The imperfect longing: Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners and the dance of doubt

Abstract

This paper explores the social and narrative construction of immigrant identity and diasporicity in Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners. The stories of the immigrant men in this novel rely on the scaffolding of the narratives by Moses Aloetta, an early migrant to London from the colonial space. Moses depicts the experience of movement as part of a larger lyrical analysis of exclusionary practices embedded in language practices that the men defy in order to claim London as home. The treatment of London as a site in which inclusion is negotiated and the center becomes the eccentric reverses conventional configurations of space whereby the men's stories become the elocutionary point of view in which adaptation and contingency become the locus of life and living. The Lonely Londoners offers an aesthetics of modernity and migration located in speech acts – the ballad, the episode, and the lark. This literary creation of a diasporic imaginary calls attention to the various, sometimes conflicting ways in which the idea of home can be invoked and maintained.