The Housing Lark

Sam Selvon's brief novel The Housing Lark combines his typical comic sensibilities with a serious storyline about the struggle of West Indian migrants to find adequate housing in the racist London of the 1960s. Thematically, the story seems to combine the cynicism and disappointment of the later Moses novels with the humorous and episodic structure of Selvon's Trinidad novels or his famous work, The Lonely Londoners. Written in dialect and comprised of a ballad-like structure which heavily uses Trinidadian vernacular, calypso, and West Indian culture, history, and migrant experience, the novel's happy ending and promise of solidarity among West Indians in London hints at the rise of a "West Indian" identity among Caribbean migrants in the UK. Through their common experience of racialization, discrimination, and cultural differences with the English, one sees a powerful forging of a shared identity through "excursions," rum, Trinidadian and West Indian cuisine, chasing after "birds," and the central role of women in actually seeing to it that the "housing lark" succeeds. 

It's a novel for dreamers and reflects the sexist culture of the West Indian male characters like Battersby and Syl, but it's undeniably entertaining, witty, and hopeful. Who could resist laughing after reading the tale of Nobby and his English landlord giving him puppies he does not want? Or the ambiguous Syl, an Indian Trinidadian, who tries to pass as an East Indian to secure housing from a discriminatory landlord? After all, through the dream of Harry Banjo and the pragmatism of Jean, Matilda and Teena, they will find a house of their own. Thus, they will achieve a degree of security, space, and belonging in the "Mother Country" which rejects them. Sure, one can find elements of the pessimism of Selvon's later sequels to The Lonely Londoners, but there is a lot of optimism in this entertaining and immersive tale of 1960s Caribbean London. One wonders what transpired between the mid-1960s and the 1970s to cause Selvon's shift in tone and eventual relocation to Canada...

Howards End

I only know Foster's classic through Zadie Smith's On Beauty, but I felt it was necessary to read Howards End. After reading Forster's "The Machine Stops," my interest in Forster only grew. However, Howards End is achingly slow, albeit quite philosophical, and perhaps is too optimistic about the future of English class relations and a synthesis of the English practical character and German idealism. Nonetheless, it is rewarding to see where Smith's fascinating novel comes from, despite their radical differences in setting and the racial themes of Smith's work. However, Foster, in his own way, was quite critical of Empire and the ascendant commercial classes, which leaves him relevant to posterity, though the characaters of Howards End are by no means radicals. It's a shame that such an optimistic novel of the future would be broken by World War I and renewed German-British conflict. For the urban/rural character of the novel (London versus the provinces) and the hybrid German-English protagonist, Margaret, one sees how this novel influenced Zadie Smith.

Moses Ascending

Sam Selvon's Moses Ascending is not what one expects from a sequel of sorts to Lonely Londoners. Like Pressure, a film Selvon co-wrote, the novel addresses Black Power and race and gender in a 1970s London setting. Unlike the film, however, this novel, save Brenda, a young woman born in London and devoted to the Party, Selvon's novel does not try to understand the appeal of Black Power to Black Britons born in the Mother Country. To his credit, Selvon's carnivalesque commentary on race and gender includes Indian and Pakistani immigrants (including trafficking in illegal immigrants) along with some Selvonian wit for great laughs, but it was much more difficult to relate to the characters here, not to mention Moses's unsuccessful attempts at finding some peace, whether as a writer, friend, or lover, or community. 

Interestingly, the rather temporal nature of the setting (Moses's building is slated to be demolished at some point in the future) may foreshadow Moses's return to Trinidad in the final part of the trilogy. Indeed, at multiple occasions throughout the novel, Moses longs for sweet memories of Trinidad, for the trees of his home, and will have to make some changes at some point once the Shepherd's Bush home is destroyed and he can no longer profit as a landlord (in this world, a black man in London cannot live like a 'lord' for too long). The black nationalism, subverted Caliban-Friday relationship with Bob (also a 'migrant'), and challenging times of white racism, growing xenophobia, as well as some of the rather problematic assumptions and biases of Selvon regarding black nationalism or the role of literature in social struggle provide interesting themes, but not in the engaging or direct sense of Moses's first adventure.

Pressure

Worth watching just for its portrait of 1970s Black Britain and the screenplay co-written by Sam Selvon, Pressure sort of a sequel in spirit to The Lonely Londoners. Instead of the immigrant experience of Tony's parents (who would be the equivalent of the characters in Selvon's famous novel), the film tells the story of the generation of West Indians born in Britain, as they struggle with identity, Black Power, racial discrimination in all sectors of life, and the generation struggle and divide between them and their parents. As one would expect with Selvon, there are some humorous moments and allusions to interracial sex between black men and white women, a theme in some of Selvon's novels. 

An Island Is A World

“Foster looked about him, a strange emotion in his heart. He was one of them, and yet he couldn’t feel the way they did, nor share in the kinship they knew. They were going back home. They had a home. It was far away, but they hadn’t forgotten. When they had come to Trinidad they kept some of India hidden in their hearts. They had tried to live in Trinidad as they had lived in India, with their own customs and religion, shutting out the influences of the west. They had built their temples and taught their children the language of the motherland. They had something to return to, they had a country.”

Selvon's second novel, An Island is a World, actually helps explain his first and third novels, particularly his time in London as an influence on The Lonely Londoners. Ramchand's excellent introduction to the novel explains how autobiographical this novel is, so Selvon's relationship with his brother, his service in World War II, and experiences with West Indians in the "Mother Country" shed light on Selvon's personal experiences influencing his fiction. Telling the story of Foster and his brother, Rufus, the novel moves back and forth between the connected families and shifts in setting from Trinidad to London and America, while expressing a certain malaise, as Naipaul said, about the state of the West Indies in the 1950s, colonialism, and the Federation. Per usual, one respects and adores the interracial friendships and relationships, and a deep identification with the island of Trinidad in Selvon's work. Much like Selvon, Foster, though descending from indentured Indians, identifies with Trinidad and its Creole multiracial makeup, and along the way this process of Foster (Selvon) to make sense out of life, experiencing racial prejudice in England, and find a way to make it through the monotony or routine of life in London and Trinidad. 

Foster, Rufus, Father and Foster's best friend, Andrews, share similar views on Trinidadian society, the political and social problems, the seemingly inevitable dissolution of Federation, and the rather low status accorded to the West Indies by visiting sailors or seamen from the US and England. Much like Adrian in I Hear Thunder, despite Selvon's undeniable expression of faith in Trinidad as a nation capable of encompassing all of its inhabitants, one can sense the author's lingering fears about the political corruption or lack of meaning in life beyond pleasure, although there is some optimism in this work. In this constant shifting of identity and gradual acceptance of the island as a full world, Selvon also brings to mind fiction by the Naipaul brothers. Indeed, Fireflies came to mind more than once given both novel's tragicomedy aspects, depiction of Trinidad, dysfunctional relationships, and the struggle over its "smallness" or alleged insignificance. Like the Naipaul brothers, Selvon excels writing, with a keen eye for humor, intricate family or personal ties in apparently dysfunctional families, an excellent example from this novel being Johnny's constant state of drunken stupor but finding solace in his grandson, despite attempts to hide his feelings for the child. 

In comparison to other Selvon novels, this one is a little lacking in the level of humor one comes to expect. Moreover, there are clunky sentences or missing pronouns here and there, though the combination of Trinidadian vernacular, occasional moments of comedic relief from rather depressing scenarios in which the characters find themselves, and excessive philosophizing on religion and being prove interesting for those who care to delve deeper into Trinidadian history, politics, or colonialism. Furthermore, as an early Selvon novel and part of the flourishing postwar Anglophone Caribbean literature, the novel was prescient on the failure of Federation and a careful nationalist text with a beaming example of the colonial politician, Andrews. 

Magic Seeds

"In spite of all the killings, the movement was becoming more and more a matter of these abstract words."

Naipaul's sequel to Half a Life, Magic Seeds, his most recent work of fiction, is underwhelming compared to the interesting plot and earlier life of the protagonist, Willie Chandran. In this sequel, Willie decides to follow his sister's advice and joins the guerrillas in the Indian countryside, drifting for several more years until being imprisoned as a political prisoner, his early 1950s "postcolonial literature" saving his hide as Roger, still in London, is able to get Willie released. Back in London, Willie continues to drift. This is essentially the entirety of the story, with the "meat" set in India amongst a dangerous group of "revolutionaries" who are not aligned with the Kandapalli's group, which his sister Sarojini, had meant for Willie to join. 

The only character from the prequel who actually succeeds in meeting his goals is Marcus, the West African who finally achieves success by having a white grandchild, while Roger is on the path to perdition and Willie reaches a typical Naipaulian conclusion: "It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world." Similar themes abound: the disconnect between the Indian guerrillas and the peasants they exploit in the name of revolution, the unreality of human connection, intimate or otherwise, decay in the postcolonial areas, decline in London (council estate houses, the alleged dependency they breed, according to Roger), a general state of unraveling, of unreality.

Since Naipaul has previously explored guerrillas in a novel with the same name, based on the Black Power movement in the West Indies, this novel, which focuses on a more explicitly Marxist-Leninist group of revolutionaries, brings to mind some critiques of Sendero Luminoso. The revolutionaries Willie joins in the Indian countryside cling to the fiction of fighting for the peasants, for a revolution inspired by Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but the reality of the peasants and their different aspirations contradict them at every turn. 

In the end, the guerrillas become another exploitative force, taking advantage of the countryside's populace without meeting any success. How can one ever launch a successful revolution when one's forces are killing and exploiting the very group one claims to fight for? It is this contradiction, the elusive goal or "unreality" of revolution which plagues the Indian movement Willie joins. In typical Naipaul fashion, Africa is, though acknowledged as a site of colonialism, is portrayed as better off than India because the Africans "know who they are" while India remembers its ancient past yet lost meaning. Both are "wounded civilizations" nonetheless.   

Half a Life

"At home his life had been ruled by his mixed inheritance. It spoilt everything. Even the love he felt for his mother, which should have been pure, was full of the pain he felt for her circumstances."

Naipaul's Half a Life is really fixated on those half-and-half peoples, both in terms of caste and race. Willie Chandran, the protagonist, is born to a brahmin of the priestly caste who shames his family, all int he name of sacrifice like the Mahatma, by marrying a "backward" (Untouchable), from his college. Willie, named for the famous English writer, William Somerset Maugham, is trapped by this mixed-caste background, eventually fabricating his own identity as a college student in 1950s London. Befriending a "brown" Jamaican student, Willie participates in the multicultural bohemian Notting Hill parties, literary gatherings with an interesting cast of characters via his English friend, Roger, and experiences a changing London where the Notting Hill riots break out before his book, a collection of short stories, receives negative reviews in the press. 

One fan of his work, Ana, a mixed-race woman from Mozambique, which is never explicitly stated in the text, a second-rank Portuguese in the colonial setting, becomes close with Willie, who finds comfort with her. He later asks to return to Africa with her, spending 18 years helping manage her estate , seeing African prostitutes in the capital, finding pure satisfaction through an affair with a married "mixed-race" woman, and eventually realizing he was following in his father's path, a path of nondecision, not proclaiming and living life but trying to live someone else's life. These themes of disillusion, mimicry, and an near obsession over the "real" and the place of those caught between worlds, are hardly new to Naipaul's work, but the India of Willie and his  parents provides a new setting for Naipaulian worlds. The ease in which Willie enters the world of Ana and the second-rank Portuguese of Mozambique, mostly second-rank because of their partial African ancestry, and the historical colonial links between Portuguese Goa and the colony, illustrate this tension of the intermediary, the "mixed-race" caught between the fictional worlds of black and white, Brahmin and Untouchable.

One wishes Sarojini's character, the sister, and Marcus the West African were present in more of the book, but the most surprising thing about this novel is how it recycles older themes and settings but is still something different. There is a rich sense of humor in this tale, particularly in the London setting, and the numerous fake or lying characters, including the protagonist. In a sense, Half a Life is very similar to The Mimic Men: both feature uprooted characters of Indian origins who go off to a changing London, experience sexual frustration (although Willie finds the satisfaction that Ralph never discovers), commentary on the colonial peoples (Caribbean, Africa, and India), and the facades all peoples use to masque themselves (racial, colonial, political, sexual), to hide who they truly are. Half a Life, in that regard, is hardly a new or radical step in Naipaul's fiction, yet provides a surprisingly different take on Africa, still bearing Conradian aspects (the darkness, difficult tropical climate, the reversion of the colonial structures to the "bush") but finding commonality between India and Africa. 

In a Free State

"He will never in a hundred years understand how ordinary the world was for me, with nothing good in it, nothing to see except sugarcane and the pitch road, and how from small I know I had no life."

V.S. Naipaul's In a Free State won the Booker in 1971, and consists of 5 different stories, the longest being a novella. Bringing together the metropole (London, Washington) with recently decolonized countries (India, Egypt, Trinidad, Uganda), the prize-winning book explores the contours of freedom, in both a personal sense as an immigrant, a settler in Africa, and a traveler who sounds suspiciously like Naipaul himself in the prologue and epilogue, both centered on Egypt. All stories share movement as a theme, whether occurring through planes, automobiles, cruisers, trains, or ships in the Mediterranean, Egyptian desert, London, 

The most interesting of the stories was the first, a short story about Santosh, a domestic from Bombay, who accompanies his boss to Washington and enters into his own 'free state' as he moves away from tradition forms surprising relationships with a hubshi woman, an African-American woman. Despite the stereotypes and low opinion Indians held of blacks, even those of the servant class who were comfortable sleeping in the pavement of Bombay's streets, Santosh, in his own way, experiences his rupture from his Bombay roots through parallel developments with African-Americans in the US capital. Like the other tales in the book, Naipaul includes shrewd social commentary on the absence of real or authentic experiences, how everybody lies. For its fascinating take on Indian class and the Indians uprooted, so to speak, this stands out as one of the more interesting short stories penned by Naipaul. One wonders if this tale possibly influenced Aravind Adiga's White Tiger, which shares a similar interest or influence from African-American literature.

The other fascinating story was "Tell Me Who to Kill," which is recounted in first person by an unnamed brother. Born in poverty in an island that sounds just like Naipaul's Trinidad, the narrator places his hopes into helping his younger brother, Dayo, pursue an education and become more than what their island represents, in London. In a surprising twist for Naipaul, this narrative actually alludes to racial discrimination and the harshness of life for West Indian immigrants in the 'Mother Country.' Written in a kind of dialect, one almost feels as if this story was written by a Samuel Selvon rather than Naipaul. However, like the rest of this book, the brother deceives himself and the free state of escape from the West Indies does not work out well for him, as he becomes reliant on his only friend, a white Frank, whose liberal impulse to protect the narrator carries the stench of condescension. 

The novella, "In a Free State," is also an intriguing read, but too similar to A Bend in the River. The novella, however, is centered on an English homosexual administrative official in a country that sounds eerily similar to Uganda, which is in a state of political unrest due to timeless "tribal" conflict. Told through a third person narrator, "In a Free State" moves chronologically and physically from the 'English-Indian' capital to the Collectorate in the South, across valleys, along rivers, and the dark forests. Much like A Bend in the River, a Conradian image of Africa is pervasive, as well as the old mimicry of England or European ways in the former English colony (English hairstyles, resorts, towns, and buildings that resemble England). 

Depending on how one reads Conrad, Heart of Darkness can be either a pro-colonialist or anti-imperialist text, and much like his literary forebear, Naipaul falls somewhere in between, as someone who highlights the casual racism of the Europeans while never truly including an African character who is not more than stereotypes. Naipaul also hints at the protagonist character in A Bend in the River by attributing much of the cities and maintenance of businesses to the Indian community, a community in danger of deportations. Like the other stories, again one finds characters who are in a 'free state' of deception and fabrication, the Europeans lying to themselves about why they are in Africa in the first place and their role. Lots of postcolonial theory here, for those interested in Naipaul's take.

As for the prologue and epilogue, they are tied in thematically with the rest of the text. The prologue shares with "In a Free State" a similar critique of deportations, from Egypt sending the Greeks of Alexandria packing to Uganda expelling Indians. The future failure of Egyptian soldiers, of peasant origins, in the Sinai against Israel, also pertains to the Israeli military men training African soldiers in the novella. In both cases, the Africans (Ugandans, Egyptians) were hopeless when it came to matching the Israelis military, and one can see how the foreigners in both stories (Italians, Lebanese, Germans, Chinese) come to Africa with their own interests, economic or political. The Chinese 'circus,' impressing Egyptians in a hut, with their 'Red' dogma or the Lebanese merchants plotting how to enrich themselves in Egypt, for example, depict a postcolonial world in which deception is truly international. The 'desert children' outside the rest-house in Luxor are another 'circus,' performers for the Italian tourists who enjoy watching the 'sand animals.'

Overall, an interesting story suite here, but lacking the humor of his strictly Caribbean fiction or depth of A Bend in the River. Naipaul's masque of Africa is better illustrated in that subsequent work than what we have here, although he manages to impressively weave together the lives of so many distinct groups of people, across borders. For all fans of his fiction after A House for Mr. Biswas, this is essential reading. 

A Flag on the Island

"They don't pay primary school teachers a lot in Trinidad, but they allow them to beat their pupils as much as they want."

Naipaul's A Flag on the Island, a collection of short stories and a novella, is one of those transitional works of his 1960s output. Most of the book consists of short stories, usually set in Trinidad, with rich satire, dialect, and a keen sense of humor that permeates his early novels. There also exists intertextuality with the universe of The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street, indicating that some of these stories were first written in the 1950s and one or two were initially written for the linked stories from Miguel Street. A few short stories take place in London, and deal with class or universal matters of the human condition, with the narrator presumably being Naipaul himself, if not someone just like him.

The last story in the text, "A Flag on the Island," is of a very different vein. Stylistically and thematically, the novella is more aligned with The Mimic Men and subsequent Naipaul novels. There are problems of mimicry and the colonial West Indian, postcolonial themes, an obsession with the smallness of the island, of Trinidad's apparent nonexistence, as well as sexual frustration. The main character of the novella, Frankie, is an American who served at the US base in Trinidad during the War. Taking advantage of his position, he profited from selling excess supplies and materials at the base, and is driven by this desire to buy or purchase fellowship from the poor 'natives.' In the end, all of his help is largely misguided.

The short novel is actually quite rich in satire, too. The fake or inauthentic Trinidad promoted by the tourism industry is a consistent theme, tying in quite well with other postcolonial themes of mimicry. One character in particular, Mr. Blackwhite (yes, that's his name), is a colonial writer who, at first, writes in the style of Jane Austen, and then writes interracial romances and stories with local color, supported or funded by the foundations and corporations. Here, I suspect, Naipaul is delineating the contradictions of West Indian identity and literature, as Mr. Blackwhite struggles to define himself and his writing. The foundation whites who fund Blackwhite want more of the same, but Blackwhite rebels against this with the idea of writing a narrative about ordinary, perfectly human blacks falling in love. Well, since that goes against what the white-controlled publishing world wants, Blackwhite loses their favor. 

Naipaul's comic genius really shines through these stories, providing excellent entertainment regardless of one's feelings on his dark novella. By far,"The Baker's Story" is the most amusing. Narrated in local vernacular by a Grenadian raised in Trinidad, it tells the story of how the poor black Grenadian, through hard work and taking advantage of the racial/class schema of occupations, becomes one of the wealthy businessmen with several bakery establishments, all operated through Chinese employers. The reason? Well, black Trinidadians won't buy food from blacks, and associate bakeries and groceries with the Chinese or whites. So, using a mixed-race Chinese boy, 'Yung Man' begins to prosper, marries a Chinese woman, and escapes poverty, in spite of his low education. While written in a hilarious manner, this short story speaks to the many racial divisions and stereotypes Trinidadians of all races and colors confine themselves in. If one only has the chance to read a single story from A Flag on the Island, this one is it.

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion

"All action, all creation was a betrayal of feeling and truth."

Naipaul's Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion is a strange little novel. No characters of color, old age, search for meaning, possible Hindu symbolism (Shiva), and London. The novel's themes are consistent with some of Naipaul's earlier work, and perhaps part of his attempt to not be pigeonholed as a West Indian or Caribbean writer, even though all his early work draws on Trinidad and the Caribbean. The protagonist, an aging Mr. Stone who is about to retire, struggles to find meaning in his life, fights to have something pure or stand the test of time. In this regard, Mr. Stone is not too different from other protagonists of Naipaul's novels. 

For those seeking an amusing and short read, give this one a chance. There is a rich and almost condescending humor throughout the text, as well as social commentary on marriage, family, the 'changes' of London as more immigrant communities of color establish themselves, as well a deceptively thin overview of one man's attempt to establish himself in a world, beyond the seasons or routine.

The Mimic Men

"We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World, one unknown corner of it, with all its reminders of the corruption that came so quickly to the new."

Harsh and somewhat unfair characterization of the Caribbean from Naipaul, although there was and is an undeniable mimicry of Europe and North America among some West Indians of Naipaul's generation. The Mimic Men seems like Naipaul's harsher way to distance himself from Trinidad and the postcolonial government through Ralph Singh as a deracinated Indian, uprooted from his ancient Hindu past by the sea, shipwrecked in the Caribbean or London. I think Patrick French's biography is right to emphasize Naipaul's personal life as shaping novels like The Mimic Men or A Bend in the River, which clearly draw from the author's personal frustrations and identity crisis as an "East Indian of the West Indies."

Moreover, one sees here, in The Mimic Men, the shift in Naipaul's writing from the comic satire of his previous Trinidad novels. There are a few good jokes interspersed here (sheet paper pronounced by a Maltese in London, Eden being so black out of spite that Spite becomes his nickname at school), but The Mimic Men represents a shift to sexually frustrated, anxious, protagonists of displaced Indian descent. Like Saleem, Ralph Singh is an East Indian shipwrecked in the Caribbean island of Isabella, modelled on Naipaul's origins in Trinidad. Much like the trees carried away by ocean and river currents which arrive on Isabella's beaches, Ralph Singh is displaced and caught as an 'intermediate' Asiatic in a slave island of blacks and whites. Like other people of the 'transplantation,' Singh is a mimic men in many ways, becoming what others see of him and, like the decolonized world, operating through borrowed expressions, ideas, and civilizations. 

The problem with Naipaul is one of imposing the center's view of the periphery, the Caribbean. Instead of seeing the region as transplantations and focusing on his displacement from his Indian roots, Naipaul does not engage the Caribbean as a region of History, not solely European colonies for profit. Naipaul should have spent more time reading J.J. Thomas instead of Froude, more time understanding the Haitian Revolution instead of falling into the trap of racial theory and obsession with the Metropole. Much like his Middle Passage, a travelogue whose casual racism was too much for me to complete it, The Mimic Men shares a similarly dismal view of the early postcolonial Caribbean. 

While there were certainly deep contradictions and a problem of 'mimicry' in the West Indies, and an issue of racial divisions which plagued Trinidad & Tobago, Naipaul's perspective as a postcolonial Mandarin who could not return for good to Trinidad, but accepts a sort of stasis in a London hotel through the fictional character of Ralph Singh, is quite disturbing and ignores how the societies of the Caribbean were only copies of the allegedly superior West. I could rant endlessly about this novel and its complexities, its memoir structure, how it moves back and forth chronologically or even its universal implications of mimicry and identity (Sandra, perhaps one of the most interesting female characters in Naipaul's corpus, or the university students at the School in London, for example, all are 'playing' in their own ways that mirror or differ from that of the 'half-societies' of the West Indies), but I shall leave that for future posts.

On another disturbing note, the colonial politicians (Browne, Singh, etc.) and the experiments at satisfying distress while ensnared in mimicry, actually reminded me of Idi Amin Dada. The Mimic Men was written in Uganda, where Naipaul met Theroux, and actually contains a reference to colonial politicians 'turning' the tables and having whites serve them, in a troubling portent of Idi Amin's photographs of whites carrying him. These kinds of token symbolic decolonisation did not work for the fictional Caribbean island of Isabella. They most definitely did little for Uganda under Idi Amin, who took power a few years after The Mimic Men was published.

Note: The Kindle Edition is full of grammatical or formatting errors, which made this a harder read than necessary. Fortunately, those formatting or editing mistakes for the Kindle edition were not as numerous as they could have been.

Some Favorite Quotes

"The career of the colonial politician is short and ends brutally. We lack order. Above all, we lack power. We mistake words and the acclamation of words for power; as soon as our bluff is called we are lost."

"Flight to the greater disorder, the final emptiness: London and the home counties."

"They talk of the pessimism of the young as they talk of atheism and revolt: it is something to be grown out of."

"I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and the oppressed. Hate oppression; fear the oppressed."

"How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else, we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains, it is the god of the city that we pursue in vain."

"He was like me: he needed the guidance of other men's eyes."

"In London I had no guide. There was no one to link my present with my past, no one to note my consistencies or inconsistencies."

"We become what we see of ourselves in the eyes of others."

"For there is no such thing as history nowadays; there are only manifestos and antiquarian research."

"Politicians are people who truly make something out of nothing. They have few concrete gifts to offer. They are not engineers or artists or makers. They are manipulators; they offer themselves as manipulators."

"Those student associations! Playing at being students, playing at being questioning and iconoclastic, playing at being young and licensed, playing at being in preparation for the world! The dishonesty of the young!"

"To be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure  New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder."

"We came out into the Indian areas, the flat lands where rice and sugarcane grew. My father spoke of the voyage, so recent but already in our strange hemisphere so remote, which the fathers and indeed some of the people we saw had made from another continent, to complete our own little bastard world."

"But in our slogans, we assumed the role of metropolitan party-givers. We did so easily; at Isabella Imperial, we were natural impersonators."

"Eden was something of a buffoon. He was the blackest boy in the school and for some time was known as Spite because some boys said he was black for spite."

Small Island

"And Hortense. Her face still haughty. But how long before her chin is cast down? For, fresh from a ship, England had not yet deceived her. But soon it will. All us pitiful West Indian dreamers who sailed with heads bursting with foolishness were a joke to my clever smirking cousin now."

Andrea Levy's Small Island is actually quite reminiscent of Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, but also the more recent White Teeth. While focusing specifically on two couples, Jamaican and English, around the time of World War II, Levy's novel tells the story of the Windrush generation of Jamaican immigrants in London. Zadie Smith's White Teeth occurs decades later, but both novels share a similar fixation with the Second World War as the springboard for anticolonialism and immigration in London. Both novels also feature India and Jamaica, although none of the major characters in Levy's novel are from South Asia. 

Instead, we get a very Jamaica-centered narrative on how West Indians contributed to the war effort, experienced extreme discrimination in the military and civilian life in London, and the rising tides of independence in Jamaica and India. Levy's novel somehow manages to encapsulate so much of the tragedy and contradictions of World War II with a sense of humor that is quite endearing and optimistic. The film adaptation is very faithful to these themes and humor of the novel, which pleasantly surprised me when I finally completed the book. 

One gets a very useful background in Jamaica during the 1930s and 1940s. Hortense and Gilbert's intriguing backgrounds reveal so much of the intricacies of color and class in Jamaican society, with the strong assumptions forced into West Indian minds that England is the 'Mother County,' English ways are best. Upon finally reaching England, the dream dies as Hortense and Gilbert endure the racist and classist prejudices of London. Like Selvon, Lamming, Smith, and numerous other Caribbean or Caribbean-descended writers, the bitterness of the immigrant experience pervades the text. The imperialism (and outright racism) of England's military and treatment of Indians during Bernard's service also tie in here, revealing how the myths about World War II as a 'fight for democracy' or 'freedom' were nothing but. 

The real magic of Levy's novel lies in how she manages to juxtapose this Caribbean immigrant experience with the class nuances of white England. Queenie's character eventually becomes a sympathetic one, despite her disturbing upbringing (Queenie used to mock the children of miners, the poorest of the poor) and being reared by a class-conscious aunt in London who prepared for her for a loveless marriage for economic security and status. The strictures of the class system of English society seem to come to life in Levy's tale, revealing some common threads with the search for opportunity by Caribbean immigrants after the war. It is, in this sense, one finds the mutual experiences of the Blighs and Josephs capable of expressing some hope for the subsequent generations of a multicultural, multiracial London.

Small Island (Film)

Small Island was humorous and retains aspects of Andrea Levy's novel quite well. The acting talent of David Oyelowo and Benedict Cumberbatch certainly helped. The actress who played Hortense is the very same woman who played the mother of Irie in the White Teeth miniseries. Unfortunately, the movie omitted the colorism of Hortense's Jamaican background and omitted numerous aspects of Hortense and Gilbert's Jamaican background. The film succeeds excellently in criticizing the incredible xenophobia and racism against the Windrush West Indians in London, but could've benefited from a miniseries format instead of a two-part film.

London Is the Place For Me

Classic calypso sounds from the legendary Lord Kitchener! Despite its praise for London and the 'mother country,' Kitchener and other West Indians who moved to London in the postwar years quickly learned how racist English society was. In this sense, this lovely song is useful accompaniment to Selvon's classic, The Lonely Londoners. For those interested in Lord Kitchener, there is an interesting BBC radio documentary on his life and music. 

White Teeth on TV: Incomplete Miniseries

I am not sure how to describe the White Teeth miniseries. It leaves one feeling incomplete, to put it bluntly. I understand how difficult it is to adapt a novel to film or television, and I respect the admirable attempt, but one cannot escape the feeling of a loss of wholeness. The miniseries hits most of the main plot points and retains much of the characteristic humor of Zadie Smith's first novel, but suffers from the loss of her witty narrative voice.

In addition, certain key parts of the novel, especially those pertaining to the Jamaican background of Irie, are silenced. Clara, after the first episode, becomes gradually less significant to the story, and while Irie does learn more about her 'roots' from talking to her Jehovah's Witness grandmother, all of the horror and critique of colonialism is lost by the lack of a flashback scene. The only time we are taken back to Kingston in 1907 is one single flashback, to the white colonial and his black lover who are the ancestors Irie desires to learn more about. None of the narrative voice's powerful critique equating colonialism to the poor treatment we give to our lovers is present in this miniseries, which is woefully incomplete.

Besides slightly changing the conclusion of the novel and omitting other plot developments, settings, and themes (such as the importance of the traditional pub for Irie's father and Samad, who never take their wives with them there), the miniseries could have benefited from illustrating the tense relations between ethnic minorities in London. Smith's novel is careful to display, for example, Alsana's racism towards Caribbeans and other minorities, but this brief miniseries only shows Alsana's homophobia towards her lesbian relative.

In spite of my aforementioned problems with the miniseries, I believe it's a worthwhile watch for any fans of Zadie Smith, multicultural London, or comedy. Again, much of the comedic voice has been changed because of the medium, but the actors carry it along quite well. All that would have been necessary to truly make this TV adaptation of Smith's novel a masterpiece is a few more episodes.

The Lonely Londoners

"Wherever in London that it have Working Class, there you will find a lot of spades."

Samuel Selvon's short novel, The Lonely Londoners, expertly captures the Caribbean migrant experience in London. Chronicling the experiences of a group, consisting mostly of men, through a series of interconnected vignettes. The uprooting experience of migration, particularly as a stigmatized racial group, leads to numerous powerful, distressing stories of the cruel and inhospitable environment the early waves of West Indians faced in London. 

Despite being British subjects and serving in the War for Britain, racism in housing, labor, sex, and the Othering experience these West Indians face provide insurmountable obstacles that provoke deep reflection in the aptly named Moses, one of the leaders of the West Indian men in London for being there longer than most others. Due to his experience, Moses guides later arrivals, and the community of West Indians grows and emulates aspects of its past while being forever changed. 

Aspects of their West Indian societies remain (colorism, the lively market women tradition, calypso music), particularly their nostalgia for their homeland, but gradually the migrants accustom themselves to the bitter winter, fog, daily racism, and false promises of streets paved with gold. Like the best immigrant literature, the disillusionment or disappointment of the migrant experience is the overarching theme, exemplified by Moses's troubling indecisiveness about returning to Trinidad. 

The novel's key themes are undoubtedly universal, particularly in the alienation and social divisions that inhibit communities. The class system, for example, is powerfully invoked to place poor West Indians in a social context in which class identities are seemingly accepted by all. Gender, romance, and love are similarly deformed by the city, which turns to cheap thrills, prostitution, and sexual depravities as the only intimacy. Marriage is not seen as viable by these early Caribbean migrants, because marriage with white women leads to problems with racism from the spouse's family, and racism against mixed-race children. And like poor whites, when not able to find work, Afro-Caribbean migrants' only option was to try to get on welfare and barely subsist until they can find low-paying work below their qualifications.

Selvon's use of symbolism and inventive language (drawing on his Trinidadian vernacular English, of course) is also noteworthy, from the symbolic use of seagulls and pigeons to mirror the migrant experience of these black West Indians, to the chapter consisting of a single sentence lacking any and all punctuation. Selvon's brush with more experimental prose, clever combination of dialect and Standard English, and local slang add humor, context, and realism to a work of fiction. One can see how this novel influenced later multicultural writers from London, such as Zadie Smith, who also writes about Jamaican and West Indian communities in London, interracial families, etc. 

I must also add that this novel reminded me of two other novels, one by Tayeb Salih from Sudan (Season of a Migration to the North) and Gisèle Pineau, a French writer with parents from Guadeloupe. The former's novel features a character who spent several years in London, experiencing the same racism as Selvon's West Indians and African character (Cap) from whites who only see blacks as sexualized primitives, who are continually dehumanized. 

In the latter's work, Exile According to Julia, I see some similarities between the old Jamaican woman, Tanty, in The Lonely Londoners, and Julia, the grandmother in Pineau's novel. Both are older Caribbean woman living in European metropolitan cities who are described in rather humorous ways, which is suggestive of some of the parallels between Caribbean communities in different European countries as they struggle to grow accustomed to the climate, form families, assimilate, and survive.

Zadie Smith's NW

Zadie Smith with her mother, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, a Jamaican woman.

"All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team being Nigerian where once they were Irish, or at least Pauline judges them to be Nigerian, and they're perfectly fine as long as you keep an eye on them every minute. Leah puts her thumbnail to her wedding ring. Pushes the band hard."

Zadie Smith's latest novel, NW, alluding to northwestern London's Willesden, Kilburn, and other neighborhoods where the author grew up, is a tough egg to crack. Unlike White Teeth, I see as more humorous and accessible, NW focuses on 4 different individuals who grew up in the same council estate and, with great detail, changes in narrative structure, and Smith's attempts to make this process seamless, show how the lives of 4 individuals in their 30s intersect. Think of the novel as White Teeth but grown up. In fact, I am quite sure there are allusions to characters from White Teeth in NW, such as Mrs. Iqbal and Irie. Unsurprisingly, this London novel's characters' community possesses a looming presence in the plot, which actually made it difficult to follow since I am not familiar with the London sights or neighborhood Smith so fondly writes of. Like White Teeth, the novel focuses on 'multiracial' contemporary London, with the Irish-descended Leah, the Jamaicans, Keisha/Natalie and Felix, and a St. Lucian, Nathan Bogle. Their loved ones and significant others are also a diverse crew, with multiracial individuals, working-class folks, and other denizens of the cosmopolitan city known as London while the lives of the aforementioned four individuals take drastic turns and each one is forced to think about why they are and what they are.

This novel asks more of the reader than White Teeth. The novel is divided into 4 sections covering the lives of Nathan Bogle, Keisha/Natalie Blake, Leah Hanwell, and Felix and the narrative structure or format changes for each. Beginning with Leah, the novel uses stream of consciousness and then more conventional formats for the other three sections of the text. This novel, however, seems to have been better constructed as a collection of short stories rather than a novel, especially because the two female characters, Leah and her childhood friend, Keisha Blake, receive a disproportionate amount of time while the black men, Nathan and Felix, receive considerably less time in the plot. Thus, this novel could have been better constructed as a a short story or two revolving around Leah and Keisha's friendship and disillusionment with life. However, Smith's nearly seamless writing connects the men to the women thematically based on angst, disappoint with adult life, and the adult struggle for self-definition not limited to societal expectations based on race, class, and gender. Furthermore, Smith critiques notions of professionalization as the key to life, to escaping poverty. Keisha, who renames herself Natalie in college, and then becomes a barrister, ends up right back in her community of impoverished working-class Londoners. And despite her education, her professional career, she could only escape poverty in the end by marrying a wealthy biracial man, Frank, and then living through a loveless marriage, an impoverished family, and a myriad of problems in a quest to find the clarity of life. However, at the end of the novel, the ultimate message on how to attain that clarity, that understanding of self and others, is still disappointingly depicted in such an odd way: Natalie calls the police to inform them of Nathan's possible role in a murder of another character. It creates many more

Nevertheless, Smith's novel, though falling short of her first, is an interesting read. It contains several references to pop culture, television, hip-hop, The Wire, Amy Winehouse, and life in 21st century London. Oddly, however, Smith does not include the Tottenham Riots or other pressing issues affecting contemporary London. As usual, however, she maintains her sense of humor and deprecation in her characters, whose conceptions of the world reveal the contradictions within all of us, especially regarding popular culture, marital infidelity, slang, and how people perceive life, as if there is a set path and it includes a profession, marriage, and children. Moreover, she is willing and able to deliver humorous punches at her character's naivete, limited perception of the human condition, and race in the UK, which has many parallels with the US. For instance, Leah, who marries a gorgeous Afro-French man, Michel, of Algerian and Guadeloupean heritage, is despised and talked about by her mostly black co-workers because she's seen as a white woman stealing "one of their men." Frank, or Franco De Angelis, the half-Trinidadian, half-wealthy Italian, also represents crisis of identity so commonly seen mixed black-white individuals, wanting to embrace a "blackness" that he does not know or have any connections to and thereby coming off as inauthentic and never free from his identity crisis or awareness of his class privilege.

Overall, a worthy read and Smith's shortest novel so far. Though difficult to follow at times, and loaded with subtle philosophical statements on life in modern London, NW succeeds in creating two developed female characters whose relationship enchants, intrigues and speaks to the reader. The central characters' friendship is repaired but there are no clear articulations or obvious answers, so the ending is far from comforting since the lives of the two women are still unclear. Regardless of the somewhat weak (and in my opinion, confusing conclusion) ending, Smith's experimental use of language, her "hysterical irony" and the novel's emphasis on the multiracial folks of Northwest London, make it worth reading.


Here are some great moments in the novel:
1. "Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside from her father. And then of course they had been surprised by their own conventionality. The marriage pleased Pauline. It calmed the anxieties of Michel's family. It was pleasing to please their families."

2.  "On Saturday mornings Michel helps the ladies and gentlemen of NW look right for their Saturday nights, look fresh and correct, and there, in the salon, he is free to blast his treacly R&B, his oh baby oh shorty till six in the mawnin' till the break a' dawn."

3.  "People back home, they don't get me at all. I'm too advanced for them. So when they try to contact me, I don't let this--I don't let drama in my life like that. No way! I've worked too hard."

4.  "Former prison guard, social worker, local councilor. How did she get anything done with those talons? Long and curved and painted with miniature renderings of the Jamaican flag. Clawed her way up through the system. Born and bred. Is wary of those, like Leah, whose degrees have thus installed them. To Adina a university degree is like a bungee cord, lowering in and pulling out with dangerous velocity. Of course, you won't be here long. Look, I don't want to give you projects you're not going to be here to finish..."

5.  "Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended for her?? Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh's dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class, sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it. Great fiery arcs, long pointed shadows."

6.  "Although Leah has a blue tongue and a fancy degree and a hot husband and no offense, but for the women in our community, in the Afro-Caribbean community, no offense, but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it's a real issue. It's just a real issue that you should be aware of. No offense. (Brighton weekend, team-building exercise, hotel bar, 2004.)"

7. "In the corridor the women spill out of every room, into the heat, cocoa buttered, ready for a warm night out on the Edgware Road. From St. Kitts, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, in their forties, fifties, sixties, and yet busts and butts and shiny legs and arms still open to the sexiness of an early summer in a manner that the women of Leah's family can never be. For them the sun is fatal. So red, so pale."

8.  "Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's parents. At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees ten-years-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age."

9. "Pauline turns the page with vilence. The windo logs Kilburn's skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once--houses, churches, schools, cemeteries--an optimistic vision of Metroland."

10.  "One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty."

11.  "Felix sighed and leaned back into his bench and began murmuring. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."


12. "Felix, listen: you can't buy a woman. You can't buy her love. She's gonna leave you that way. Love's gonna leave you anyway so you might as well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious."

13.  "Life's not a videogame, Felix--there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is everyone dies at the end. Game over."


14. "It had never occurred to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do."

15. "When being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the end of life, when qualities of the kind Keisha Blake possessed--cleverness, will-to-power--became "their own reward," and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and historical universe, and--had they ever met you--would very likely have enslaved you or, at best, bullied you to precisely the same extent as Lorna Mackenzie who had a problem with the way you acted like you were better than everyone else."

16."For precisely this reason Keisha has always been wary of Rodney and keen to avoid him--as much as that was possible in a place like Caldwell--on the principle that the last thing a drowning person needs is another drowning person clinging to them."

17.   "We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking," read Rodney, and then made a note by this sentence: "So what? (fallacious argument.)"

18. "There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route."

 

19. "When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis--she was not the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility--she said that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis--or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis--could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?"

20. "Perhaps sex isn't the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited--there are only so many places for so many things to go--and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank's silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom."

 

21.On Frank: "He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside from the old nostalgic affection for 90s hip hop. The idea of the Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he preferred to think of Africa--"Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx"--where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.)"

 

22. "A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural."

 

23. Reference to The Wire:

"Everyone in both Natalie's workplace and Frank's was intimately involved with the lives of a group of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of crack in the scrub between a concatenation of terribly designed tower blocks in a depressed and forgotten city with one of the highest murder rates in the United States. That everyone should be so intimately involved in the lives of these young men annoyed Frank, though he could not really put his finger on why, and in protest he exempted himself and his wife from what was by all accounts an ecstatic communal televisual experience."

 

24. "She wanted to give her friend something of equal value in return. If candor were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake's instinct for self-defense, self-preservation, was simply too strong."

 

25. "Through the glass doors they watched the children spinning in the lawn. Leah found the number online. Natalie dialed it. It was Keisha who did the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset. "I got something to tell you," said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice." 

Zadie Smith with her father at 5 years old.