From Loneliness to Encounter: London in the Windrush Generation Novels of Sam Selvon and Andrea Levy
Abstract
The article explores the ways in which Sam Selvon in his pioneering The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Andrea Levy in her Small Island (2004) negotiate London spaces. Although the novels were created half a century apart they both feature the Windrush generation imaginatively reinventing the city through their hybrid language.
The London of The Lonely Londoners (in contrast to the novels by George Lamming or, later, V.S. Naipaul) is not only a city of solitude but also a site of possibility, shaped by the Creole language and featuring a specific Caribbean flâneur.
Like Selvon, Andrea Levy, who is a second-generation writer, also employs humour when mediating and shaping historical urban spaces. However, whilst acknowledging all the hardships of immigrant experience, her early twenty-first century sensibility makes her transcend the loneliness and also the sexism of Selvon’s vision in favour of an anticipatory transculturalism.