Amidst the unveiling of Basil Watson's Windrush monument design at Waterloo station. This week we’re reflecting on the Windrush Generation with Sam Selvon’s incredible novel ‘The Lonely Londoners’. Written by Sam Selvon.
Published in 1956, it was one of two books focusing on working-class black people following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948, alongside George Lamming's The Emigrants 1954.
The narrative explores the issues of false promises and poverty upon arrival in Britain.
Sam Selvon breaks the conventions of the English novel by defying plot tropes and using Trinidadian Creole within storytelling.
The narrative is told in third-person, through the primary focalising character Moses Aloetta. The novel opens with him travelling to Waterloo station to meet a newly arrived fellow-Trinidadian.
“Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.”- Author, Sam Selvon.
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