Calypso Music and Postcolonial Masculinity in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

This article explores the masculine construction of West Indian immigrants in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. Selvon represents the cross-racial relationship between the black male immigrants and the white British women in the novel in ways that illuminate the interlocking space in which black masculinity is revised and negotiated. The protagonists’ masculine struggle shows highly complex dimensions of the cross-racial gender economy; sexual relations become an anticolonial struggle to reach the mainstream British culture, and this sexual self-assertion of the black male protagonists interrupts British culture’s hegemonic power. Moreover, the sexual quest in the novel becomes even more interesting, given the structural presence of Calypso, an Afro-Caribbean music genre in colonial Trinidad. The Lonely Londoners consists of various ballads that imitate the structure of calypso music. As the calypso symbolizes hegemonic misogyny and homophobia in the male-centered Trinidadian culture, the allusion of calypso music reflects phallic and homophobic self-affirmation against social castration. This reading, placing black men’s sexual quest toward white women in the context of the Trinidadian calypso tradition, explains the contradictory self-construction of black male immigrants in The Lonely Londoners; by alluding to the vernacular folk tradition and thus by contextualizing the social standings of ethnic minorities in multicultural London within the patriarchal culture of the West Indies, the novel explores the intersection wherein the mythic postcolonial black masculinity becomes visible.