My Girl and the City

Sam Selvon

Trinidad-born Sam Selvon (1923–1994) began writing while working as a wartime wireless operator, moving to Port of Spain in 1945 to write for the Trinidad Guardian and edit its literary magazine. In 1950 he emigrated to England, completing his first novel A Brighter Sun on board ship. His 1956 masterpiece The Lonely Londoners is one of the most iconic literary depictions of post-war West Indian immigration, chronicling the fortunes of new arrival Henry “Sir Galahad” Oliver as he carves out a space for himself in the city.

With The Lonely Londoners , Selvon created new ways of reading and writing London as a black city, using a creolised language to give voice to his characters after finding Standard English insufficiently pliable. His writing captures the uncanny disorientation of arriving in a place at once familiar and unfamiliar, presented to those arriving after the 1948 Immigration Act as the “Mother Country” but frequently unfriendly, prejudiced and cold. Selvon’s evocation of a foggy London “when it had a kind of unrealness” rewrites Eliot’s “Unreal City” in Trinidadian calypso, describing both the loneliness of struggling to make a living in a strange, alienating environment and the moments of exhilaration as Galahad and his fellow immigrants learn to survive in their new surroundings.

“My Girl and the City”, first published in Barbadian literary magazine BIM in 1957, contains much of The Lonely Londoners in miniature. As the narrator and the girl discuss their feelings about the city, we are shown both the eerie anonymity of London—“blank faces, unseeing eyes, millions and millions of them”—and its potential to transform seconds later into a place of enchantment and possibility as an inviting face emerges from the crowd. The story opens in Waterloo, where West Indian immigrants would arrive on the boat-train, and which Selvon presents as a gateway into the city.