So:  with Selvon’s novel we begin to study some products of what’s known as the West Indian Literary Renaissance or “Boom”:  within a period of about ten years, beginning around 1950, many of the writers emerged who would put West Indian lit on the world map.  In a short but intense burst of activity, these guys—it was pretty much a boys’ club—effectively invented the forms and themes of the modern West Indian novel.  The curious thing about this West Indian literary boom, though, was that for the most part, it didn’t take place in the West Indies. Almost all the writers associated with it gained their fame and success not in the Caribbean, but in London—and in fact many of their first works were (like The Lonely Londoners) about the experience of their self-imposed exile there. Obviously, this requires some explanation.

For starters, you could do worse than read Maisie and Haynes’s situation as a kind of explanatory allegory.  That is: you could argue that all sorts of stifling material circumstances conspire to trap Maisie & Haynes in a kind of paralyzing inertia.  Life is so claustrophobic and impoverished in Minty Alley that anyone with real ambitions (especially any young woman with independent aspirations) has got to get the hell out of there.  Even if you’d like to stay and work things out (as Haynes sometimes seems to want to), the place can be so constricting and alienating and intense that it frustrates your ability to get any perspective on it.  So read Minty Alley as a microcosm of Trinidad (or of any Caribbean island):  if you live in a small, provincial colony and you’ve got artistic or intellectual ambitions—especially if those ambitions involve giving voice to some kind of oppositional black consciousness—you eventually find that you run up against the same sorts of obstacles.  This had happened before, actually:  Claude McKay decamped to America in 1912, and both CLR James and Una Marson lit out for England in 1932.  And now, in the late 40s and early 50s, a whole bunch of other young writers full of piss and vinegar were driven to escape what they saw as the failure of their homeland in order to nurture their imaginations.  (George Lamming talks about this at some length in “The Occasion for Speaking,” which I’ve put in next week’s readings.)

Now to see things this way—i.e., to see the streets of 1950s London as being choked with Young, Gifted & Black West Indian writers and intellectuals and artists—would be to distort and exaggerate the situation.  Sure, there were some of those (i.e., students, writers, artists, entertainers, et al.), but obviously the men who populate Sam Selvon’s Lonely London are not romantic artist-types who’ve gone into exile because they felt creatively stifled or underappreciated back home. Moses, Galahad and Co. are peripherally aware of the presence of all those students and eggheads, but they themselves are regular Joes, working stiffs.  So how did England become (by the late 1980s), the “third-largest West Indian island”?  How did it come to be that in 1960, an English book reviewer could complain that the London which Jamaican writer Andrew Salkey had depicted in his latest novel seemed like a city “as foreign to an English person as Babylon or Buenos Aires”?

Well, briefly:  it came to be through one of the great ironies of colonial history.  In its waning years, the Empire, quite to everyone’s surprise, began to implode upon itself—a delicious paradox whose poetic justice Louise Bennett gleefully plays up in “Colonisation in Reverse.”

I already mentioned some of the patterns of migration out of the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; now, from the late 40s through the early 60s, there was a second wave which swamped those earlier ones. Here’s the simple version of what happened:  to begin with, during WWII, Britain recruited fairly good numbers—a few thousand, say—of West Indians to come work in Britain as servicemen and civilian laborers associated with the war effort.  At the end of the war they were all offered big financial incentives to return home, but many stayed.  More important, after the war, when the British economy was in shambles and industry needed rebuilding, colonial subjects were tempted to come to the “mother country” to fill serious labor shortages in certain industries. Now, the government wasn’t exactly encouraging this; in fact it tried for several years to fill the shortages with Eastern European workers.  But with the institution of the British Commonwealth in 1948 (a complicated political arrangement between the UK and its current and former colonies), all subjects of the Empire were officially regarded as British citizens and technically entitled free entry into the UK.  West Indians simply saw an opportunity and jumped.

So in June 1948 what happens is this:  the SS “Empire Windrush” (wonderful name, no?) arrives in England from Jamaica with 492 (black) passengers intending to settle and find work, even though they’ve got no arranged jobs, no family waiting for them, no place to live.  (I encourage you in the strongest terms to go explore some of links on the Selvon web page.) The episode makes headlines for a few days, embarrasses the government slightly and alarms a few racists, but jobs and housing are found for everyone and the whole thing blows over.  The thing is, though:  the Windrush episode turns out to be the start of a trickle of spontaneous migration. Over the next few years, in fits and starts, more and more West Indians arrive under more or less the same circumstances.  

Now at this point, the government is still a little skittish about large numbers of indigent single black men entering the country, and it takes a few half-hearted steps to discourage further immigration. But the immigrants keep coming anyway—many of them by this point having been actively recruited by prospective employers in the UK.  There are no reliable figures for the years 1949-52, but in 1953 about 2000 West Indians entered Britain; in 1954, about 11,000; from 1955 thru 59 between fifteen and thirty thousand per year; in 1960 and 1961, 50,000 & 66,000 respectively—and by halfway through 1962 (with 32,000 already having entered the country so far that year), the Brits suddenly put immigration restrictions in place.  (The numbers I’m citing represent only West Indians, who up till that point were single biggest immigrant group, but there were also significant numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, Africans and Hong Kong Chinese.  The overwhelming majority settled in the major British cities, particularly London.)

Now you can imagine some of the problems that ensued:  Moses & Co. mention most of them, at least obliquely.  On the material level, there were problems with job placement and unemployment, inadequate social services, housing shortages, etc., etc.  Very little was done officially to assist or accommodate the settlement and social integration of the migrants.  They tended to be segregated into low-income jobs and deteriorating neighborhoods, and they increasingly grew to be looked upon by their neighbors with suspicion and alarm.  A couple of noisy conservative politicians tried to mount an anti-immigration campaign throughout the 50s and tried to get restrictions imposed, but the Labor government, for various political reasons, did little except to repeatedly “study” the matter.  As for the British public:  there was certainly plenty of petty, everyday racism, and even a few scattered racial disturbances (as well as sporadic, isolated incidents of small-scale racist violence), but there was actually very little  widespread popular concern about immigration (and no widespread, overt antagonism towards immigrants of color) until August and September 1958, when all the simmering hostility came to a boil in four days of race riots in Nottingham (a city in the midlands) and Notting Hill (the London neighborhood just west of Bayswater), which were provoked almost entirely by white racist thugs who savagely beat up and otherwise terrorized black residents.  The issue briefly flared up in Parliament and the national newspapers with lots of tongue-clucking and soul-searching—but then after a month or so it fizzled, and nothing really came of it.

Nevertheless, in the ensuing couple of years there were mounting pressures for immigration control (which paradoxically had the effect of spurring immigration, as colonials rushed to get into Britain before the inevitable happened).  Legislation passed in late 1961, as I mentioned above, but even this was fairly mild:  it established a three-tiered system of restrictions based on job skills, and those restrictions were administered fairly liberally.  So even with restrictions in place, over 50,000 immigrants per year arrived from the Commonwealth from 1963 on through the 1970s, and “race problems” kept on growing.  

Anyway, this is the context in which the West Indian literary “boom” was happening.  Between 1949 and 1960, as I said, over a dozen West Indian writers (not just Selvon, Lamming, Walcott, and Naipal, whom we’ll be reading, but other big names like Vic Reid, Roger Mais, Edgar Mittelholzer, Ralph deBoissiere, Andrew Salkey, and Wilson Harris) established international reputations in England, with over 50 books to their credit between them; many of those books are now recognized as “classics” of West Indian lit. Selvon and Lamming were the first to break through to a wide audience and critical acclaim (Selvon’s A Brighter Sun came out in 1952, followed by Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin in ‘53)—in fact these two men were good friends, and had arrived on the same boat in 1950.  Their initial success, together with the flood of West Indians into Britain, provoked both a kind of “exoticist” curiosity and genuine interest on the part of a British reading public.  “Caribbean Voices”—a weekly radio program on the BBC devoted to West Indian creative writing (which actually grew out of a show Una Marson had begun in the late 1930s), consolidated all these guys’ fame both in Britain and back home. (Listen to the 2009 BBC radio documentary about "Caribbean Voices" if you haven't already.)   

And that’s how London became the “literary capital” of the West Indies.  Certainly there was something weirdly colonialist about this, but nevertheless, London was a place where lots of cross-fertilization and collaboration could take place.  Freed from what they saw as the constraints of their small islands back home, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Trinidadians and others could come together and forge a sense of Pan-Caribbean cultural consciousness and unity.

Again: we’ll read more about this dynamic in Lamming’s essay next week, but I think you can see it at work even in The Lonely Londoners, where Africans, South Asians, and West Indians of all types are coming together in a new community, inventing a social style, a street culture and a common language—(which as Ken Ramchand points out is neither standard English nor West Indian Creole, but something in between)—all their own.

For a critical perspective on the narrative I've just related, see J. Dillon Brown and Leah Rosenberg's collection Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature.