The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon

“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones except what you read in the papers.” 

I figured it was time to take a quick break from short-stories and focus on reviewing a novel instead. Shocking, I know.

I love discovering hidden gems and Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners is certainly one of them. The story follows a group of black men living in--yes, you guessed it, London--during the 1950's as they experience various hardships of being discriminated in a foreign city that is predominantly white and xenophobic. Many immigrants arriving on England's shore from the West Indies are bravely optimistic like Galahad (a fitting nickname given to him by Moses, the central character in the novel who has lived in this country for many years) who have left their homeland in search of a better life only to experience a rude awakening that any notion of England's roads being paved with gold is a pure myth. Living in London as a black person is to be treated with blatant racism, a racialized "other" who is considered less than human. Work is scare and many of these people live in abject poverty, barely scraping together enough money to pay rent or feed themselves. While this sounds like it would be a bleak and depressing read, which it can be at times, the author's satirical critique of racism and black identity is actually quite funny. Selvon has a great ear for dialogue and his witty humor shines through in highlighting the absurdity of displacement within this diasporic space.

The narrative framework consists of a series of 'ballads' or vignettes mostly mediated from the perspective of Moses and is written in a type of creolization that lends itself to an authentic representation of a working-class black vernacular. Thus, Selvon's narrative technique is intrinsically connected to the articulation of lived experience and the need to establish a collective voice against the oppression of language itself. He uses specific language to shape the fragmented Caribbean consciousness. Despite its relatively short length, Selvon's work offers a complex representation of the black diaspora--more specifically, home and homelessness. The underlying irony is that even though life in England is pretty terrible, many of these black men refuse to return home. On other words, they are stuck in limbo, neither here nor there. Selvon's London is often presented as a phantasmagoria, a dream-like and confounding space for them as they battle loneliness and disappointment. Their desire for stability remains out of reach and they must adapt to a hostile environment. Yet, Selvon somehow manages to find humor in their interminable struggle, which is no easy accomplishment. Such a great read.