Immigration, Postwar London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon's Fiction

In the grimness of the winter, with your hand plying space like a blind man's stick in the yellow fog, with ice on the ground and a coldness defying all effort to keep warm, the boys coming and going, working, eating, sleeping, going about the vast metropolis like veteran Londoners.

—Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners

Like Sam Selvon's thrice-recurring African Caribbean character Moses Aloetta, I will begin in Waterloo station, the first London destination of the Caribbean migrants whose Atlantic-traversing ships had just docked in Southampton. In the 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners, Moses initially appears while on his way to meet a friend of a friend at the station of "the boat-train," a point of arrival and departure where Moses experiences "a feeling of homesickness that he never felt in the nine-ten years he in this country" (9). The narrator explains that the station attracts Caribbean-born Londoners because there they "see familiar faces, ... watch their countrymen coming off the train, and sometimes they might spot somebody they know" (10). With this opening scene, Selvon introduces readers to a nondescript public space that was fast becoming a Caribbean gathering site and that was serving in the 1950s as the smaller-scale, British equivalent of New York's Ellis Island. The "desolate station" of Waterloo, one of the London Underground's and British Rail's many stops, would without Selvon's novel remain an unremarked and uncelebrated point of contact between migrants and their destination city (17). ¹ This first glimpse of Moses winding his way through the city streets leading to Waterloo station illustrates Selvon's strategic use of mundane situations and sites in London. By depicting actual London sites and placing migrant characters within them, Selvon stakes his and other colonial migrants' claim to the geographical location most symbolic of British imperialism and culture.

Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, with its focus on "the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and make-shift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of 'discipline'" (xiv-xv), provides a useful starting point for an analysis of the fiction produced by colonial and postcolonial migrants. The process of settling in London has been portrayed by a number of fiction writers from the British West Indies as a disillusioning immersion in the everyday concerns of finding adequate housing, keeping menial jobs, enduring cold weather, and staying in touch with widely scattered friends and family. These pursuits are perhaps not as dramatic as the moments immediately leading up to and following the life-changing voyage, but migrants' fictional representations of the city have political significance. These writers' portrayals reshape London's culture while their Caribbean-inflected voices rework the "Queen's English" and respond to white-authored journalistic and literary treatments of the city. Although, as producers of fiction who sold their works to London publishers, Caribbean writers clearly did not rely on a "clandestine form" to get their message and voice across, their subtle reworkings of the novel and short story genres and of the often-used setting of London illustrate their "dispersed, tactical, and make-shift" responses to earlier British literature set in the city.

In the introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau explains that the necessity of bringing "to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society ... is concealed by the euphemistic term 'consumers.' Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others" (xiii; emphasis in the original). The men and women who migrated from the British West Indies to London following World War II had been—prior to their migration—the "consumers" of an ideal of Englishness that was being exported from Britain to its colonies. And these postwar migrants' "poaching" can be seen as their simultaneous borrowing, critique, and transformation of...