The Latest Lowdown and Ballad

The passages/issues we might still think about in The Lonely Londoners are probably legion! There's surely still more to say about homes and housing (and the idea of home) -- with cramped rooms, dormitories, hostels, and temporary meeting places seeming to loom so large, reminding us, perhaps, of that Grace Nichols poem with which we began the semester and inviting some possibly rich paper topics (I know there is a Selvon short story entitled "Basement Lullaby" -- I wonder what that might offer); Waterloo Station, with its many scenes of arrival, is one of the many central spaces of the novel (a locus of return, of rendezvous, of remembrance) that needs to be addressed (is Piedra's "Game of Critical Arrival" relevant here?); renamings and nicknames are crucial to Selvon's novel, and are another continuation of a prominent concern in our course; the whole idea of reimagining (and reverse colonizing) the metropolis (in a sense, inventing a black London) probably deserves more consideration (we did well to note Tanty's tropicalizing of the local food store, as well as the symbolic appropriation of some of London's central landmarks (which may provide intriguing overlap as we look ahead to Book 5 of Omeros and Chapter 5 of No Telephone to Heaven)); the spatial creolization that transforms St. Pancras Hall into "Saltfish Hall" in Trinidad suggests (even if just for a few moments) a new kind of socially inclusive space (don't even the gender relations seem a little different during Harris's fete?) and foreground the performative cultural resources of London's new citizens (how cool to think of them dancing calypso style to "God Save the Queen"!); the difference between Moses's and Galahad's approaches to living in London seem to go to the heart of the confused spirit of the rehomed (but still largely unhomed) West Indian migrant. Lots still to talk about, as you can see, and I'm sure you all would add to this list (also, perhaps, lots still to write about -- if you have a stray moment during these busy days, this blog space still seeks your musings!).

The Lonely Londoners is certainly a novel about itineraries, about routes, about an alternative pedestrian rhetoric (which is why I think de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life could be relevant here), about a sustained (and largely optimistic) engagement with the immigrant's built environment. Fittingly, the novel, which begins on a "grim winter evening" (23), ends on a summer night when "laughter fell softly" (142), and seems ultimately to offer a figurative rendering of the migrant's creative spirit, which was still able to be suffused with hopefulness in the mid- to late-1950s. And how wonderful, too, that the proliferating narratives never reach closure but remain open, and thus suggest that "Selvon's boys" are not fated to be merely passive and acted upon by the world; their stories are never finished, and it will apparently become Moses's quest to become the narrator of both his own life and the lives of his people.

I hope that you were able to avoid excessive "botheration" this past weekend, that you were able to "coast a lime" or two, and, indeed, that the glorious weather meant the weekend did really be hearts for all of you!