Writing Across Worlds

Contemporary Writers Talk

Susheila Nasta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134282203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Writing Across Worlds brings together a selection of interviews with major international writers previously featured in the pages of the magazine. Conducted by a wide constituency of distinguished critics, writers and journalists, the interviews offer a unique insight into the views and work of a remarkable array of acclaimed authors. They also chart a slow but certain cultural shift: those once seen as 'other' have not only won many of the establishment's most revered literary prizes but have also become central figures in contemporary literature, writing across and into all our real and imagined worlds.

With an introductory comment by Susheila Nasta, editor of Wasafiri, this collection is essential reading for all those interested in contemporary literature. Authors interviewed include: Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Monica Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, David Dabydeen, Bernadine Evaristo, Maggie Gee, Lorna Goodison, Nadine Gordimer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wilson Harris, Keri Hulme, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, George Lamming, Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Sam Selvon, Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith, Wole Soyinka, Moyez Vassanji, Marina Warner.

1
Sam Selvon with Susheila Nasta

Sam Selvon’s fiction, published between 1950 and the mid-1980s when he left Britain to live in Canada, was a milestone in the history and development of Caribbean and black British literature. Frequently described as the father of ‘black writing’ in Britain, a ‘natural philosopher’ and ‘alchemist of language’, Selvon was one of a group of now-distinguished writers who arrived in Britain from the Caribbean during the 1950s. Whilst in Britain, Selvon wrote ten novels set both in Trinidad and London, and was a frequent contributor to BBC Radio, author of several radio plays as well as co-author of the screenplay for Pressure, directed by Horace Ove in 1975.

Selvon’s London works, which include the collection of short stories Ways of Sunlight (1957), The Housing Lark (1965) and the ‘Moses’ novels The Lonely Londoners (1956), Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983), span a crucial period in the literary and cultural history of black Britain. His experimentations with language and form in his London works were to be a major influence on a later generation of writers as he lifted his immigrant characters out of the stereotypical strait- jackets imposed on them and created an alternative way of seeing and reading that world. Selvon’s city is a mongrel city, a mishmash of languages, people and identities jangling with each other and vying for a place. It is a world which anticipated by many years the literary visions of a multicultural and postcolonial London created in works such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black or Monica Ali’s Brick Lane.

The interview was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 following the publication of Moses Migrating.

Susheila Nasta The central figure in this group of novels, which spans about thirty years, is called Moses and we first meet him inThe Lonely Londoners. How did you come to create Moses?

Sam Selvon Well, I think I wanted to have a voice belonging to the old generation, the first immigrants who came to this country [in the 1950s] and Moses is representative I think. He came as an immigrant, he went through all the experiences that he relates, he typifies to my mind all that happened among that older generation and he also spoke in the voice, in the idiom of the people. I think that in spite of all his presumptions to be English, that he still remains basically a man from the Caribbean, and that this comes out in the way he relates all the experiences that happen to him and through using this identical voice which is so much a part of the West Indian immigrant.

But he also seems, despite the fact that he’s part of this group, almost as his name suggests, like a prophet; he’s looking forward, into the future, he’s looking in from the outside at the community he’s describing and in Moses Ascendinghe’s trying to be a writer. Do you identify with Moses at all yourself as a writer?

Well, I have had very many similar experiences as Moses describes. I have been around with the boys. I have ‘limed’ with them, I have had experiences that are very comparable, I have heard stories from them, and the creation of this character is really and truly based on a true-life man from Trinidad. And as I say, it seemed to me that the only way to give expression to what happened to the original immigrant was by using this idiom, this language form that he brought with him. There was no other way. I tried to write The Lonely Londoners in Standard English and it just would not work, and when I got into the Trinidad way of speaking the whole thing seemed to flow so easily and everything seemed to come to life. This idiom is so much a part of the people, so much a part of the characteristics of the people, that you cannot separate a language from the experiences.

In The Lonely Londoners we have all these people in Moses’ room and they all keep talking to him. I think you say at one point that they are like voices in the wilderness crying out to him for guidance. Who are all these people, who are all these characters that Moses knows and why are they together?

Well, these are all people from the various West Indian islands. You see when this immigration happened, for the first time the Trinidadian got to know the Jamaican or the Barbadian, because in the islands themselves the communications were so bad that they never really got in touch with one another, they never got to know what happened in other islands. And it was only when they all came to London that this turned out to be a kind of meeting place where the Jamaican met the Trinidadian and the Barbadian and they got to know one another, they got to identify in a way as a people coming from a certain part of the world. Not so much as islanders, no, but as black immigrants living in the city of London. And so they got together, and it’s a very strange thing that they had to move out of their own part of the world, and it was only when they came to London that this kind of identity happened to them.

What effect did this have on the West Indies?

Well, in a way this kind of unity of the islanders that happened in London reflected back to the Caribbean to some extent I think. And even people down there in that part of the world began to think of, at least of the immigrants who had travelled all this way into London, that they had all come from one part of the world. I think in this way it helped to make all the islanders feel as if they all belonged to one region of the world.

There’s even a Nigerian character, isn’t there, in The Lonely Londoners who gets drawn into this general sort of West Indian world that you’ve created?

Yes, yes, all the blacks living in London were thrown together. For the first time West Indians were in contact with people from Africa who were black like themselves, and it was a strange kind of experience because they were all away from their homeland and this thing was happening to them way up in London so far away from their own homes. But it helped in a way to form a kind of feeling of community and this is why they always tended to get together and talk about their troubles and relate incidents that happened to them.

So were they brought together in a sense by their own exile, their own isolation?

I think this is what basically caused the whole thing, yes.

Towards the end of The Lonely Londonerswe have a very powerful image of Moses sitting in his basement room and all the voices of the ‘boys’ ringing out and he is listening to their stories about this and that, the ‘ballad of the episode’. They have these get- togethers every Sunday morning but nothing really seems to be happening; the characters keep saying, ‘What happening, what happening?’ but there’s no direction, and Moses himself seems to see this gap and to reflect on it. So what happens to Moses in his basement?

Well, eventually Moses does manage to save up enough money so that he buys a house. It is a dilapidated house, it’s one of those houses that is almost collapsing, which is really the only kind of property that black immigrants were allowed to buy. And Moses manages to get one of these and he’s feeling pretty chirpy with himself now because he’s no longer a tenant, he’s a landlord as he states himself twenty years later in Moses Ascending: ‘After all these years paying rent, I had the ambition to own my own property in London, no matter how ruinous or dilapidated it was. If you are a tenant, you catch your arse forever, but if you are a landlord, it is a horse of a different colour.’

But Moses eventually ends up almost like a tenant in his own house. I mean he has these ‘Pakis’ who come to stay and the Black Power Party taking over the basement and then Bob and Jeannie take over his own flat, ‘the penthouse’, and he has to move out of it. So his house in the end seems to be taken over by the blacks, by the new generation of immigrants, not just West Indians but Pakistanis and everybody else.

Well, in the third novel of the trilogy, Moses Migrating, he finally makes up his mind that he’s going to return to Trinidad and he gets back there where he stays in a hotel. He has to stay in a hotel room. And he is there in Trinidad, he looks around, he’s casing the joint, he isn’t quite sure whether he’s going to stay in Trinidad or not, he still has the feeling that he belongs to Britain. In fact what he does is he sets himself up as a goodwill ambassador, who is going down to the islands to tell people that things are not really as bad in Britain as they have been reading about. All these stories about how the economy is falling right down and there are millions of jobless people and Britain is falling on the rocks. He is setting himself up as a kind of champion for Britain and he goes down there determined to try and tell people that Britain still rules the waves as it were.

So does Moses feel like a stranger in his own country, a West Indian Londoner in Trinidad? After all, he has been away from the island for nearly thirty years.

This is exactly how he feels, and these are some of the incidents that happen to him while he is down there in the island.

So he moves from a basement in The Lonely Londonersto a metaphorical attic in Moses Ascending and then back down to the basement when Bob and Jeannie take it over; then back to Trinidad inMoses Migratingto the ‘upside-down’ world of his hotel room in the Trinidad Hilton. What does he do at the end of Moses Migrating?

Well, he looks around at the scene in Trinidad. He thinks, ‘Well I don’t know, I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do here, you know, and I’m wondering what’s going to happen to me now I’ve turned my back on Britain completely and what will happen if I try to get back in’, and in fact he does take a plane and he lands up at Heathrow at the end of the book. He stands there and he faces the customs officer and the customs officer takes his papers and has a look at them and tells him ‘Just wait a minute here’ and that’s how the novel ends.

So we’re left there with Moses waiting, we don’t really know where he’s going.

That’s exactly so. He gets back to the gates of Britain and he knocks on the door and I end the book right there.

Most of your London novels seem to be concerned either in fantasy or reality with this movement from Trinidad to London and now we have a Moses who is migrating back to Trinidad. What about you yourself? I mean you came to London in the 1950s and you stayed here until 1978 and you’re now living in Canada. How did you find this experience yourself?

Well, I spent so many years in Britain taking in English culture and European traditions, that I felt I wanted to get back to the Western hemisphere really. It didn’t matter so much whether I got back to the Caribbean or the United States or Canada or Latin America for that matter. It’s just that I wanted to get back to that part of the world. I had personally spent almost half my lifetime in Britain and I wanted to get back and see what was happening on the other side of the world. And this is really why I moved on. And in fact what happened during the years later on was that most of the writers who lived in Britain had already left. I guess I must have been one of the last ones to leave. All the other writers like Lamming and Salkey and others, they had already left Britain, I was about the last one to leave.

And how do you find your experience in Canada?

Well, I haven’t regretted it. I am seeing Western culture really for the first time, which I had left as a much, much younger man. And now I think that my thoughts are working along different lines and that I am in touch there with things that are happening in the Caribbean. In a strange way I happen to be geographically living much further away from Trinidad than I did in London, but there is a great deal of Caribbean atmosphere in the United States and in Canada, which I find stimulating and which I want to get working into parts of a new book.

Why is there this Caribbean atmosphere in Canada? Were there a large number of people who emigrated to Canada at the same time as they came to Britain?

I think so, I think immigration has been happening to Canada for a number of years. People haven’t been talking very much about it. But the fact is that the Caribbean is in that part of the world and many people have been going to the States and many more to places like Canada. So that there is a feeling there that is a new world feeling, whereas living in Britain was an old world feeling. So this is really what I went over there to try and get back into. And living in Canada, which is a developing country, I feel almost part of going along with the development, whereas in England I felt that there was already so much tradition established here, that I was imposing on it, whereas in Canada I feel I am actually helping to build it.

Sam Selvon died in 1994 on a trip ‘home’ to Trinidad.

2
Wole Soyinka with Mary David

Since his first emphatic emergence on the literary scene in Nigeria in 1960 - the year of the nation’s independence - Wole Soyinka has successfully combined the roles of dramatist, actor, director, novelist, poet, memorialist, critic and agent provocateur. His policy of deliberate non-alignment during the Civil War of 1966–71 landed him in prison for several months in Kaduna and Lagos, an experience that he described in his memoir The Man Died (1972), and he has since maintained an unremitting resistance to the corruption and oppression of a number of regimes. Other phases of his lively and alert existence have been covered in successive volumes of near-autobiography: in Aké: The Years of Childhood (1981), in the part- fictional Isara: A Voyage Around Essay (1990), and in Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (1994). Early in his career Soyinka published two novels: The Interpreters (1965) was a fictional account of his generation, and Season of Anomy (1973) an allegory of civil conflict. But it is as a playwright that he is mostly known to the world at large. Rejected by an official committee, A Dance of the Forests (1960) was an alternative to the formal Nigerian independence celebrations, and he has since produced and published over fifteen plays, notably The Road (1965), Kongi’s Harvest (1965), Madmen and Specialists (1971), A Play of Giants (1984) and A Scourge of Hyacinths (1992). Soyinka was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, the year following this interview, which was recorded when Dr Mary David was teaching at Ibadan and Soyinka was about to quit his job at the University of ile-Ife to return to full-time writing.

Mary David Of the different forms of creative writing that you have done, are you more at ease in any one form than in others? Do you have a partiality for any one medium?

Wole Soyinka It is a fair question, one which I find difficult to answer with any precision. I think that different experiences and different objective responses as well as emotional responses call automatically for different mediums. There are experiences which literally go straight into the terrain of poetry. I never sit down and say, ‘Which medium do I want to write, this or the other?’ Some go straight into the theatre. The only time there is ever any kind of clash is in the case of plays. I’ll give you an example. When I wrote The Road for instance, I saw The Road, I remember, as a film. But I wrote the play since I had no means of doing a film at that time. It is a film I’ll do someday.

You once referred to The Strong Breed[1963] as your favourite one- act play?

You’ll find that I never said a particular play is my favourite. I would say that i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Sam Selvon with Susheila Nasta
• 2: Wole Soyinka with Mary David
• 3: Wilson Harris with Fred D’ Aguiar
• 4: Lorna Goodison with Denise deCaires Narain
• 5: Chinua Achebe with Chris Searle
• 6: Moyez Vassanji with Susheila Nasta
• 7: Jamaica Kincaid with Gerhard Dilger
• 8: Joan Riley with Aamer Hussein
• 9: V. S. Naipaul with Alastair Niven
• 10: Caryl Phillips with Maya Jaggi
• 11: Salman Rushdie with Alastair Niven
• 12: Nayantara Sahgal with Minoli Salgado
• 13: Vikram Seth with Sudeep Sen
• 14: Kazuo Ishiguro with Maya Jaggi
• 15: Maxine Hong Kingston with Maggie Ann Bowers
• 16: George Lamming with Caryl Phillips
• 17: Rohinton Mistry with Robert Mclay
• 18: Keri Hulme with Rima Alicia Bartlett
• 19: Amit Chaudhuri with Fernando Galvàn
• 20: David Dabydeen with Mark Stein
• 21: Jackie Kay with Richard Dyer
• 22: Michael Ondaatje with Maya Jaggi
• 23: Zadie Smith with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
• 24: Bernardine Evaristo with Alastair Niven
• 25: Ama Ata Aidoo with Nana Wilson-Tagoe
• 26: Maggie Gee with Maya Jaggi
• 27: Nadine Gordimer with Hermione Lee
• 28: Ngugi wa Thiong’o with Harish Trivedi
• 29: Monica Ali with Diran Adebayo
• 30: Abdulrazak Gurnah with Susheila Nasta
• 31: Marina Warner with Robert Fraser
• Among the Contributors