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...

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.