One of the bonuses attached to  living in England for long periods again is that I get to hang out with the Ramchand side of my family, in the form of the clan that emanates from my brother Michael and his wife Karena and has so far produced 4 daughters and 2 granddaughters. So it was  appropriate that my first `show’  since moving to take up my job at Oxford was a trek in to London to see a performance of The Lonely Londoners at Kilburn Theatre with the family in tow. Especially appropriate since The Lonely Londoners is a dramatization of a book of the same name by Sam Selvon, A Trinidadian writer, written during, and about, West Indian immigration to London in the Windrush era.  In fact, our whole family had read the book and knew it well, having also had the privilege of meeting  Selvon himself, a friend of my father’s (Kenneth Ramchand, the renowned Literary Critic whose PhD in West Indian literature in English from the University of Edinburgh was the original pioneering work in the field.)  For this reason, the Ramchand clan was buzzing with anticipation and expectations for the spectacle we had signed up for. The prognostications were good. And so were the reviews. 

The reason for turning our experience into a blog post is the connection to language, because the author’s central use of the vernacular in his work, and our own family’s native competence in Trinidad dialect speech is a main player in this reaction piece.  The  show was great on many measures: the individual performances, the staging which combined  the words of our beloved text, with music, drama and body movement; the way in which the narratives from the different notionally independent short stories in the book were combined to form an organic whole that tells an overarching story.  All of these qualities conspired to create an enjoyable afternoon for the Ramchands in London. 

We were disappointed however to realise early on that there were no actual Trinidadians within the cast who could have been tasked with performing Sam Selvon’s words in their original vernacular musicality.  One of the upshots of this missed opportunity is the transformation of what we as a family had experienced as a (at times elegiac) but mostly richly comedic novel into something more seriously dramatic. We recognised certain memorably comedic `incidents/moments’  or characters being played out on the stage, but the result simply wasn’t that funny.  We had chuckled and giggled through the book, but now we found ourselves sitting with earnest and engaged attention, without smiles and snorts. I asked around to see whether my co-watchers had had the same reaction: “The book was much funnier.” said my brother.   We decided after some discussion that the humour must have rested on the subtle phrasing and timing of the original Trinidadian dialogue and not on the events in and of themselves, and that threw me into musing about the effects of the oral vernacular and its relation to writing, and how so much can get lost when you take something off the written page without having really heard  its music in your mind’s ear (if there can be a mind’s eye, then there is surely also a mind’s ear). 

As linguists, we are well aware that when the speaker of a language reads the written words off a page, they also mentally rehearse the sounds and articulatory gestures that would correspond to producing that text orally, although they do it in a highly compressed fashion temporally, since reading a written text is very much faster than pronouncing it (Leinenger 2014 for an overview ). (As a particularly striking effect of this, linguists have noted that readers of a purely written text are actually  slowed down in relative terms by tongue-twisting words and phonology, even though they are not actually literally reading out loud. (McCutchen and Perfetti 1982 ). Returning to Selvon’s writing, the non Trinidadian reader would notice only minor deviations from standard English expression in the written text, and those that exist are mostly found in the explicit quoted dialogue between the characters in the stories. Nevertheless, the text as a whole swims in the rhythms of Trinidadian speech, for those who are attuned and primed to hear it as it was conceived, in their own mind’s ear.  This point was made to me early by my father about Selvon’s work (and West Indian writing in general), but this was the first time I had experienced the effects of it so strongly— in the absence that was created by a performance that had not been tuned in to those frequencies that only we could hear.  (The review linked to above does not mention, or notice, the lack of Trinidadian actors in the cast).

Humour is subtle, complex, and does not easily cross the translation barrier. The effects we were missing were based on the expectations of rhythm, and stress,  and beat, word choice and timing.  Selvon’s prose  allowed the flow of thought and emotion of the characters to be transparent to us, and this, combined with Selvon’s ability to draw characters who we recognized, whose motivations we could easily interpret, produced a much richer landscape of effects (including in this case humour, and in some instances also pathos) over and above the simple drama of the factual incidents in their unfolding. Luckily there is much drama and interest in these stories that survives the gutting of the particular oral language medium, and it would have been interesting to have a conversation with the many British non-Trinidadian who were in the theatre that afternoon, to gauge their response to the performance. 

I read The Lonely Londoners   as a teenager, and it was interesting to revisit the stories and their historical context now as an older person (female, hyper-educated, myself a piece of flotsam resulting from various successive waves of colonialism and diaspora). One of the things I missed the first time around, and which came out strongly in this production,  was the extent to which the Windrush men from the Caribbean largely failed to operate in solidarity with the West Indian women of their generation. The camaraderie is strong within the men— this band of brothers with hopes, and dreams, and agency, co-travelers on this path in an alien society that both needs them and rejects their humanity. They share a complex relationship to this society in which pride, ambition, curiosity and the forging of  an identity are all  driving motivations. But for them, the women from their own islands who might potentially understand them and support them best are not conceived of as Fellow Travellers in any sense. It was striking to me in watching this performance how these women were objects bound up  in the larger questions of `leaving or staying’,  `keeping, or giving up for something newer’, and are ultimately let down by not notionally being included as co-participators in the same struggle as the other males in the stories.   (Do we not have hopes, and dreams and agency too? And when you cut us, do we not bleed? )  This theme  must also be present in Selvon’s original work,  even while he simultaneously pours  his expressive genius  into the male friendships that occupy the bulk of the book.  It came out to me more forcefully seeing the performance this time around, and I would like to go back to the book to see how much of that perception comes from the changes in my own mind-eyes and mind-ears, how much came from the artistic direction in this particular production, and how much was sitting there in the work all along just waiting to be seen by the right reader. 

A couple of weeks later, I went on a walking tour in London whose theme was The Clash, and the musical influences on the band from the region of London they lived in, a part of the capital rich in history from the point of view of the Windrush era in particular.  Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill. I saw the pubs where the earliest punk gigs took place, and the building housing the original Mangrove restaurant that was the focus of the famous police harassment case,  and eventual Old Bailey trial  (topic of the Steve McQueen BBC docudrama, Mangrove in 2020).  As an addendum to my Lonely Londoners play experience, it was very appropriate. I was reminded about how deep these cultural connections run in the capital city of this country— how the reggae music of the West Indians seeped into the punk aesthetic of the London scene, and how the in the best case, creativity and the revolutionary spirit can make allies transcending race and upbringing.  From the carnival that flourished here, to the food and influences on London speech, the lonely Londoners of Selvon’s tales eventually become part of the warp and weft of London. So that when Joe Strummer sings the refrain “ London Calling “ in 1979, in the now iconic punk ode to London, he does so in a musical idiom intertwined with the rhythms of those original immigrants in the form of reggae and ska.  The London that `calls’  contains their voices as well.