KJ's WAYS OF BEING (Part 9)
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
I see him one January evening quarter-century ago, four months before his death in 1994. He is only 70 but shuffles into the room slowly. It is a small seminar space in the Creative Arts Centre of the University of the West Indies, an old wooden building whose floorboards creak. He is medium height but appears taller because he is thin. He sports jeans and sandals. His neat beard and ponytail are silver, and his eyes are sad and ancient as if they have seen too much, including his own impending death. Once seated he fidgets with the books on the table before him while novelist Earl Lovelace introduces him as "a beleiver in Trinidad".
Lovelace says that Selvon's work proclaimed and affirmed the lives and dreams of ordinary people. "I dunno what else to say," admits Lovelace.
"Go on, go on, it sounding good," prompts Selvon, forcing a smile. But Lovelace is dry. He squeezes out the "idea" that Selvon allowed us to "thumb our noses at what is frothy and jokey in us."
It's a common trope when people speak about Selvon, the frothy and jokey, the humour and dialect, as if our language only good for making joke. They go no further because Selvon never had the omniscient arrogance of a novelist who explains everything. He was descended of a different type of wordsmith, an older, wiser species - the storyteller who relies on word of mouth. If written, his words must echo the spoken. That's why Selvon's early attempts to write Londoners in standard English failed and he was forced back to our dialect.
The novelist is of the modern capitalist era of complex, highly differentiated societies and anonymous lives. They belong to different classes, occupations, races, religions which interact with others infrequently. The novelist informs strangers of the secrets of other strangers living amongst yet more strangers. What he writes is new to them - novel - and they consume his secrets as he wrote it: in silent solitude. "The novel differs from all other types of prose - folktales, legends, even novellas - in that it neither comes from nor feeds into the oral tradition," wrote Walter Benjamin. "The storyteller finds his material in experience; his own or what he has leaned secondhand."
The storyteller was born of older, smaller communities, where everyone knew everyone else and secrets were few. Face to face he told of what they all knew already of familiar people and events, of the doings of gods, heroes and animals. If he was good he did so more memorably. Or he sang to his audience of faraway lands and the wonders he witnessed there. Selvon, although his stories are written, holds more in common with Aesop and Homer, an African slave and a blind poet, with calypsonian Shadow, rapper Tupac and folksinger Bob Dylan, than with Earl Lovelace or VS Naipaul.
Selvon drags his chair closer to the small encirling audience, perhaps to evoke the huddled intimacy that surely generated the anecdotes he wrought into his stories of West Indians in London. He rifles through the books on the table with long, delicate fingers. He opens The Plains of the Caroni. It's not a compelling story, but the bombast in the passage animates its reader. Selvon seems to be recalling an incident, not reading from a book. The protagonist Balgobin coughs. Selvon coughs too, uncontrollably. The audience titters. Selvon stops. "I suppose I have to read something from The Lonely Londoners," he says. It was published in 1956, twelve years before The Plains of the Caroni.
The storyteller's stories must also hold a lesson, a moral or a useful experience, like the morals in Aesop's fables. So Londoners is in the historic present tense, with Moses Aloetta "standing on the banks of the Thames. Sometimes he think he see some sort of profound realization his life, as if all that happen to him was experience that make him a better man, as if now he coud draw apart from any hstling and just sit down and watch other people fight to live. Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot."
Selvon launches into one of his long, lyrical, bittrsweet soliloquies and as he picks up stride transforms into the storyteller. His voice shifts timbre as beneath its kif-kif laughter words switch mood. His ballad segues from a kaiso into the blues, which is always about movement and loss. The froth is of the seas crossed, the jokey is the laughter that hides tears. It opens one grim winter evening with a realism that gives it an air of unreality, "with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the bur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet."
The Londly Londoners is the West Indian odyssey of migration, solitude and uprootedness. In it Selvon chronicles our optimism, the racism we battled, the sex and hustling that sustained us, the disappointing unreality of London, different from what good colonials expected. That uprootedness and homesickness we have endured since the seventeenth century, before all but the Jewish people and the Roma.
"Every year he vowing to go back to Trinidad, but after the winter gone and birds sing and all the trees begin to put on leaves again, and flowers come and now and then the old sun shining, is as if life start all over again, as if it still have time, as if it still have another chance. I will wait until after the summer, the summer does really be hearts."
Selvon wraps the evening with "My Girl And The City", speaking to us "as if you and I were earnest friends and there is no need for preliminary remark."
The storyteller recalls a London he loves but his girlfriend dislikes. He courts her with urgent stories, talking incessantly, desperately, about the two of them, about what they do in the city, about life, about walking through the rain and getting lost, about buying a sandwich for her in a pub or waiting for a train. A thousand and one moments.
"Fidgeting in that line of impatient humanity I got in precious words edgeways, and a train would rumble and drown my words in thundering steel. Still it was important to talk. In the crowded bus, as if I wooed three or four instead of one, I shot words over my shoulder, across seats; once past a bespectacled man reading the Evening News who lowered his paper and eyed me that I was mad. My words bumped against people's faces, on the glass window of the bus; they found passage between 'fares please' and once I got to writing things on a piece of paper and pushing my hand over two seats."
The West Indian writers of his generation have testified that love is impossible for those cynical colonials, with their neuroses of race and colour and class. In Selvon's Trinidad the kaiso celebrates desire but laughs at love's folly. Then you realize what looks like the storyteller's naivete is really the radical innocence demanded of a lover. The stories he tells, the web of anecdotes he spins are the threads which bind communities together more firmly than constitutions and flags. Those stories have always secured women's hearts firmly to men's.
"My girl, she is beautiful to look at. I have seen her in sunlight and in moonlight, and her face carves an exquisite shape in darkness," he says. "These things we talk... why mustn't I say them? If I love you, why shouldn't I tell you so?"
She replies, "I love London."
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