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

Abstract

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 [End Page 108] 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.