by Sam Selvon
Even beyond the innovative choice of omniscient vernacular narrator, this is a novel in love with West Indian Vernacular English (WIVE). Like the novel’s form and narrator, its linguistic medium, too, works to create and reinforce a sense of community and belonging. Consider the following ode to Selvon’s subject and method:
If you ever want to hear old-talk no other time better than one like this when men belly full, four crates of beer and eight bottle of rum finish, and a summer sun blazing in the sky. Out of the blue, old-talk does start up. You couldn’t, or shouldn’t, differentiate between the voices, because men only talking, throwing in a few words here, butting in there, making a comment, arguing a point, stating a view. Nobody care who listen or who talk. Is as if a fire going, and everybody throwing in a piece of fuel now and then to keep it going. It don’t matter what you throw in, as long as the fire keep going—wood, coal, peat, horse-shit, kerosene, gasoline, the lot. (this page)
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Selvon draws a compelling parallel among language, community, and his own novel: talk is life, life is literature, literature is talk. WIVE, here, functions as both a metaphor and a medium for the idea of communal endeavors and survival in the colonial metropolis. This is the essence of Selvon’s undertaking and his success.
In an equally concrete tribute to his chosen language, Selvon includes explanations of some terms with which a non–West Indian reader would be unfamiliar. This is a quintessential technique of vernacular literature, which often self-consciously builds the literacy of its audience. After using the word “buttards,” the narrator parenthetically but proudly declares “(That’s a good word, but you won’t find it in the dictionary. It mean like if you out of a game, for instance, and you want to come in, you have to buttards, that is, you pay a small fee and if the other players agree, they allow you to join. It ain’t have no word in the English language to mean that, so OUR PEOPLE make it up)” (this page). Internal gloss, or a definition encapsulated within a literary work, appears frequently within vernacular fiction; here, it is fitting that the novel’s most prominent internal gloss involves the topic of community and belonging. Just as “OUR PEOPLE” invent the word “buttards,” so Selvon supplements the English literary canon by offering his own immigrant-centric (in terms of both language and content) contribution.
This is not to say that WIVE is the only language that appears in The Housing Lark. Selvon’s narrator is a virtuoso of code-switching who employs whichever communicative medium best suits his purposes at a given moment. He often wryly approaches Standard British English from the outside, at once displaying his mastery of it and also pointing out its shortcomings in terms of communication or truth value. The English literary references are vast, from Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” and Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities to a radical recontextualization of Biblical verse into a comment on girl-watching (“You could say what you like about the old Brit’n, but when summer come he that have eyes to see let him see” [70].) The novel weaves in the language of journalism, Romantic poetry, weather forecasting, and even math, as the narrator describes the tragicomic side character Syl asking Bat “‘So what you think, so what you think,’ like a recurring decimal” (this page). Though Selvon’s deepest love may be for WIVE, it is hard to imagine any way of speaking (i.e., discourse) or of knowing (i.e., epistemology) that he would not use as artistic fodder.
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Having outlined Selvon’s major achievements in The Housing Lark in the areas of form, narrator, and language, I will bring us into this superbly crafted novel at the most logical point: the beginning. The novel’s first sentence beautifully encapsulates the important topics and strategies to come. “But is no use dreaming,” the narrator boldly begins (this page). This in medias res opening asserts the validity of the vernacular English that is among the many codes accessible to the narrator, while also setting up the dialectic of “use” (in other words, utility, pragmatism, realism) versus “dreaming” (in other words, fantasy, idealism, romance). The theme of dreams runs through the novel, from the initial and recurring image of genie wallpaper, to the motley cast of absurd dreamers, to the governing dream of a home. Every character has a dream, some more reasonable and plausible than others: Harry Banjo seeks a recording contract; Gallows carries out an “everlasting quest” for a missing five-pound note; Alfy quixotically hopes for instant success as a photographer; Syl chases women across London.
In the poignant passage below, Selvon recognizes the universality and transformative power of dreams:
Is a funny thing, but men have a lot of thoughts and ideas what sleeping inside and never get a chance to come out. If for instance you notice a fellar who quiet and easy with a job that bringing him in about ten quid a week, you put a hundred pounds in his hand and you will see a different man. You might look at this fellar and say he ain’t have no ambition, he look so satisfy with this ten quid a week. And bam! you put this hundred quid in his hand, and all them thoughts and ideas what was sleeping yawn and come wide awake. Suddenly this same fellar realise he want a car, or a yacht, or a platinum blonde. Mark you, is not the money what create these ideas: he had them all the time, but only now they getting a chance to breathe. (this page)
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Reconciling the apparent opposites of “use” and “dreaming” that he introduced at the outset, Selvon suggests that dreams, when allowed, will take on their own reality. To survive and build community in a hostile land may take the intervention of a genie, but it can be done. The “lark” of the title, Selvon insists, is at once amusing and deadly serious. While mocking unrealistic dreaming, the novel also valorizes it as a potentially transformative activity—as long as it’s combined with some degree of pragmatism. Being unrealistic is the only way that anything will ever change. To return to the beautifully succinct opening “Is no use dreaming,” we need “use” (utility or realism) plus “dreaming” (fantasy) in order to effect social change.
As Selvon valorizes both dreaming and realism on the level of plot, so he vacillates between realist and fantastical modes in his narration. “Now, that is exactly how everything happen,” his narrator insists at a pivotal moment in the evolution of the central goal.
If I was writing a story I could make up all sorts of things, that Bat say so-and-so and Jean say this-and-that and Harry say but-what-about.
Because you know how the idea catch on? Just like that? Is so things happen in life. Some words here, a little meeting there, and next thing you know, War Declare, or a Man Gone to the Moon.
And being as I want to tell the truth, I have to say that that is how it happen. (this page)
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Here we have a realist mission statement: with “is so things happen in life,” Selvon uses the conventions of literary realism to justify his central metaphor and its satisfying outcome, which ironically represents a departure from an expected realist ending. This is not overt magic in an English fairy tale mode, but instead a light-handed intervention on the narrator’s part, an updated deus ex machina in an unexpected guise.
Achieving the dream of a home necessitates the perfect recipe of realism and fantasy; it also necessitates specific contributions from the novel’s male and female characters, each of whom Selvon associates with a different approach to the idea of dreams. Jean and Teena, burned before, mistrust the act of dreaming; Matilda offers a breakthrough idea that helps make the “lark” a reality; and it is Teena’s pragmatism that resuscitates the plan. When Harry assures Jean, “We will have our own place to live,” here is her reply: “‘That is only a lark,’ Jean say, ‘you think them fellars really serious? . . . Everything is ‘if.’ If this and if that. You fellars does live in a dream world’” (this page). For now, Jean provisionally doubts and invalidates the lark of the title; yet, through her, Matilda’s, and Teena’s assertive interventions, the dre
am world of the fellars becomes a place that all can inhabit together. Cross-gender cooperation, some unlucky-seeming luck, and strategic appropriation of existing racist stereotypes all mix together to provide a surprise happy ending.
The transformative role of women in The Housing Lark represents a departure from Selvon’s earlier novels of migration. As Selvon explained in a 1994 interview, “In The Lonely Londoners, for instance, there were no women characters but you’ve got to remember that the time I am writing about, this is when the men went to England before, to look for jobs, and to settle down before they sent for their women and their families to come and join them, so there weren’t very many women about then. So to write about later on, like in The Housing Lark as I say, they come into play, and I have written about them.” Indeed, women come into play not only as characters but as important actors in the novel’s central quest.
That is one of the many ways in which The Housing Lark challenges a prevailing misogyny that it may sometimes appear to endorse. The male characters (along with the narrator) consistently refer to women as “things”—literally objectifying them, or making them into objects—as well as assuming that they will be responsible for all domestic duties. At the same time, though, the narrator reveals those beliefs as absurd, while also compassionately representing Jean’s, Matilda’s, and Teena’s points of view. The more misogynistic men of The Housing Lark come in for gentle, indirect mocking on the part of the narrator—or, rather, the narrator gives them just enough rope to hang themselves. Fitz, for example, boasts that “I am a professor of womanology, boy. If I had five little fingers, I could wrap them around all of them” (this page). This is the same Fitz who proves to be an obedient husband to the admirably organized Teena. Anticipating feminist critiques that would emerge several decades later, the novel both illustrates and undermines the language of male supremacy. The Housing Lark also roundly depicts a range of female characters’ perspectives, including a nonjudgmental and nonromanticized portrait of Jean’s experience as a prostitute. As the narrator explains, “To tell you the truth, though Jean was a nice girl, she was a hustler, going up to Hyde Park every evening to look for fares” (this page). He later adds, on a counter-discursive note, “Hustling for fares wasn’t as easy as people think” (this page). Moralizing, Selvon later shows through an amusing episode with some interfering white nuns, is an entirely pointless undertaking.
Again anticipating twenty-first-century gender theory, The Housing Lark also illustrates the complex intersections of race and gender. The narrator disavows the English stereotype that “the boys only after white things” (this page) as well as illustrating the men’s different expectations for relationships with white and West Indian women. We also see how, within that racialized milieu, a character like Syl finds the need to perform a falsely exoticized identity in order to get the interest of white English women. Despite its light, entertaining tone, The Housing Lark never simplifies or sugarcoats the complex race and gender dynamics that it depicts.
All of the above—literary form, narrator, language, plot, and the themes of dreaming and gender—factor into a simultaneous portrait and enactment of community. The novel acknowledges the complexity and multiplicity of Caribbean diasporic identities, working to disaggregate any monolithic understanding of what it is to be West Indian. As well as gender, other possible fissures are those of race and nation. In an early scene, the novel portrays Caribbean London as fractured, and the concept of solidarity as self-serving and limited. It is the unsavory, assimilationist rent collector Charlie Victor who first floats the idea of solidarity, cynically encouraging Trinidadian Bat to take a Jamaican roommate—in the guise of regional fellowship, but in reality so that Charlie can collect more rent. Elsewhere, characters of African descent mock the Indo-Trinidadian Syl’s shifting identity. However, the action of the novel works to repair those provisional schisms, enacting solidarity by creating a pan–West Indian community despite apparent fractures. Solidarity grows by necessity, but ultimately for the benefit of all.
The Housing Lark is about West Indian individuals—dreamers, hustlers, artists—coming together despite the factors of nation, race, and gender that threaten to divide them. Even while insisting on a variety of migrant experience, Selvon also shows how different people converge to create and sustain an art, culture, and politics that ensure the survival of all. Thus the recurrent capitalized phrase OUR PEOPLE, which embodies the expansive but concrete pan-Caribbean grouping that is formed through language. Whereas “in truth and in fact, loneliness does bust these fellars arse” (this page), Selvon’s novel both embodies and remedies that profound loneliness. The fellars may not return home, but they will get their house.
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The Housing Lark celebrates West Indian vernacular cultures in all their multiple manifestations, from language to food, music, religion, nicknames, history, and ultimately to vernacular forms of knowledge. To take the concrete example of food, the novel initially gestures toward bestowing value on “them dishes you does only read about in magazines, chicken a la this and that, T-bone and Z-bone steaks” (this page). Later, though, it stakes a claim against a bland, assimilationist diet, drawing a clear contrast between “mash potato and watery cabbage and some thin slice of meat what you could see through” (this page) and “all kind of big iron pot with pilau and pigfoot and dumpling, to mention a few delicacies” (this page). The loving detail paid to West Indian food points to the need for true nourishment in a foreign and often inhospitable environment.
Music is an equally strong source of pride and community. Formally, calypso gives the novel its ballad shape; calypso also provides the deus ex machina happy ending. The charming and optimistic Harry Banjo is a perfect metatextual figure for the artist (whether musical or literary) who brings people together and interprets migrant culture to a broader audience. Like Langston Hughes’s ode to internal migration, “Po’ Boy Blues,” Harry’s music merges a pre-existing musical form with reinvented migrant content. Channeling Harry’s diplomatically phrased publicity materials, the narrator tells us that “he would be cutting his first disc soon, with some numbers that he compose while awaiting Her Majesty’s pleasure in the Brixton jail” (this page). Migration and unjust incarceration have changed Harry’s music; the pre-existing genre of calypso is made new for a new place and a newly diversified audience. Art, in Selvon’s view, is always reinventing itself, for the good of all its consumers. Like The Housing Lark, Harry’s album is a faithfully West Indian artistic product that could only have existed in diaspora.
Vernacular religious practices make a brief appearance as well. In his ballad on the open-hearted Matilda, Selvon’s narrator explains that “Matilda come from a religious family. The religion ain’t have no name” (this page). This is a perfectly succinct description of a vernacular way of life: here, as in Selvon’s observations on food and music, vernacular is not only a linguistic mode but also a way of thinking and being. Along with food, music, and religion, nicknames too signify a vernacular outlook. The nicknames that abound in The Housing Lark constitute an insider’s shorthand that defines and delineates a community. Nearly every male character has a nickname; the narrator displays his careful negotiation of multiple codes and audiences by establishing their “official” names (Battersby, Fitzwilliams, and so on) and then quickly switching to the more intimate and personal nicknames.
Finally, in the same way that he deflates standard English language, Selvon’s narrator also punctures “official” English history. When the characters visit Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s sixteenth-century palace, the narrator observes, “You could imagine the old Henry standing up there by the window in the morning scratching his belly and looking out, after a night at the banqueting board and a tussle in bed with some fair English damsel. You could imagine the old bastard watching his chicks as they stroll about the gardens, studying which one to behead and which one to make a stroke with” (this p
age). This moment, among others, displays Selvon’s revisionist agenda: to tell the story of West Indian immigration to England from a West Indian point of view. We see competing versions of history, “official” and popular, dominant and subaltern. As Fitz narrates his version of English history to Teena and their children, they’re shushed by a disapproving guard: “‘Here here, what’s all this?’ a attendant come up. ‘You can’t be shouting like that. Move along now’” (this page). White supremacist authorities will always be present, telling the immigrants that they don’t belong and have no right to interpret the meaning of England. Yet The Housing Lark itself defies those authorities, moving along with its characters rather than pushing them away.
Despite its light tone, The Housing Lark conveys a complex and crucial debate about education and historiography: Whose history will be told, and how? Later in the same Hampton Court scene, unnamed characters ponder how history will be taught now that West Indian children have entered the English school system in large numbers. The following unattributed dialogue may be spontaneous and conversational, but it contains important and enduring questions about curriculum and national identity:
