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CARIBBEAN IMMIGRANTS IN RELATIONSHIP: TRACING THE TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN AUSTIN CLARKE AND SAMUEL SELVON by Kris Singh A thesis submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (March, 2016) Copyright ©Kris Singh, 2016 Abstract Austin Clarke and Samuel Selvon are similarly positioned in the literary field and offer overlapping perspectives in their depictions of Caribbean immigrants, yet for the most part, there has been no in-depth comparison of their careers. Moreover, their decades-long friendship and its documentation—archived correspondence and Clarke’s memoir dedicated to Selvon’s memory—have never garnered critical attention. My dissertation fills this gap in criticism through an investigation of the transnational relationships surrounding and explored within their literary production. In situating these two authors as simultaneously connected and isolated as they traverse different national boundaries, I foreground their emphasis on the interplay between the interpersonal relationships of Caribbean immigrants and the social structures within which they function. Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that both Clarke and Selvon investigate how social reality is encoded, inscribed, and naturalized while also suggesting the transformative potential of the social practices of Caribbean immigrants. Underlying this dissertation is a reflective reconsideration of the categories used to organize Caribbean writers and the interpretive frames applied to their literary production. Through reference to their archived correspondence, I explore the parodic strategies deployed by Clarke and Selvon as they conform to and undermine established boundaries, categories, and modes of behavior. My careful study of the privileges and pressures of macho performance in their correspondence guides my reading of their fiction and my refashioning of their critical reputations. Though critics have read their work as simply sociological descriptions of distinct social contexts and have misrepresented them as inept or reductive when it comes to issues of gender and sexuality, I demonstrate that both authors present remarkably nuanced depictions of gender construction as informed by and informing racial tensions, economic realities, and ii sociopolitical contexts. Clarke and Selvon demystify naturalized systems of domination, and careful analysis of the relationships that shape the lives of their characters uncovers how their practices and perceptions are tied to their manufactured feelings of loneliness and vulnerability as they desperately seek control of or become resigned to their constrained circumstances. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Chris Bongie, and my second reader, Asha Varadharajan, for their generous support. iv Statement of Originality I hereby certify that all of the work described within this thesis is the original work of the author. Any published (or unpublished) ideas and/or techniques from the work of others are fully acknowledged in accordance with the standard referencing practices. (Kris Singh) (March, 2016) v Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... iv Statement of Originality ................................................................................................................................ v Chapter 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 Archived Relationships: Austin Clarke, Samuel Selvon, and the Field of Cultural Production 34 Chapter 3 Determined Relationships: Loneliness and W(e)ary Immigrants in Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners, "My Girl and the City," and The Housing Lark ....................................................................... 64 Chapter 4 Labour(ed) Relationships: Interpersonal Intimacies and Euphemism in Austin Clarke's Toronto Trilogy and Samuel Selvon's Moses Ascending ........................................................................................ 111 Chapter 5 Generational Relationships: Renascent Meaning and the Disruption of Propriety in David Chariandy's Soucouyant and Austin Clarke's More .................................................................................. 184 Coda .......................................................................................................................................................... 253 vi Chapter 1 Introduction In A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon (1994), Austin Clarke marks Sam Selvon’s death by meditating on their decades-long friendship, offering readers a glimpse into their occasional but cherished meetings, their archived correspondence, their overlapping perspectives on their shared career, and their comparable positioning in the literary field. Clarke recalls hearing Selvon’s voice on Caribbean Voices, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s radio program, while growing up in Barbados in the early 1950s. Selvon’s stories interrupted his colonial indoctrination by allowing him to “feel ‘we was people, too’” (12). Clarke notes that “our words spoken amongst us” were being transmitted back to the Caribbean as “golden and acceptable portraits of our lives” and accepted as such “because they were coming to us […] on the BBC’s radio programme” (9). This reflection is offered in hindsight; as a child, the need for English consecration did not appear as “strange or characteristic of our cultural status” (9). While critics like Glyne Griffith, Philip Nanton, Hyacinth Simpson, and Peter Kalliney offer in-depth analysis of the role of Caribbean Voices in Caribbean literary production, my reading of this scene is centred on Clarke’s self-reflection in terms of his relationship with Selvon. This opening presents a Barbados-born author, writing from Canada, remembering how a Trinidad-born author, speaking from England via an English cultural institution, contributed to the collective forging of a Caribbean sense of self in a decade that anticipated constitutional decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean.1 Clarke’s transatlantic relationship with Selvon demands rigorous reflection on the frameworks within which Caribbean literature is defined because the shifting sociopolitical contexts and intimate 1 configurations that constitute its production and reception are neither readily perceptible nor immutable. In Caribbean Discourse (1981), Edouard Glissant describes the Caribbean as a “multiple series of relationships” (139). His neat characterization is a nod toward not only the relationships that knit individual island and mainland nations into what is known as the Caribbean region but also the network of relationships set up by colonialism as enslaved and indentured black and brown bodies were transported from their homes by white colonizers to extract resources from the colonies. It is a description that resonates strongly because it charges critics to attend to these relationships cautiously as they continue to unfold in ways that resist easy interpretation. Stuart Hall displays such an approach in “Thinking the Diaspora” (1999) in which he explains that the “fate of Caribbean people living in the UK, the US or Canada is no more ‘external’ to Caribbean history than the Empire was ‘external’ to the so-called domestic history of Britain” (1). Hall is not making the simple assertion that writers based in the Caribbean diaspora need to be accounted for. Rather, he is stressing the necessity of interrogating how the Caribbean is imagined and reflecting on the conceptual apparatus applied in critical approaches to Caribbean literature. Citing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) as a powerful alternative, Hall questions whether the nation state “still provides a useful framework for understanding the cultural exchanges between the black diasporas” (9). More recently, in Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (2006), Alison Donnell offers another example of critical self-reflection in terms of challenging the paradigms used to read Caribbean literature, including the significant contributions made by Hall and Gilroy. Donnell asks, “what it is that we read when we approach Caribbean literature, how it is that we read it, and what critical, ideological and historical pressures may have shaped our choices and 2 approaches” (1). She answers with a persuasive critique of canon building in Caribbean literature, revealing the exclusions spurred by arbitrary periodization, the lasting legacy of critical preferences developed in support of the nationalist project, the shortcomings of over- emphasis on the diasporic, and the limited perspective applied to Caribbean women’s writing. My project takes heed of these examples of critical self-reflection when considering Caribbean literature. By placing Clarke and Selvon in conversation with each other, I aim to foreground the transnational relationships surrounding and explored in their literary output. Not only has their personal relationship never been studied, but the connections between their depictions of Caribbean immigrants have for the most part escaped critical

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