one gains in humour, compassion and ul mately pathos”59. Despite such

reduc ve analyses of Selvon’s c on, Kenneth Ramchand introduces the 1985 reissue of the novel by

sta ng: “we are drawn to recognise in Selvon’s literary artefact a ghtness of structure […] subtlety in

the development and revela on of theme; linguis c cunning; and an appropriateness in the

presenta on and deployment of characters”60. Susheila Nasta stresses the “obvious limita ons” of

58 Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, p. 45.

59 F. M. Birbalsingh, ‘Samuel Selvon and the West Indian Literary Renaissance’ ARIEL, 8.3 (1977), 5-22 (p. 20).
60Kenneth Ramchand, ‘An Introduc on to This Novel’, in The Lonely Londoners, by Samuel Selvon (Harlow:
Longman, 1985), pp. 3-21 (p. 10).

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 the peasant reading of Selvon’s c on, asser ng Selvon’s stories are “clearly the result of a conscious

and sophis cated cra ”61, while Mark Looker emphasises the importance of contextually reading

Selvon’s literature “from the perspec ve of post-war Bri sh c on in general”62. Seemingly, cri cism

of Selvon oscillates between two camps: one which sees him as a simple writer of West Indian folk

tradi on, and a second which understands Selvon’s work to be consciously ar culated and as

par cipa ng within Western literary debates. The division of cri cism regarding Selvon’s work can be

understood as resul ng from the dual addressivity of the author’s literature, based upon Steven

Connor’s model of the dual addressees within Bri sh c on. Connor speci es that “the postwar

Bri sh novel was required to respond to twin impera ves”63. Selvon’s c on, on the one hand,

addresses his West Indian audience, seeking to provide aspects of community through shared

experience; and on the other, speaks to his white Bri sh readership, revealing the aliena on inherent

in the migrant’s experience of the metropolitan. While addressing both his West Indian and white

Bri sh readers, Selvon’s engagement with modernism in The Lonely Londoners, during a decade in

which realism was the popular Bri sh form, permits the author to nego ate a space between West

Indian and Bri sh cultures which seeks to disrupt the essen alist di erence between na ons.

Moreover, Selvon’s deployment of modernist technique also func ons to create a West Indian

iden ty which exists in his ar culated space between na onal cultures, which signals itself as

recognisably Bri sh, yet legi mises itself as dis nct through its unique West Indian di erence.

Throughout The Lonely Londoners Samuel Selvon presents a diverse West Indian diasporic

community, within which, each migrant shares the common experience of rela ng to London as an

alienated individual. In order to re ect the speci c experiences of each of his characters Selvon

employs a fragmented episodic plot, typically associated with modernist literature. In adop ng an

episodic structure, Selvon allows the stories of his West Indian characters’ to be told anecdotally,

strengthening his own reading as a writer of Caribbean folk tales. Indeed, much of the academic

a en on surrounding Selvon’s literature has iden ed a rela onship between Selvon’s novels and

the Caribbean musical form Calypso, origina ng in Selvon’s birthplace Trinidad and Tobago.

61Susheila Nasta, ‘Introduc on’, in Cri cal Perspec ves on Samuel Selvon, ed. by Susheila Nasta (Washington:
Three Con nents Press, 1988), pp. 1-16 (p. 8-9).
62Mark Looker, Atlan c Passages: History, Fic on and Language in the Fic on of Sam Selvon (New York: Peter
Lang, 1996), p. 19.
63 Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950-1995 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 11.

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 Re ec ng on the characteris cs of the Calypso genre, Susheila Nasta comments “the oral

calypsonian ballad is well known for its use of subversive irony, the melodrama c exaggera on of

farcical anecdotes, racial stereotyping, repe on for drama c e ect and the inclusion of topical

poli cal material”, which alongside the employment of disconnected narra ves are all elements

contained within Selvon’s comedic c on.64 Many earlier modernist writers, for example James

Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, also turned to music in their search for a form which

represented both conscious and unconscious emo ons; therefore, the impression of a musical form

on Selvon as a method of depic ng his West Indian characters is reminiscent of his modernist

predecessors65. Selvon’s comedic calypsonian anecdotes, however, do serve a poli cal func on in

foregrounding the aliena on experienced by West Indians due to their racial subjuga on, and the

construc on of black iden ty within dominant Western discourse. The implica ons of ideologically

constructed racial iden es, for instance, are brie y revealed in Galahad’s personi ca on of the

colour black:

Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying ‘Colour is you that causing

all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be

white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world. Is not me, you know, is

you! I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! Look at you, you so

black and innocent, and this me so you causing misery all over the world66.

The passage func ons to accentuate the construc on of black iden ty and the racial prejudices of

dominant white Bri sh culture. Galahad’s separa on of the colour black from his own self

emphasises the di erence between black iden ty constructed by dominant cultural discourse and

reality. Moreover, comically addressing the externalised colour black allows Selvon to reveal the

aliena ng implica ons of such ideologically charged construc ons. On the one hand, the fragmented

episodic narra ve of the novel func ons to re ect the fragmented iden ty of the racially subjugated

West Indian individual. On the other, it serves to provide a range of separate anecdotes that together

form a collec ve narra ve which becomes representa ve of the West Indian iden ty in London. Jon

64Susheila Nasta, ‘Se ng Up Home in a City of Worlds: Sam Selvon’s London Novels’, in Other Britain, Other
Bri sh: Contemporary Mul cultural Fic on, ed. by A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto Press, 1995), pp. 48-68 (p. 57).
65Brad Bucknell, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthe cs: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3.
66 Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 77.

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 Hegglund asserts “na onal consciousness was largely driven by the resistance to racism directed at

black West Indians abroad”, and indeed Selvon’s ar cula on of a communal consciousness via

collec ve narra ves undermines aliena ng racial abuse by empowering West Indians though shared

experience67. As asserted by James McFarlane, a de ning aspect of modernist fragmenta on “is not

so much that things fall apart but that they fall together”; thus, the employment of an fragmented

modernist form is empowering as the collec ve narra on denotes the polyvocal aspect of

community amongst the otherwise separated West Indians68.

Despite presen ng a modernist episodic structure the text also displays a linear

development, speci cally the progression of Moses and Galahad, which is common to realism. The

employment of both mutually exclusive formal modes can be understood in rela on to Connor’s

model of addressivity in the ies novel. The modernist episodic form communally empowers the

West Indian, while the realist linearality addresses white readers in a reportage style which depicts

the aliena on caused by their stereotyping. Thus, in terms of narra ve form, the novel posi ons

itself between a modernism in uenced by Caribbean folk tradi on and the realism dominant

amongst its contemporary Bri sh literary culture, presen ng itself then, as a hybrid text in the terms

of postcolonial cri cism. Discussing hybridity, Homi K. Bhabba addresses the mutual dependence

between colonised and coloniser’s cultures, due to the forma on of culture in the ambivalent space

in between, which he coins ‘The Third Space’:

It is signi cant that the produc ve capaci es of this Third Space have colonial or

postcolonial provenance. For a willingness to descend into that alien territory […] may

open up to way to conceptualising an interna onal culture based not on the exo cism

of mul culturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscrip on and ar cula on

of cultures’ hybridity.69

For Bhabba, the space between cultures highlights each culture’s own uidity by foregrounding their

constructed natures. By posi oning himself between modernism and realism Selvon takes a stance

between West Indian and Bri sh cultures. It is this posi oning that creates a hybrid West Indian

67 Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fic on (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
p. 114.
68 McFarlane, ‘The Mind of Modernism’, p. 92.
69 Homi K. Bhabba, The Loca on of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 38.

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 subcultural iden ty which is Bri sh with a Caribbean di erence, highligh ng to his addressees the

uidity of each culture. Through narra ve technique, Selvon is invi ng both his addressees into the

Third Space, and is calling for a mutually reciprocated cultural compromise which seeks to overcome

the essen alism produced by colonial ideologies.

Selvon also demonstrates quali es of hybridity through his modernist experimenta on with

narra ve voice. Re ec ng on his linguis c decisions in an interview with Michel Fabre, Selvon

comments how he “wrote a modi ed dialect which could be understood by European readers, yet

retain[ed] the avour and essence of Trinidadian speech”70. In a later interview, Selvon explains how

he aimed “to keep the essence, the music” of Caribbean speech, while trying “to avoid some words

or phrases which […] would be very di cult for an audience outside of the Caribbean to follow”71.

Selvon’s re ec ons signify his awareness of the need for a narra ve voice which addressed both the

West Indians he sought to represent, alongside his white Bri sh readership. To adopt this ambivalent

posi on between two addressees, Selvon manipulates the language of his extra-diege c third-person

narra ve voice:

It have no other lime in London that Big City like more than to coast by Marble Arch at

the Orator’s Corner on a summer evening and listen to them fellars telling about how

the government this and that, or making big discussion on the colour problem. In fact,

this lime is a regular for the boys (Selvon, p. 88).

By manipula ng Standard English syntax and employing elision Selvon creates a narra ve voice

which is representa ve of the West Indian community. In crea ng his dis nct voice by modifying

Standard English Selvon signals to his Bri sh readers the recognisable similari es between Bri sh

and West Indian cultures, while empowering his West Indian readership by maintaining a vital

di erence. In terms of postcolonial cri cism manipula on of the language of the centre is a crucial

medium through which the colonised can be empowered72. Consequently, in refusing to write his

dialogue phone cally, which would imply Standard English as the norm, and embarking on what

70Michel Fabre, ‘Samuel Selvon: Interviews and Conversa ons’, in Cri cal Perspec ves on Sam Selvon, ed. by
Susheila Nasta (Washington: Three Con nents Press, 1988), pp. 64-76 (p. 66).
71‘Interview with Sam Selvon’, in Tiger’s Triumph: Celebra ng Sam Selvon, ed. by Susheila Nasta and Anne
Rutherford (London: Dangaroo Press, 1995), pp. 114-125 (p. 115).
72 Bill Ashcro , Gareth Gri ths and Helen Ti n, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Prac se in Post-Colonial
Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 38.

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 Dominic Head labels “a creolisa on of the English novel”, Selvon is empowering the West Indian

community by refusing the hierarchy of languages following colonial history73. Moreover,

untranslated words are acknowledged as metonymic of the cultural di erence implied by the

linguis c varia on74. Thus, the inclusion of “lime” further empowers Selvon’s West Indian readers by

ensuring that their voice within Britain remains unique. For Selvon, the juxtaposi on between

Caribbean slang and English serves to defamiliarise the Bri sh reader, mirroring the anxie es of

displacement felt by diasporic West Indians on arrival to the ‘mother country’.

Selvon’s experimenta on with narra ve voice is also resonant with the postcolonial

techniques of abroga on and appropria on. The former being de ned by Ashcro , Gri th’s and

Ti n as “denial of the privilege of ‘English’ [and] a rejec on of the metropolitan power over the

means of communica on”, and the la er, as the “recons tu on of the language of the centre, the

process of capturing and remoulding the language to new uses”75. While de ned as mutually

exclusive techniques, their rela on to The Lonely Londoners rests upon the dual addressivity of the

novel, and Connor’s model of the twin impera ves of post-war c on. For the Bri sh reader

manipula on of English equals abroga on; refusing to privilege Standard English as the norm

indicates a denial of the cultural power rela onships produced by past colonial rela ons, and

signi es to the Bri sh reader a vital di erence that denotes the West Indian’s refusal to assimilate to

English culture at the cost of sacri cing past cultural heritage. For the West Indian reader, the

manipula on of Standard English represents appropria on, which is empowering as it denotes an

authorita ve subversion of the coloniser’s culture, while textually embodying colonisa on in reverse.

Thus, Galahad’s statement “Is English we speaking” (Selvon, p. 82) becomes an empowered

asser on, as it signals to both the Bri sh and West Indians the dis nct di erence of the subcultural

group through its manipula on of English. Such a theory also corresponds with Mikhail Bakh n’s

discussions of heteroglossia, and the centrifugal and centripetal forces of language. Bakh n

understands that within a narra ve both a centrifugal force, which a empts to homogenise the

73Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduc on to Modern Bri sh Fic on, 1950-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), p. 165.
74 Ashcro , Gri ths and Ti n, The Empire Writes Back, p. 53.
75 Ashcro , Gri ths and Ti n, The Empire Writes Back, p. 38.

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 structure of language, and a centripetal force, which a empts to counter the process by refusing

standard use, are at play:

Every concrete u erance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as

well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The process of centralisa on and

decentralisa on, of uni ca on and disuni ca on, intersect in the u erance.76

Although Bakh n’s analysis is primarily related to class, the centrifugal and centripetal forces of

language can be understood in terms of Selvon’s c on as Bri sh and West Indian, or indeed in

postcolonial theory as the homogenising force of the colonial ‘centre’ against the resistance of the

colonised. Selvon’s abroga on and appropria on of Standard English acts as an empowering

centripetal force which disrupts the forced assimila on of West Indians to Bri sh culture.

Furthermore, disrup ng the language of the dominant culture also disrupts the authen city of the

ideologies implied in that language. Nick Bentley comments that Selvon’s experimenta on with

narra ve voice “acts as an expression of opposi on to the cultural and ideological frameworks of

that central culture”77. Using abroga on and appropria on to reject the authority of English in the

hierarchy of languages, Selvon also rejects the essen alist ideologies which jus ed colonialism and

produced the racially subjugated stereotyping the West Indian was subject to in Britain. Selvon’s

experimenta on with narra ve voice is a poli cally charged act which seeks to empower the West

Indian by reclaiming authority following colonial history. Signalling an a lia on with Britain while all

the while maintaining a di erence through gramma cal manipula on allows Selvon to create a West

Indian iden ty that refuses essen alist di erences between na onal cultures. Thus, Selvon’s

modernist experimenta on, on the one hand, signals to his Bri sh audience a denial of the cultural

power rela onships produced by colonialism and the ideologies upon which they are founded, and

on the other, serves to nego ate a dis nct West Indian iden ty that is seemingly situated in Bhabba’s

Third Space, calling for a mutual cultural compromise to overcome the essen alism between Bri sh

and West Indian cultures.

Alongside Selvon’s experimenta on with narra ve voice, The Lonely Londoners also

demonstrates the use of textual appropria on as a method of empowering and strengthening the

76M. M. Bakh n, The Dialogic Imagina on, ed. by Micheal Holquist (Aus n: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.
272.
77 Bentley, p. 279.

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 West Indian diasporic community. In the novel’s opening Selvon’s o ered image of London is

reminiscent of his Bri sh literary predecessors:

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 Aloe a hop on a number 46

bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to

meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train (Selvon, p. 1).

In providing a snapshot of London from the West Indian perspec ve Selvon draws on previously

renowned images of the city from Bri sh literature. Primarily, the passage is lexically evoca ve of

the fourth stanza from ‘The Burial of the Dead’ in T. S. Eliot’s high modernist poem The Waste Land:

“Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn”78. Similar to the Windrush genera on, Eliot,

prior to his naturalisa on as a Bri sh subject in 1927, also resembled the gure of the migrant in

Britain79. Mimicking Eliot’s literary vision of London, then, seeks to empower the West Indian

subcultural community by signalling a form of iden ca on with an insider’s view of the

metropolitan coming from the perspec ve of a fellow migrant. Addi onally, Selvon’s descrip on of a

London shrouded in fog is reminiscent of Dickens’ Bleak House. For Selvon, the fog func ons as

pathe c fallacy, signalling the alienated migrant’s failure to envision a future due to the denying

social and economic inequali es they faced. Unlike Eliot’s Prufrockian fog moving with sleek feline

tendencies, Selvon’s fog sleeps “restlessly”, with the adjec ve conno ng the migrant’s unse led

social posi on following an inhospitable welcome from the Bri sh popula on. Moreover, the

“unrealness” adjec vely a ributed the city is representa ve of the disenchantment experienced by

diasporic West Indians, resul ng from the realisa on that the colonial centre roman cised in their

colonial educa on was a distorted truth. This is con rmed in the simile: “as if is not London at all but

some strange place on another planet”. By providing a fellow West Indian migrant’s image of the

metropolitan, which shares the alienated, unse led and disillusioned social posi on the West Indian

reader occupies, Selvon’s textual appropria ons strengthen the West Indian subcultural community

through shared experience. Appropria ng previous literary images of London aligns Selvon with

Eliot’s argument in his essay ‘Tradi on and the Individual Talent’: “we shall o en nd that not only

78 Eliot, The Waste Land and other poems, p. 25, l. 60-61.

79 Harold Bloom, Bloom’s Biocri ques: T. S. Eliot (Broomall: Chelsea House Publishing, 2003), p. 30.

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 the best, but the most individual parts of [the writer’s] work may be those in which the dead poets,

his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously”80. Eliot argues that tradi on reveals a

writer’s skill, and also his own status as tradi onal, as “if you want it you must obtain it by great

labour”81. Selvon’s appropria on, then, serves to embed him as tradi onal amongst his Bri sh

contemporaries and legi mises the voice he creates. Furthermore, reclaiming the texts to represent

the West Indian perspec ve is empowering as a disrup on of the canon metonymically represents

recogni on of the right to reclaim coloniser’s culture a er a history of exploita on.

Re ec ng on the duality of the passage, Thomas Davies comments “the passage, and indeed

the whole novel, relies on the frisson between the foreign and the familiar, aliena on and

belonging”82. Certainly, the juxtaposi on between the language describing a defamiliarised London

and the style of reportage journalism, li ered with geographical references, bus routes and the

protagonist’s name reorien ng the reader, foregrounds the dual addressivity of the paragraph. Like

previous modernist depic ons of the city, Selvon’s London separates its inhabitants from one and

other, as this is re ec ve of the isolated black individual in ies Britain83. For the West Indian

reader the passage is empowering as it reinforces the subcultural community by sharing the

disorienta on the migrant feels in the metropolitan, while also providing an iden able rela on to

the city. On the other hand, describing the city through appropriated past depic ons ini ally

defamiliarises London for the white Bri sh reader, forcing them to experience the disillusionment felt

throughout the Windrush, before returning to a documentary realism that presents the experience

of the city from the perspec ve of the alienated West Indian. Nego a ng between the two forms

once again signi es Selvon’s call for a mutual compromise to overcome essen alism. Moreover,

u lising Bri sh culture to represent the West Indian perspec ve suggests Selvon’s desire for the

subcultural group to be recognised as Bri sh ci zens, yet, like his characters, it is a model of

Bri shness that remains dis nguished by carrying with it the legacy of a di erent cultural experience.

80 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), p. 14.

81 Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 14.
82 Davies, p. 334.
83Peter Kalliney, Ci es of A uence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (Virginia:
University of Virginia Press, 2007), p. 106.

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 While employing an episodic plot, an experimental narra ve voice, and appropria ng

previous literature as methods of crea ng a migrant iden ty and nego a ng a space between West

Indian and Bri sh cultures, The Lonely Londoners is its most aesthe cally modernist during the

summer stream-of-consciousness passage preceding the novel’s end. Once again Selvon’s formal

experiments func on as a mode of represen ng West Indian iden ty and its rela onship with

Bri shness:

Oh what a me it is when summer come to the city and all them girls away heavy

winter coat and wearing light summer frocks so you could see the legs and shapes

that was hiding away from the cold blasts and you could coast a lime in the park and

nego ate ten shillings or a pound with the sports (Selvon, p. 92).

Re ec ng the immediacy of thought by erasing punctua on is typical of the modernist technique.

Furthermore, Selvon’s deployment of the form echoes Molly Bloom’s monologue which ends

Ulysses. For Selvon, the juxtaposi on of the stream-of-consciousness with the previous narra ve

style of the novel, and the scale at which the technique is employed, serves to represent the distance

to which the West Indian voice is removed from the cultural restraints of dominant Bri sh culture.

The libera on of the West Indian iden ty from Bri sh cultural customs is epitomised in the narra ve

voice’s release from the gramma cal and syntac cal conven ons of Standard English. Moreover, the

clima c summer se ng, in which the West Indian voice is released, strengthens the libera on of the

migrant through its contrast with the “grim winter” fog that slept “restlessly over the city”, which

symbolised the diaspora’s failure to envision a future and unse led social posi on (Selvon, p. 1).

Homi K. Bhabba has noted the use of the English weather as a method of elucida ng the na onal

di erence between English culture and the cultures of tropical climates84. Thus, the clima c se ng

serves to highlight the di erence between ‘cold’ Bri sh and ‘warm’ West Indian culture, and

empowers the West Indian iden ty by refusing the diminishing of this di erence through forced

assimila on.

The stream-of-consciousness passage also serves to illuminate the issues faced by the West

Indian concerning assimila on by re ec ng the dominant white Bri sh construc on of black iden ty

through Selvon’s ar culated West Indian voice at its most liberated. This is expressed through

stereotypical concep ons of the black experience:

84 Bhabba, ‘DisseniNa on’, p. 319.

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 The cruder you are the more the girls like you you can’t put on any English accent for

them or play ladeda or tell them you studying medicine in Oxford or try to be polite

and civilise they don’t want that sort of thing at all they want you to live up to the

lms and stories they hear about black people living primi ve in the jungles of the

world (Selvon, p. 100).

The adjec ve “primi ve” and noun “jungle” associated with white construc ons of black iden ty

produce connota ons which re ect the stereotypical Othered image of the black individual as

created by ideologies of colonialism, such as, the binary dis nc on between enlightened and

unenlightened which jus ed colonial conquest and strengthened the essen alism between na onal

cultures. The fe shizing of the stereotypical Othered black iden ty by the white female reveals the

problems of assimila on the West Indian faced; to be accepted as Bri sh the migrants must sacri ce

their cultural heritage, whereas, seemingly to achieve social success they must refrain from

assimila ng and perform a version of their cultural iden ty distorted by the colonial lens. The

pronouns of the passage, however, serve to counter the aliena ng e ects of black stereotyping. The

collec ve address of “you” to the West Indian reader, juxtaposed with the “they” of the Bri sh,

excludes the white reader and empowers the West Indian by reinforcing the established community

between the diasporic West Indians. Despite the passage’s underlining of West Indian di erence, J.

Dillon Brown argues “in openly paying homage to what was then perceived to be an established part

of Bri sh literary tradi on [the passage] manages to signal its a lia on with a recognisably Bri sh

model at the same me as it advances an unmistakable West Indian di erence”85. In terms of

Connor’s dual addressees, Selvon’s Joycean appropria on aims to reduce the ideologies of

essen alist di erence inherent in Bri sh culture following colonialism, and legi mises the

commonwealth a ributes of his West Indian readers iden fying with the migrant subcultural

iden ty, by ul mately libera ng them through a technique associated with high Bri sh modernism86.

Rejec ng realism as a mode of represen ng the West Indian empowers the diasporic individual by

signalling di erence, yet using a then established Bri sh literary technique suggests a similarity that

85 Brown, p. 125.
86Of course, Joyce himself refrained from iden ca on as an English writer. Born in Dublin, Joyce’s works are
now o en read from an an -colonial or Irish na onalist perspec ve. However, in the context of post-war
Britain, the writer was o en accredited as one of the principal recent contributors to the Bri sh literary canon.
This is also iden ed by J. Dillon Brown in his chapter on Samuel Selvon; Brown, Migrant Modernism, p. 125.

28
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 produces a framework, similar to Bhabba’s Third Space, in which the West Indian and the Briton can

integrate.

The use of modernist techniques in The Lonely Londoners allows Selvon to ar culate the

voice of the West Indian community in ies London. Providing aspects of community through

collec ve experience serves to counter the aliena on experienced by the West Indian in London due

to the ideologies of racial subjuga on produced by colonialism. The novel also adheres to Steven

Connor’s model of the dual addressivity of the English novel in the nineteen- ies. In terms of his

dual addressees, Selvon’s engagement with literary modernism, during a me in which the Bri sh

literary arena was dominated by realism, allows him to nego ate a space between both West Indian

and Bri sh cultures, thus, serving to overcome the essen alism exis ng between na ons. By

disrup ng the ideologies of essen alism between the West Indies and Britain, Selvon can ar culate a

West Indian iden ty which is understood as Bri sh, yet is legi mised as a model of Bri shness that

remains unique via its West Indian di erence.

Conclusion

The novels of the Windrush genera on, as represented by George Lamming and Samuel Selvon,

demonstrate a clear engagement with the legacies of literary modernism as a method of ar cula ng

their speci c poli cal and ideological aims. A lia ng with literary modernism in the nineteen- ies

directly contrasts the tradi onalist sensibili es of the decade, as represented in literature of the

period by the dominance of the realist form, which was adopted by the writers of literary groups

such as the Angry Young Men and The Movement whose inward turn sought to remodel Britain’s

na onal character following a crisis of na onal iden ty following the Second World War. For the

Windrush authors, the prac se of modernist wri ng o ers a means of expressing the West Indian

diasporic community’s desire for poli cal and social autonomy within post-war Britain, and allowed

for the representa on of a dis nct, and otherwise marginalised, voice within the colonial centre.

In The Emigrants, George Lamming’s adop on of modernism allows the author to produce a

complex literary text, and to take a posi on which is resonant of Virginia Woolf’s no ons regarding

how a reader should relate to c on. It is to this end that Lamming produces what Roland Barthes

would label a ‘writerly’ text, in which Lamming’s reader is demanded to remain engaged in order to

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 overcome the di culty and density of the novel. By producing a complex text which is resonant of

di cult modernist prose, Lamming prevents a reading of the West Indian novel which approaches it

in terms of anthropological study or primi vism. Lamming’s incorpora on of modernist technique

also allows him to introvert the novel into the psyche of his West Indian characters, serving, on the

one hand, to textually recreate the West Indian’s experience of the metropolitan, and, on the other,

to reveal the aliena on resultant of a collec ve Othering of the migrants based upon colonial

ideologies. Moreover, Lamming’s complex text and frequent introversion allows him to remodel the

ideologically constructed West Indian iden ty, by incorpora ng a sophis ca on and acuteness of

thought which contradicts the simplicity presumed of the subject by colonial ideology.

Samuel Selvon’s engagement with the formal debates of the nineteen- ies in The Lonely

Londoners allows the novel to address both a West Indian and a white Bri sh reader, adhering to

Steven Connor’s model of the dual addressees of post-war c on. Primarily, the techniques of

modernism allow Selvon to empower the West Indian migrant in Britain by fashioning aspects of

community through shared experience. Addi onally, when addressing the white Bri sh reader,

Selvon’s modernist technique permits him to reveal the aliena on and disorienta on inherent in the

West Indian’s experience of the ‘mother country’, due to colonialist ideology. By addressing both a

West Indian and Bri sh readership, Selvon’s modernist technique seeks to overcome the essen alism

between na onal cultures by nego a ng a space in-between the, seemingly mutually exclusive,

cultures of the West Indies and Britain, which resembles Homi K. Bhabba’s Third Space in his

discussion of postcolonial hybridity. Selvon’s work to reduce the essen alism between na onal

cultures ensures that the West Indian community his novel fashions can iden fy as Bri sh, while all

the while upholding an empowering West Indian di erence.

Lamming and Selvon’s privileging of primarily the black, male West Indian iden ty in their

c on is problema c, however, in leaving the iden ty of the female West Indian migrant

unestablished. A further study could expand the scope of enquiry to include primary texts wri en by

female writers of the Windrush genera on, for instance: Louise Bennet-Coverly, a Jamaican born

writer and poet, who in 1945 became the rst black student to study at the Royal Academy of

Drama c Art87; or Beryl Gilroy, whose migra on novel In Praise of Love and Children, wri en in 1954,

87Knolly Moses, ‘Louise Bennet, Jamaican Folklorist, Dies at 86’, The New York Times [online] (29 July 2006)
h p://www.ny mes.com/2006/07/29/arts/29benne .html?_r=0 [accessed 11 March 2016] (para 13 of 25).

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 was inspired by the desire “to set the record straight [as] the woman’s experiences had never been

stated”88, yet remained unpublished un l 1994 due to her social posi on as a black migrant woman.

By including Bennet-Coverly or Gilroy, for example, a female perspec ve of the Windrush genera on

could be established.

Despite their gendered focalisa on, both Lamming and Selvon appropriate the modernist

form in order to engage both poli cally and ideologically with the nineteen- ies’ cultural debates.

Refusing to adhere to the trend of realism, which was domina ng the Bri sh literary scene,

metonymically represents a refusal to assimilate fully to Bri sh cultural prac ses at the cost of

sacri cing the West Indian’s cultural heritage. Moreover, ar cula ng a West Indian voice in Britain

through an a lia on with high literary modernism serves to remodel the West Indian as an

intelligent being in its own right. The West Indian literature which Lamming and Selvon create

represents the unique voice of the West Indian in Britain. By crea ng a West Indian voice which

appropriates recognisable past Bri sh literary ideas, Lamming and Selvon seek to overcome the

essen alism between the West Indies and Britain, and to forge a West Indian migrant iden ty which

is recognisable as West Indian and Bri sh simultaneously.

WORD COUNT: 10,895

88 Beryl Gilroy, Leaves in the Wind, ed. by Joan Anim-Addo (London: Mango Publishing, 1998), p. 9.

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 Bibliography

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