Aj Thesis Corrected.Pages
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Liminal Text: Exploring the Perpetual Process of Becoming with particular reference to Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and George Lamming’s The Emigrants & Kitch: A Fictional Biography of The Calypsonian Lord Kitchener Anthony Derek Joseph A Thesis Submitted For The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English and Comparative Literature Goldsmiths College, University of London August 2016 Joseph 1! I hereby declare that this thesis represents my own research and creative work Anthony Joseph Joseph 2! Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the assistance of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in providing financial support to complete this work. I also express my warm and sincere thanks to my supervisors Professors Blake Morrison and Joan Anim-Addo who provided invaluable support and academic guidance throughout this process. I am also grateful to the English and Comparative Literature Department for their logistic support. Thanks to Marjorie Moss and Leonard ‘Young Kitch’ Joseph for sharing their memories. I would also like to thank Valerie Wilmer for her warmth and generosity and the calypso archivist and researcher Dmitri Subotsky, who generously provided discographies, literature, and numerous rare calypso recordings. I am grateful to my wife Louise and to my daughters Meena and Keiko for their love, encouragement and patience. Anthony Joseph London December 16 2015 Joseph 3! Abstract This practice-as-research thesis is in two parts. The first, Kitch, is a fictional biography of Aldwyn Roberts, popularly known as Lord Kitchener. Kitch represents the first biographical study of the Trinidadian calypso icon, whose arrival in Britain onboard The Empire Windrush was famously captured in Pathé footage. In the critical essay, contextualising Kitch, I argue that rite of passage theory, in particular, liminality theory, as defined and developed by Victor W. Turner, offers a valuable alternative to theories of hybridity and fragmentation hitherto applied to the postcolonial Caribbean and its literature. To support this position I offer close readings of two iconic works of postwar migratory fiction; George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1956) and Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), showing how aspects of rite of passage and liminality theory illuminate these novels. My critical reflection on Kitch examines the marked absence of auto/ biographical work on or by calypso artists in ethnomusicology or mainstream publishing. This absence is disproportionate both to the numerous studies of the calypso which approach the form homogeneously, at the expense of its individual artists, and, to the socio-historical importance of the calypso to the Caribbean and its disapora. Since Kitch is a fictionalised biography, I provide a brief exploration of the genre by drawing on the work of Michael Ondaatje and Earl Lovelace. My argument here is that the multitudinous and liminal approach of Kitch offers a more plausible alternative to linear, single narrator approaches since it mirrors both the process of research, and the manner in which a community of non- hierarchical voices may contribute to the construction and memorialisation of a calypsonian’s life. Joseph 4! Contents Kitch Part One: Bean ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..6 Part Two: Lord Kitchener…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……… 77 Part Three: The Grandmaster……………………………………………………………………………………………..……………160 Epilogue …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….222 The Liminal Text Critical Context: Introduction: Liminal, Hybrid or (Both)………………………….……….230 Chapter One: Fragmented Symmetries Part One: The Archipelago Becomes a Synonym……………………………………… .247 Part Two: Writing in the Interstice………………………………………………………..………………… 257 Chapter Two: Liminal Migrations………………………………………………………………………………………………. 271 Part One: George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954): The Novel as Liminal Chronotope The Separation Phase: A Voyage………………………………………………….….…… .272 The Margin or Liminal Phase: Rooms and Residents……… ..277 Assimilation/Aggregation: Another Time……………………………….……. 282 Part Two: Happy in the Mother Country: Liminality in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956)…………………..……………………..287 Viaducts and Liminal Spaces: Waterloo Station………………….… ..287 Creole-English or Mesolect as Liminal Location………..……….….290 The Liminal Londoners Moses……………………………………………………………………………………………………… .. ..295 Galahad……………………………………………………………………………………………….….….298 Tanty…………………………………………………………………………………………..……………..… 302 Harris…………………………………………………………………………………………………..….……305 Calypso Style…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..308 Chapter Three: ‘You see me alive’: Notes To A Calypso Biography………312 Calypso: Roots and Representation………………………………………………………………………….312 Kitch…………………………………………………………..………………………………………………………………………………………….318 A Liminal Life, a Community of Voices……………………………………………..………………..321 ‘Negotiated’ Versions………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…328 Kitch: Forms and Elements………………………………………………………………………….….………….……332 Methodology……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….…..……….….. 332 Conclusion: Endless Limits………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…..…. 337 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…………………..…..342 Joseph 5! Kitch Joseph 6! Part One: ‘Bean’ He have melody like peas grain. - Lord Pretender Joseph 7! Everybody know ‘Kitch’ but few know ‘Bean.’ Is he sister give him that name, because as a boy, he was so tall and thin. She used to call him ‘String Bean,’ she used to call him ‘Bean.’ Then some people, where he was living in Arima, would call him ‘Bean Pamp,’ because Daddy Pamp was he deceased father name. I used to call him Bean sometimes, quietly, and he would laugh because he know that name dig far. The name is ‘Bean.’ But I never prostitute it, or let everybody know. — Russell Henderson Joseph 8! Green Fig The stable hand in his rubber boots throws a bucket of disinfectant into the pig pen. Sun coming up slow on the market now, but a faint moon still in the sky. Is Saturday. Donkey cart and wagon coming down the main road from Valencia and Toco, to the market, leaning in the potholes and the lumps in the road, heavy with purple dasheen and pumpkin, plump green christophene and lettuce by the basket, long brown cassava and breadfruit, mauby bark. Black back crapaud still weeping in the gullies, corn bird flying from vine to river vine,and the knock-kneed Indian woman sets her stall by the market side, near where the road slopes down into tracks and shacks, stirs her cauldron of cow heel soup and hums holiness hymns. She has been there since dew wet morning, from the first glimpse of light burst. Her pot bubbles and spits and the scent of wild thyme and Congo pepper drifts through the market like a spell. Soon, in the damp woody spaces of the covered market stall, chickens will be swung by their feet, wow and flutter against the grip of the abattoir man, with his cutlass hand and his hot water boiling on a cauldron fireside, to dip and pluck them beating, from wing and narrow bone. Sun sketching its arc still, light penetrating the sky, and the morning opening like a promise above Arima. Miss Daphne sits on an overturned iron bucket shelling pigeon peas in her yard, with rose mangoes and speckled breadfruit laid out on a crocus sack before her. She talking to a full woman selling navel orange in the stall beside her - laughs - rims back and skulls and peas fall from her crotch. Down the aisle, Ma Yvette selling bottles of black strap molasses, Pearl selling saltfish, smoked herring, Ma Hoyte have nutmeg and mauby bark, Chambers selling lamp oil, Picton: corn. Customers to walk now among the stalls, choosing okra and congo pepper, cow foot, tripe and live crabs for Sunday calaloo. Later in that afternoon time, after the market has been deserted, when only the stink of fowl gut and rotten fruit remains in the gutters, and the traders are packing their unsold goods, a team of cars will roll slowly across the ragged field behind the market. The dry season has parched the grass there till the earth is veined with fissures. Dust. Buicks and Austins, bullet shaped Chryslers are taking French Creoles to the Santa Rosa race track. Joseph 9! But uphill to the north Bean sit down on the worn wood of his front step with his head between his knees, making rhythm beat with a guava stick against the splintering edge and humming, upright bass in the throat, comping, with the high notes. Eileen, his sister, was frying fish in batches in the outside kitchen behind the house and he could smell the flour and oil burning in the skillet. A bee start to inveigle the stick. Bean get up. He dust off the seat of his pants, he catch a caps and walk down St Joseph Street, whistling, his slipper slapping the gravel beneath. He waved to the hornerman Deacon sanding crosses in his shed, to the black tongued socouyant hanging white sheets on a line flung between her lime and barbadine tree, to Baboolal the tailor, needle in his mouth. Crossing the main road, by the dial, he passes the market vendors dragging their carts home and he walks across the dusty field beyond the market, to the old Samaan tree near the paddock. Its branches spread majestic over the wild yard where horses roam. He sits among its raised roots where a rage of ti marie bush waits with leaves that shut to the touch. From where he sits he can see the jockeys walk their horses from the paddock to the races. He can smell the horse dung. Simple so he sit there with his head resting on his forearm, and his