13 - Double Displacements, Diasporic Attachments

Summary

Following active labour recruitment in the Caribbean, postwar Britain was not only unprepared, offering hastily equipped air raid shelters to her colonial citizens, but also quite unwilling to welcome its new arrivants. In the slew of novels from the 1950s and 1960s, dislocated men (predominantly) have relocated to the ‘mother country’ but find themselves in effect doubly displaced, halfway between their origins and their destination. Sam Selvon’s ‘boys’ are groping through thick London fog in search of the imperial romance that the metropolis had seemed to promise. The protagonists of his Moses trilogy struggle to survive by inhabiting enclosed spaces, leading a subterranean room-based existence. They represent this first migrant generation’s embattled quest, both literal and metaphorical, to be accommodated in Britain. This chapter focuses on how the works of various writers of different backgrounds and political persuasions – including Braithwaite, Desani, Lamming, Markandaya, Naipaul, Salkey, and Selvon – engage with Britain as an inhospitable nation, anticipating through their fictions later debates on the location of culture and the power of writing the centre from the margins.