Lonely Londoners
Born in South Trinidad on 20 May 1923, Samuel Dickson Selvon, the son of an Indian father and a half-Indian, half-Scottish mother, graduated from San Fernando's Naparima College in 1938. Selvon grew up in Trinidad's multiracial society and regards himself as a creolized West Indian, as he has suggested in more than one interview. But he has a strong sense of displacement, and this feeling sometimes emerges as a subtle theme in his fiction. He began to write fiction and poetry while he worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Navy Reserve during World War II. When the war ended, he turned to journalism and served as the fiction editor of the literary magazine of the Trinidad Guardian newspaper until 1950, when he left for England in search of other employment. In London his short stories began to be published in journals and newspapers, and in 1954, before the publication of his second novel, he was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship. Six additional fellowships and assorted scholarships, including a second Guggenheim (1968), followed, and in 1969 the Trinidad and Tobago government awarded him the Humming Bird Medal for literature. Selvon married Draupadi Persaud in 1947, was later div
exploration of clashing cultures. The novel takes place during the years following World Whitney Baillett hailed "a nearly perfect work of its kind." The critic proclaimed, "This is The Lonely Londoners the first book of Selvon's Moses trilogy, has been recognized as a literary landmark for two main reasons: its successful reliance on Caribbean English as a medium of narration and its treatment of "the new reality of life in Britain for the new immigrants from the non-Western world" (Dickinson). As Sushiela Nasta puts it, in the Moses trilogy "Selvon is concerned primarily with the creation of a black London" ("The Moses Trilogy" 5). One of the complexities of Selvon's style, however, lies in the fact that this West Indian is of East Indian and Scottish descent; the effective creator of a black London writes without African ancestry. Hence he dons an ethnic mask in order to produce a black narrative; yet, while he does rely on masquerade to construct a creolizing voice, his particular form of masking produces authentic narrative by virtue of Selvon's lived experience. In this "cross-dressing" of subject position he moves, in the terminology of Martinican Edouard Glissant, away from "cultural Sameness" and toward "fragmented Diversity" (Caribbean Discourse 97). Glissant sees Sameness as "effectively imposed by the West"; Diversity, on the other hand, is a pattern achieved "in a...creative way by the peoples who have today seized their rightful place in the world". Selvon's acceptance of diversity, and his openness to transcultural identification allow him to assume the identity of an Afro-Trinidadian Londoner. And it is in reading the carnivalesque qualities of Moses Ascending the second novel of the London-set trilogy, that one discovers ethnic masquerade in Selvon's creolization of culture. 1960), Lamming allied himself, a Negro, with Selvon, an Indian, in emblematic partnership. He contradistinguished them both, as grounded in "the peasant sensibility” With its apparently unstructured, episodic style and the comic dexterity of the dialect form, The Lonely Londoners is often regarded as being simply an amusing social documentary of West Indian manners. As such its prime intention is to reveal with pathos and compassionate irony the humorous faux pas of the black innocent abroad. I think the The Lonely Londoners was his third novel and the first set outside of Trinidad. Selvon had gained a reputation for the sensitive handling of Trinidadian dialect in his
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Approximate Word count = 2466
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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