Sam Selvon

"Selvon's London works...span a crucial period in the literary and cultural history of black Britain. His experimentations with language and form in his London works were to be a major influence on a later generation of writers as he lifted his immigrant characters out of the stereotypical straitjackets imposed on them and created an alternative way of seeing and reading that world. Selvon's city is a mongrel city, a mishmash of languages, people and identities jangling with each other and vying for a place. It is a world which anticipated by many years the literary visions of a multicultural and postcolonial London created in works such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Diran Adebayo's Some Kind of Black or Monica Ali's Brick Lane."

"Irony, it seems to me, has always been present in West Indian writing. It is integral to West Indian life as a whole. Survival itself is ironic. When you look at calypso, which is a form of oral literature, it is chock full with irony, and it's been there from the very beginning. Just to survive in the Caribbean, you have to be ironic, and it becomes part of one's range of expression, including humor. It is the tragicomedy of someone like Samuel Selvon (another important influence), a capacity for irony that was in Selvon's work from the very beginning, even before he moved to London to write Lonely Londoners, for instance."

"In the early Tiger books, there is a sensitive and even painful probing of the Indian sense of self. An Island Is a World is an even more searing treatment. One values the impishness of the Moses books and, of course, the grand "federation" experiment of the all-ah-we-is-one Caribbean reality executed, most appropriately by language, in The Lonely Londoners. It is around this point in Sam's writing that he begins to veer away from the particular in favor of a "Pan-Caribbean perspective." He only returns to the Tiger motif at the end of his life through an unfinished novel, a fragment of which deals with "free paper"-the pass that Indians had to carry when they left the estates of their indenture. This is published as the short story "Turning Christian." My point is that here was Sam, almost at the end of his life, struggling to reopen that vein in his writing which probed the Indian sensibility, and invoking the humiliation of the pass-system that existed as a condition of Indian serfdom. This was not standard in all the territories of indenture, but it did occur in Trinidad. I can't help but wonder about what would have happened if he had not been waylaid by the simplistic falsehood of the all-ah-we-is-one agenda and had continued to explore the Tiger-type character. Or even integrated both-because Sam really belonged, unlike Naipaul, to both worlds. Yet ideologically, as "Three into Two Won't Go" so eloquently expresses, he positioned himself within the "progressive" agenda of mixing and merging and inventing a true-true Caribbean creolized self, and my question really is, at what cost to his writing? Or how did this facilitate his writer's agenda?"

"the greatest and therefore the most important folk poet the British Caribbean has yet produced."

"One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet, Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train."

"Every morning when Foster awoke, it was the same thing. The world spun in his brain. The world spun in his brain, and he imagined the island of Trinidad, eleven and a half degrees north of the equator. He saw it on a globe, with the Americas sprawled like giant shadows above and below, and the endless Atlantic lapping the coastlines of the continents and the green islands of the Caribbean. The globe spun and he saw Great Britain and Europe, and Africa. The eastern countries, Australia. Foster imagined Trinidad as it was, a mere dot on the globe. But he saw himself in the dot. He saw himself in the dot, and he transmitted thoughts into the universe. He was lying down on the dot and thoughts radiated from him like how RKO introduce their films with a radio station broadcasting into space."

"On New Year's Day, 1939, while Trinidadians who had money or hopes of winning money were attending the races in the Queen's Park Savannah, Port of Spain, a number of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe landed on the island."

"People didn’t know what part of the world I came from and that was something that I felt ought to be corrected. Those days in England—in the fifties and so on—the only country in the Caribbean people spoke about was Jamaica. You never heard them talking about places like Barbados, Trinidad, Tobago and so on…"

"I’d rather stay in ignorance. Mark you, it may be true that I am repeating something that has been said before, but in the actual creation it wasn’t so to me, because in my ignorance I didn’t know. So I think that ignorance helps a lot. When you know that somebody has done something before, it hampers you."

"living in Canada, which is a developing country, I feel almost part of going along with the development, whereas in England I felt that there was already so much tradition established here, that I was imposing on it, whereas in Canada, I feel I am actually helping to build it."

"[about the kind of English he used in his novels] it seemed to me that the only way to give expression to what happened to the original immigrant was by using this idiom, this language form that he brought with him. There was no other way. I tried to write The Lonely Londoners in Standard English and it just would not work, and when I got into the Trinidad way of speaking the whole thing seemed to flow so easily and everything seemed to come to life. This idiom is so much a part of the people, so much a part of the characteristics of the people, that you cannot separate a language from the experiences."

"when this immigration happened, for the first time the Trinidadian got to know the Jamaican or the Barbadian, because in the islands themselves the communications were so bad that they never really got in touch with one another, they never got to know what happened in other islands. And it was only when they all came to London that this turned out to be a kind of meeting place where the Jamaican met the Trinidadian and the Barbadian and they got to know one another, they got to identify in a way as a people coming from a certain part of the world. Not so much as islanders, no, but as black immigrants living in the city of London. And so they got together, and it's a very strange thing that they had to move out of their own part of the world, and it was only when they came to London that this kind of identity happened to them. (Q: What effect did this have on the West Indies?) Well, in a way this kind of unity of the islanders that happened in London reflected back to the Caribbean to some extent I think. And even people down there in that part of the world began to think of, at least of the immigrants who had travelled all this way into London, that they had all come from one part of the world. I think in this way it helped to make all the islanders feel as if they all belonged to one region of the world."

"I grew up in Trinidad speaking the way Trinidadians talk. That remained with me throughout all my years living abroad. I found that it was so much easier for me to express myself if I could use the Trinidadian form of the language rather than trying to speak “proper English”, as it’s called…"

"The American language is almost, in its way, a kind of experimental form, too, with the English language…"

"I would like to see writers writing about movement from one island to the other. I don't really want a novel about Trinidad. I want the characters to move and go up to UWI [University of the West Indies] in Jamaica and spend a week in Barbados—have friends in Barbados, have friends in Cuba. This is what I’m hoping to do in the new novel."

"I think that this is a kind of dilemma that doesn't face just one individual. I think it's a dilemma that faces any number of people who move out of one culture into another, particularly people from Third World countries because of their color, who move into white societies to settle. And I think that they have this problem of how they are going to identify themselves. Are they going to keep their original identity or keep their roots, or are they going to allow themselves to be assimilated completely into their new culture?"

"I paid very little respect to the rules, purely because I'm ignorant of them. Intuitively I found that if I was succeeding by my primitive way, I would continue to use it. That way, I also feel that I do maintain some kind of individuality in my work. For me the best pleasure I get out of writing is for someone to be able to say that that's a Selvon novel or that's a Selvon short story. I've always felt that if I probed too deeply and started to become knowledgeable about what the novel is, I would lose that individuality. Whether it is good or bad-that's something else. Should I sit"

"I would certainly feel that they should not forget their past, their background, where they come from. I have always remained Trinidadian myself. I know where I come from, and I know that by race I am mixed. I am predominately East Indian, I know that, but that doesn't stop me from formulating my own philosophy or my own psychological approach as to how I'm going to assimilate myself into the culture. I don't know which is best, but I would certainly hope that they would not forget their past or turn a blind eye to the origins of the whole thing. I don't think that you can build a future without using the past, and I don't think that they should try to forget their origins at all. But certainly I think they should make some effort to assimilate into the society in which they have to live day by day. Are we going to have just ghettos of people who are living completely apart?"

"I think that I am representative of what I always say is a third race in Trinidad. We talk about the blacks and the Indians being the two races there. But there is a third race who are people from my generation who grew up Westernized, who still remain what they are because you can't change yourself, but who have adopted a way of life which tries to work and operate between the two races and who are Creolized, as it were, and who see themselves more as West Indians than as perhaps belonging to people who originally came from India...They are more Westernized and they are creating a nation out of this mixture. I'm not the only one. Very few people talk about that third race, but that is a race that exists. I know that it exists, and that is the race that I am putting my hopes on for any future for Trinidad."

"It is...a much more ambitious concept to try and get a national feeling among the English-speaking Caribbean writers. This is not just my dream because they've tried it already with the Federation in the late forties. I myself was very disappointed when that fell through. (Q: Why do you think it broke down?) Selvon: Well, I think it's just because we couldn't agree among ourselves. There was all this bickering. Trinidad feels that it's a better island than Jamaica, and Jamaica feels it's the biggest English-speaking island. They want everything to happen over there, and Barbados doesn't want to have anything to do with it. That sort of petty rivalry that goes on has been keeping us apart for years and years. I think we are slowly growing out of that now, and we are able, at least, to get together and talk more about what will be done for the area as a whole. In fact, it is already, in a way, in practice with trade agreements going on between the islands and so on."

"a man could tell you a lot about what he's going to do tomorrow, but when the time come he ain't done one arse"

"I do not feel that I express my thoughts and views as well as I would like to in interviews and public statements, and I prefer to be read than heard. If I have anything significant to say on any issue it is to be found inside my novels and stories."

"I feel that any contribution that I have to make as a writer should be directed towards our own culture, and most of the writers I know are disappointed at the fact that while our potential has been appreciated and used abroad, nothing has been done at home."

"The slave (Black) and the indenture (Indian) have always fascinated me because in spite of what is happening in Trinidad today it is my belief- tinged as it is with more and more disillusionment as the years go by- that a very strong human bond existed between these two factions though it has become more and more fragmentary."

"When a writer is writing, it should be approached with a certain amount of innocence and when a writer loses that innocence he ceases to be a writer as far as I am concerned. Therefore I deliberately cultivate a certain measure of ignorance about everything in order to allow the innocence to feel its way into a situation or issue."

"I would like to be identified as an individual writer. I hate comparisons. My work has been compared to Steinbeck for example, and I have been called the Steinbeck of the West Indies, but that means nothing to me. When a reader says "I hear Selvon's voice," that satisfies me - whether they think Selvon is right or wrong. I can take adverse criticism as well as the praiseful. What I find in my writing is my identity and personality, and people's views that what I say is right or wrong becomes less important to me because in my writing I am being my own self."

"There is a saying that I like, "When the pot was cooking you wasn't in the kitchen." So now, Ken, you are suggesting that I contrived during my creative process to have Tiger and Urmilla living near Joe and Rita but that wasn't planned in my mind when I was writing the book. The fact that Joe happened to be a Black man is quite incidental. To many Trinidadians it would appear that I deliberately made this set-up. I do not work this way. I have never worked this way. I start a book and I allow this creativity/charisma that writers are supposed to have to do its thing."

"It was Sir Galahad who drew my attention to the property. He was reading Dalton's Weekly, as was his wont, looking for new jobs; roaming through bedsitter land; picking out secondhand miscellany he need and could afford; musing on the lonely hearts column to see if any desperate rich white woman seeks black companion with a view to matrimony; and speculating when he come to the properties-for-sale page, buying houses and renovating them to sell and make big profit. Little did he dream that whilst he dreamt I was on the lookout for an investment in truth."

"There is a short spell during the year in Trinidad when a kind of twilight comes between the sudden shift from light to dark. Actually, there is no such thing as twilight in the island, but for a week or so before the rainy season starts the daylight lingers for an extra hour. Candleflies flicker in the gloaming, birds wing across a sky reflecting yet another brilliant sunset, and cicadas relieve one another in making a continuous buzz to herald the wet months that are to follow. The buzzing starts as a spluttering, jerky sound, as if the creature was trying the notes of the scale at random, until it settles for a middle C and buzzes for a long minute. Astonishing the energy stored in that little body, for the droning is loud and clear. But more remarkable the continuity, for hardly does one stop than another begins a short distance away as if by pre-arranged signal, and no link slips from the chain of sound they maintain from dawn to dusk."

"I don't rightly recollect when it was the idea of going back home hit me. It could of been one time of any time when I was down in the dumps, my back aching from bending down to pick up the apples that fall when my cart upset. But I could tell you one thing for sure, that down there in that grimy basement in Shepherd's Bush, feeling like a trapped animal while my erstwhile lackey Bob and his bride Jeannie occupied my pent-house on the top floor, it was not hard to wish for a change of scenery and circumstances. And topping that was the daily dread that the pigs would come a-knocking at the basement where Galahad and Brenda conducted their Black Power party affairs, to arrest somebody for something, or merely to give me the shivers."