Andrew Salkey Research Articles

Diaspora, Modernism, and Black Masculinities in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement

Following the transnational turn in modernist studies, and building on Stuart Hall’s and Nadia Ellis’s concepts of diaspora as key to understanding Caribbean modernism, this essay examines Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) as the first wave of West Indian fiction that traces a black, male consciousness shaped by modernity and migration, one whose lived experiences and feelings of belonging in post-WWII London resist binarized understandings of colonizer and colonized. Selvon’s and Salkey’s fiction represents complex and conflicting senses of black masculinity as mediated by colonialism, bourgeois respectability, and whiteness. Migrant or middle-class, normative or queer, the various modes of black masculinity captured in the novels counter reductive attempts to ascribe one fixed identity, ideological position, or reality to Windrush flaneurs who might prefer walking the streets of London incognito.

Digitally Mapping Caribbean London: Urban Strolls in the 1950S BBC Radio Archive

This article uses Geographic Information System (GIS) tools to digitally map depictions of urban London by Caribbean writers, including George Lamming, Andrew Salkey, and Carlisle Chang. Through extensive archival work, including the examination of numerous heretofore unexplored BBC scripts of the 1940s and 1950s, this article identifies a genre of ‘urban stroll’ narratives written and broadcast by Caribbean writers of the period. By mapping these texts, this article revises critical stereotypes about the ways that Caribbean immigrants inhabited and represented London, rejecting the focus on the precarious urban narrative. This article also suggests ways that digital mapping can facilitate new reading practices that take into account metropolitan spatial relations and their attendant power dynamics.

Caribbean Literary Discourses on the Polyvalence of Masculinity

though it has taken the academic community in the Caribbean, particularly those in the social sciences and the humanities, some time to begin to address the issues of masculinity and sexuality systematically, the creative writers of the region have long demonstrated abundant leadership in this regard. One should not interpret this claim to mean that men have not been talked about in the scholarly literature of the Caribbean, but a systematic and ongoing analysis of the way society shapes the construction of masculinity, as a gendered identity, had to await a different type of discursive practice that emerged in the late 1980s. Caribbean creative writers, in contrast, have been reflecting on matters of masculinity and sexuality for a very long time.1This essay seeks to examine the ways in which some Anglophone Caribbean writers skilfully map the terrain of masculinity in the region, being cognisant of the nuances of its construction, but simultaneously mindful of the shifting terrain upon which masculinity is fashioned. Emerging from this examination of the creative literature are forms of masculinity that range from the more traditional and self-assured prototypical conceptions of heterosexual masculinity (for example, Austin Clarke's Nine Men Who Laughed [1986], Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners [1956], George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin [1953] andV. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas [1961]),2 to examples of less decisive practices of sexuality, and more nuanced understandings of the ways men lay claim to their manhood (such as Selvon's Turn Again Tiger [1958], Jacques Roumains Masters of the Dew [1944] and Eric Walrond's Tropic Death [1926]).3 In the process, one of the more compelling contributions of the writers is the way they return to the reader the sense of community and cultural impact on the way men view themselves, and the extent of societal influence on the way they configure masculinity. This essay traces the construction and performance of masculinity in Opal Palmer Adisa's It Begins with Tears (1997), Earl Lovelace's The Wine of Astonishment (1982), Harold Sonny Ladoo's Yesterdays (1974), and Andrew Salkey's Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1959).4Masculinity and the society's influenceThough there may appear to be no social sanctions governing male sexual behaviour in the Caribbean, the day-to-day activity of the living situation may not be entirely without some ethical constraints. In the patriarchal context of the Caribbean, sanctions against sexual licence are much less binding on the man than on the woman. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for men to be chastised for their infidelity. In a perceptive observation, Brackette Williams, speaking about making the transition to manhood in Guyana, notes that a boy of good moral standing should not be engaged in dubious clandestine affairs: Nor should he ask for one girl and then continue to play about, 'spoiling other people's girl children'.5 It is this same type of community sanction, shaming and damage not simply to the reputation of the man, but that of his family, that generates the following stern upbraiding of Godfree from his grandmother Dahlia in It Begins with Tears:Godfree! Boy, where you is? Come here.Yes Granny.Drop you pants.But Granny . . .Boy, ah still a head taller dan you, and dere is still strength in me hand. Now drop you pants.Reluctantly, but knowing the stubbornness and strength of his grandmother, the boy complied, looking around to make sure his friends weren't in the bushes watching and laughing at him. Not in the habit of wearing underpants, he stood naked before his grandmother. She stood staring at him, assessing his manhood, then walked over to him. As Granny reached for Godfree's pride, he pulled back but her left hand on his shoulder held him firm and with her right hand she took his rod in her palm. At first she held it like something hot and delicate, then she began to feel it like one testing the ripeness of a bread-fruit, then her fingers kneaded it as if it were something dead that needed to be given life. …

“Playing Fiona and being happy with Dick”: Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly

This article considers two novels by Andrew Salkey, Escape to an Autumn Pavement and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly. Where recent critical attention endeavours to emphasize the significance of the former novel as an account of black homosexuality, the intention here is to take these novels together to explore wider concerns of sex and sexuality during the 1960s. In so doing, these novels are located not just within the growing genre of West Indian writing with its emphasis upon the aesthetics of identity in this period, but also in its relation to literature associated with the “Angry Young Men”. The intention is to read Salkey’s work not just as expressions of migrant identity, but as illustrations of British identity during a moment of intense social change with regard to global status, sexual politics and incipient multiculturalism.

ANDREW SALKEY, THE BRITISH HOME, AND THE INTIMACIES IN-BETWEEN

Caribbean author Andrew Salkey's 1960 novel, Escape to an Autumn Pavement, diverges from the ‘unhomeliness’ of many contemporary diasporic narratives by placing its sexually confused West Indian protagonist within the domestic milieu of the English home. It also troubles the peculiarly English discourse of the ‘respectable homosexual’ to account for the presence of the Caribbean migrant. In so doing, Salkey makes domestic space a site where migrant and queer affiliations collide, with ideas of nationhood proving crucial to both. In offering an early prototype of a figure both black and gay, this text explores the hazards and the possibilities of an intimate life conducted ‘out of line’.

The Roots and Routes of “Imperium in Imperio”: St. Clair Drake, The Formative Years

The Roots and Routes of “Imperium in Imperio”: St. Clair Drake, The Formative Years Andrew J. Rosa (bio) Chicago: like the back of your hand; the earlier railroad the same. Just as heavily veined and stressed, you know and carry with you whole all of our suffering; a spread of pain which, we know, you conceal quietly. Andrew Salkey, 1973.1 My earliest memories of a black college involve an episode fifty-six years ago . . . My father had taken me . . . with him on a visit to his alma mater, the school that had fashioned him into a preacher and my mother into a schoolteacher, Virginia Theological Seminary and College . . . He had come there as a young immigrant from Barbados; my mother had come across the mountains from Staunton in the Shenandoah Valley. I remember that visit . . . Years later I watched black Baptists giving suppers and begging “to keep the Seminary alive” . . . The Seminary was theirs. It is still alive, impecunious and struggling. They refuse to let it die. St Clair Drake, 1971.2 [End Page 49] Introduction In 1899, Sutton Griggs published Imperium in Imperio, an obscure work of utopian fiction that unfolds around the creation of a separate black empire within the United States. One of the two main protagonists of the novel, Belton Piedmont, is a patriotic American, who believes that black people must make an attempt to persuade whites to grant them justice before wholly surrendering to a separate racial destiny. Failing in this mission, Piedmont reasoned, whites would be responsible for having created an empire within an empire. In contrast to Piedmont, Griggs introduced the wrathful Bernard Belgrade as a figure driven by his all-consuming hatred of whites to make a separate black empire a reality. Ending his novel with Piedmont’s execution by Belmont as a traitor of the Imperium, Griggs offers the ascendency of a black nationality over a hopeful vision of an integrated America. The duality of aims pursued by Piedmont and Belmont, which ultimately resulted in the creation of an independent black state, underscored for Griggs the tension around what it meant to be a “Negro” and an “American” at the precise moment when a system of segregation, motivated by the eugenicist impulse of upholding racial purity, was clarifying the spatial boundaries between whites and blacks across the South.3 Almost a half-century later a variation on this theme of imperium in imperio assumed sociological meaning in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 1945, Black Metropolis offered a view of an urban black community “in the final stages of the Depression and in the midst of the Second World War.”4 Formed from a longer history of neglect and the inequality of opportunities in Chicago, the Bronzeville of Black Metropolis was the product of a color line and pervasive discrimination, but a world distinctive in its attributes and belonging entirely to black people. Devoid of the sentimentalism and overt political preaching of Griggs’ utopian novel, Black Metropolis showed black people as constantly striving to overcome the deprivations and impoverishment of discrimination in housing and employment while “tenaciously clinging to life, liberty, and happiness” through their own organizations and institutions. “This was the world of their relatives and friends. They knew no other!”5 In its own time this view of an urban black community underscored the attachment black people developed for a way of life seen as essential for survival and getting ahead in a world controlled by whites and called into question the extent to which the modernizing forces of city were, as Robert Park theorized, sweeping away the primitive system of caste most commonly associated with the rural south.6 As James B. McKee observed, the real significance of Black Metropolis to urban sociology was found in its rich description of a separate black community. That Bronzeville was able to take root and flourish suggested that the color line in Chicago was less rigid than the system of southern caste, even allowing, in certain areas, for some degree of interracial association. However, as Faye V. Harrison contends, the full extent of black people’s separate spatial [End...

Lessons from London: E. R. Braithwaite and Black Writing in 1950s Britain

The 1950s and 1960s constitute one of the most significant periods for black writing in Britain. In the wake of war and Windrush, major works appeared by Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and others, written both in Britain and about Britain by its latest citizens newly arrived from countries with a history of colonialism.1 The advent of this formidable, remarkable moment of literary creativity begs comparison with the emergence of literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century — often a product too, of course, of migrants, expatriates, and exiles. But in accounting for the literary fortunes of the mid-century, this momentous gathering of literary voices after the war has been ignored entirely or annexed into the specialist subcategory of ‘black British writing’, kept safely away from the predominant metanarrative of British literature. Ignoring black writers of Britain — their presence, their impact, their influence — is an habitual failing of so many accounts of literature from the mid-century to the present. D. J. Taylor has nothing to say about black writers from the 1950s and 1960s in his account of the novel and England since 1945, After the War (1993). While Naipaul, David Dabydeen, and Salman Rushdie eventually appear in his study, like many others Taylor recognizes a distinctly migrant and international element to postwar British writing only towards the end of the century, after 1980. It is a familiar pattern: Malcolm Bradbury’s contemporaneous but much more detailed study, The Modern British Novel (1993), makes ‘a new spirit of ethnic and stylistic multiculturalism’ in British writing a distinctly post-1979, Rushdie-prompted phenomenon.2 Everything before it seems of little consequence.

'Voicing the Text': The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction

Long before West Indian literature became a legitimate category of writing— brought about mainly by support for and publication of novels by West Indians living in Britain in 1950s and 1960s—among new literatures in English, West Indian writers had already begun to produce an impressive body of short fiction; short fiction is, indeed, as Kenneth Ramchand describes it, the founding of West Indian literature (2). The rise of small magazines in 1930s and 1940s in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana, and existence of influential Lon- don-based Caribbean Voices Programme (1945-1958) helped to support a regional creative writing community in which short story writing thrived. The emergence of West Indian novel in 1950s and 1960s somewhat overshadowed short story writing, but since 1980s, shorter genre has been enjoying a renaissance. The publication of Olive Senior's first short story collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) —the inaugural winner of Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987— is generally regarded as point at which West Indian short story re-emerged from literary underground. Since then, single-authored collections been published with encouraging regularity, as short story anthologies. The re-emergence of West Indian short story has also brought a revival of interest in oral traditions in region and promotion of local oral contexts as artistic resources for creative writers. Speaking of recent trends in West Indian short story writing, Stewart Brown and John Wickham note in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories that many, probably most, West Indian short story writers been conscious of, and to some extent influenced by, those oral forms and stories spun around figures like Anancy, West Indian trickster, or Amerindian spirits like Ol' Higue or Mantop (xvii). E.A. Markham makes a similar observation in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, noting that West Indian short story writers have taken stories and characters out of oral and reimagined them in a literary context (xviii). The making of an oral poetics or development of an aesthetic of orality, as it is variably termed, in modern West Indian fiction turns on transposing folk figures into literary works where they function as tropes for a number of conditions and issues pertinent to postcolonial period: wily spider Anancy and his significations often form metaphoric center of works—from authors as diverse as Andrew Salkey, Pauline Melville, and Narmala Shewcharan—highly ambivalent about political achievements and climate of postindependence West Indian nations; and

Frontiers of Caribbean literature in English

Series Preface - Introduction by F.M. Birbalsingh - George Lamming: Concepts of the Caribbean - George Lamming: Africa and the Caribbean - Derek Walcott: The Sea is History - Andrew Salkey: Bright as Blisters - Jan Carew: The Wild Coast - Samuel Selvon: The Open Society or its Enemies? - Roy A.K. Heath: Continuing Colonialism - Austin Clarke: Caribbean-Canadians - Cyril Dabydeen: Here and There - Dionne Brand: No Language is Neutral - Jamaica Kincaid: From Antigua to America - Lorna Goodison: Heartease - David Dabydeen: Coolie Odyssey - Caryl Phillips: The Legacy of Othello, Part (1) - Caryl Phillips: The Legacy of Othello, Part (2) - Appendix 'The Sea is History': the text of Derek Walcott's poem - Select bibliography - Index

Andrew Salkey, 30th January 1928 ‐ 28th April 1995

(1995). Andrew Salkey, 30th January 1928 ‐ 28th April 1995. Wasafiri: Vol. 11, No. 22, pp. 82-84.

Andrew Salkey Honored at London Symposium

Andrew Salkey Honored at London Symposium

Andrew Salkey Talks with Anthony Ilona

Andrew Salkey Talks with Anthony Ilona

Book reviews : Walter Rodney: poetic tributes Introduced by ANDREW SALKEY (London, Bogle L'Ouverture, 1985). 101 pp. £5.95 cloth, £3.50 paper

Book reviews : Walter Rodney: poetic tributes Introduced by ANDREW SALKEY (London, Bogle L'Ouverture, 1985). 101 pp. £5.95 cloth, £3.50 paper

New books

The One by Andrew Salkey. (Bogle‐L'Ouverture Publications Ltd. 1985) pb. £2.50 Walter Rodney Poetic Tributes. Written by poets who were touched and moved by the murder of the late Dr. Walter Rodney. (Bogle‐L'Ouverture Publications Ltd. 1985) pb. £3.50

Of dreams and disillusion

Of dreams and disillusion

Andrew Salkey Wins Poetry Award

Andrew Salkey Wins Poetry Award

The Theme of Home in the Fiction of Canada, the United States, and the West Indies

T H E T H E M E OF H O M E I N T H E F I C T I O N OF C A N A D A , T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S , A N D T H E W E S T I N D I E S * THEODORE COLSON University of New Brunswick H a r o ld Bloom has written that all "romance is a journey toward hom e."1 The New World has been the setting for so many searches for home that it is not surprising that there are many kinds of such journeys. And it is interesting that certain differing patterns emerge in the literature of the United States and Canada and the West Indies. Thomas Wolfe's "You can't go home again" has seemed a truism for the attitude toward home in American literature. The protagonist of Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, however, wonders if the reverse may be true, that "You have to go home again, in some way or other," and in the case of Canadian literature this may be so.2 But Derek Walcott's simple "I have no home"3 is representative of West Indian literature. Consider the typical American ending oiHuckleberry Finn: "I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest." How different is the Canadian conclusion of Charles Bruce's The Channel Shore: "He would never live on the Channel Shore. But it was home."4But the West Indian in Andrew Salkey's Escape to an Autumn Pavement says, "Can't you see that I don't belong anywhere?"5 In America literature nostalgia is not for an actual home, but an idealized home. This is expressed most clearly in Agee's A Death in the Family: "You can go home; it's good to go home, but you never get all the way home in your life." The little boy Rufus thinks about his feeling when he hears "Swing Low Sweet Chariot": "He did not even try to imagine what home was like except of course it was even nicer than home where he lived, but he always knew it was home. He always knew how happy he was in his own home when he heard about the other home."6The nostalgic ideal is mixed up in the American Dream and the Edenic myth. The Great Gatsby is typical: Gatsby's nostalgia is for that fleeting relationship with Daisy, the symbol of all desire, and that relationship is the only 'home' he ever had. On the other hand, Nick Carraway turns from the corruption of the East in a little set piece about falling snow and lights at Christmas back home in the West. In this manner the novel can have it both ways by using the home and the girls as symbols. The Catcher in the Rye is the simplest exemplar of this, for it shows that growing up or leaving Eden is phoney and dangerous and that all goodness is to be found in home - specifically in the little sister, Phoebe. The greatest example of this is found in The Sound E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , i v , 3 , F a ll 19 7 8 3 5 2 and the Fury, in which the terrible beauty of home is embodied in Caddy. And then there is All the King's Men, a novel which begins with trips back to two homes, each representing a political pole, with the girl next door, Anne Stan­ ton, as the object of desire. But of course you can't go home. The theme permeates American literature from a straightforward little myth like "Rip Van Winkle" to minor yet important passages in a work like Moby Dick, which is not about going home but has near its conclusion those moving passages in which Starbuck and Ahab feel their wives and children calling them, while they know they cannot return. How much like Wolfe or Faulkner Ernest Buckler is in his nostalgic evocation of the details...

Andrew Salkey's Joey Tyson

Andrew Salkey's Joey Tyson

Island voices: Stories from the West Indies

ISLAND VOICES STORIES FROM THE WEST INDIES Selected and introduced by Andrew Salkey 256 pp. Liveright. $4.95