The 2003 publication of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation stimulated academic and popular discussions about masturbation which have increased our understanding of this under-discussed human behaviour. This paper revisits the arguments of the book in the light of these discussions and considers the implications of solitary sex – its practice, its reputation, its friends and enemies – for the history of human solitariness in general.

This seminar was co-sponsored by ‘Pathologies of Solitude Project’, Centre for 18th Century Studies, Sexual Cultures Research Group (SED).

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

The post Professor Thomas W. Laqueur: Revisiting Solitary Sex appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

‘With their parallel lives,’ writes John Berger, animals ‘offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species.’ This lecture argues that the gaze of the dog, grounded in evolution and appropriated by visual artists in the western tradition, offers a way of representing being seen – being regarded as worth regard – as a defence against loneliness both as a species and as social beings. Dogs are cultural doppelgängers of the human, creatures whose ways of seeing and very presence stand in a metonymic relationship to how we – artists and those who look at art – see in the world and want to be seen.

Professor Thomas Laqueur, based at Berkeley, University of California, is the author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003), and The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015), among many others.

The post Professor Thomas W. Laqueur Public Lecture: Canines in Solitude appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Michael Rowland (@MikeRowland84) is a researcher based at the University of Sussex working on 18th century literature, masculinity, affect & queer theory.

James Morland is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post Sociable Bodies, Solitary Minds appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is the author of books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory and psychoanalysis, including How to Read: Freud, The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark, and Not Working.  Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post Josh Cohen in Conversation with Akshi Singh appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Sophie Burrows (@burrowsdraws) is an award-winning illustrator.  James Morland is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post ‘Wordless Solitudes’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Hannah Zeavin: Thanks so much, Charlie. Sure — let me flip those questions. I wanted to write a book that brought together my interests in information science and the history of technology with my long-term investment in mental health care and its histories.

I had a sort of additive thought: what about the history of mediated therapy? I thought of mediated therapy as a wonderful aperture onto questions of the virtual and the real, and the role technology plays in our most intimate relationships. But as I began to write, the book took on a key argument: all therapy is indeed mediated, comprised not of a dyad (a patient(s) and a therapist) but a triad, comprised of patient, therapist, and media.

I argue that from the moment Freud stopped laying his hands on his patients as part of hypnosis, distance has always been involved in psychotherapies. The question has been whether these distances are overt and literalised, and what patients and clinicians alike have made of them. And that’s where I delimited to teletherapy: the use of telecommunications to span that distance.

I write extensively about pre-cursors to true teletherapy – Freud’s use of letter writing and the postal system for instance. I then proceed through chapters on ‘mass intimacy’ in the broadcast form, the ‘intimate stranger’ in the case of the 1950s suicide hotline, ‘auto-intimacy’ with AI agents, and e-therapy. Although the book was complete at the start of the pandemic, my editor graciously allowed me to add a Coda, ‘When Distance Is Everywhere’. Here I discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned teletherapy, therapy’s shadow form, into the dominant if not exclusive mode of mental healthcare in much of the world.

CW: The Distance Cure begins somewhat surprisingly with Freud. What was his relationship to distanced therapy and did he theorise it at all? 

HZ: So this was something that surprised me. Until pretty recently, theorisation of teletherapy was quite minor. In the 1980s there were a few articles by psychoanalysts on phone sessions, and recently, there has been clinical work on screen therapy (Skype, now Zoom). But very few people have taken up media theory and theories of the consulting room to think about teletherapy and relationships experienced in that practice.

It is well-known that Freud loved to explain and metaphorise psychoanalytic concepts via media: memory is like a mystic writing pad, the dream is like a censor, analytic listening is like a telephone call. In parallel, Freud was making active use of media to deliver (and to receive) analytic care at a distance. One of his best-known cases, the case of ‘Little Hans’, was conducted almost entirely by letter. My opening chapter shows how in his letters, Freud tries to diminish the intrusiveness of the distance that is imposed by the form.  I have a long theorisation of why that might be, drawing on Freud’s own fantasies about immediate modes of communication, like telepathy—which haunts the whole book. I argue that there is a suppression of mediation in the supposedly ‘pure’ in-person scenario, which is part and parcel with Freud (and others) attempts to keep charges of charlatanism at bay; curiously this convention has been long standing and widely adopted.

CW: You write that teletherapy is ‘often the emergency room of mental health care’. How can teletherapy respond to moments of individual and social crisis that other therapies cannot?

HZ: In my research I was surprised to see that, time and time again, teletherapy is innovated in, and attends, crisis. That means that for those who cannot access these media, telecare can produce new structural harms, even as it is commonly escorted by a democratising promise.

At the same time, the modes of interaction available in the history of teletherapy—and here I am specifically thinking about peer-based care in the 1950s on the crisis hotline – re-enfold many who might otherwise be unable (or not want) to access professional care.

So I think a lot about the power relations in the consulting room, outside the consulting room, infrastructures that codify and produce those dynamics, and the creative and generative ways activists have undone or upended them.

CW: The title of your book has a double meaning. It’s a history of therapy at a distance but you’re also continuously interrogating the therapeutic role of distance and mediated communication. How did you interpret distance as both a barrier and a goal of therapy?

HZ: Thanks so much for that Charlie—that’s exactly right. The book argues that we can actually recast the history of therapy by way of its shadow form, teletherapy, across the 20^th century. This makes a number of interventions as to questions of therapeutic labor, patient experience, as well as activist and community-based care.

At the same time, the book is in no way evangelising teletherapy. Instead, I wanted to bracket the assumption that distance is equivalent to absence; it isn’t.

Sometimes the therapies I study in this book are harmful; sometimes they’re radical scenes of care. Time after time I read case material where it was clear that a patient would only be reachable if some sort of distance could be used to overcome their isolation.   As just one example, in the emergence of cyber mental health clinics in the 1990s, patients could not bear to come in, in person (let alone those who couldn’t access normative therapeutic care for other reasons)—so they found licensed psychiatrists and psychologists who would truly meet them where they were: online. One of these patients finally came in for a session, at her therapist’s urging, as I detail in the book. After years of intimate digital contact, facing each other in the room left the patient unable to do the work; they moved back to digital treatment immediately.

CW: The Distance Cure proved to be incredibly timely as the pandemic forced therapists from across the world to explore the possibilities of therapy via screen. How did you find clinicians responded to this moment?

HZ: The timing was strange; the whole book was written and just through peer review as lock down happened. I address the pandemic in the Coda. Some clinicians really focused on Zoom fatigue; they just hated it. But many noted that they were shocked at the additional forms of intimacy—verging on telepathy—that distance therapy allowed. Some of this was really material. Pandemic conditions with Zoom meant that many were doing childcare, in their living rooms, while in session or else taking their phone sessions in bathrooms or cars. So therapists necessarily saw a lot more, beyond the traditional frame because Zoom of course enforces its own norms of looking; when video is in use the patient (and therapist) are in a perpetual close-up so the face is much more clearly visible. Let alone what else enters the frame. And many patients saw or heard this extra-therapeutic information as well. But let us not forget, not all therapy is done in private practice and much of it cannot be moved to Zoom completely. This posed problems for inpatient therapy and other congruent settings, too.

CW: The therapeutic encounter has traditionally provided a useful space for thinking about relationality more broadly. How does your study of the teletherapeutic encounter challenge our preconceptions of mediated relationships?

HZ: That was one of the aims of the book, certainly. I understand the therapeutic relationship to be an ‘as-if’ relationship. It is a relationship that is extraordinary because it is the site of recapitulating and (one hopes) working through what has been put into oneself via these earlier other relationships. Yet it is also ordinary, because this is the condition of all relationships, elaborated across time, etc. So again, I was interested in distance as pharmakon, both the cause for ‘illness’ and the ‘cure’. Indeed, medium specific forms of relating come about, which I call genres of distanced intimacy. I wanted to bracket this assumption that teletherapy must be hopelessly lesser for being technologised. In uncovering this history, it turns out that it certainly is not lesser, but configured quite differently. Teletherapy has been an important tool, in many contexts, over the last 120 years or so.

Hannah Zeavin (@HZeavin) is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book, The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy was published by MIT Press in August 2021. She is working on her second book, Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family (MIT Press, 2023).

The post The Distance Cure appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Here two leading historians, Thomas Dixon and Tom Laqueur, discuss emotional connections between humans and animals, especially dogs, and how these connections affect our experiences of solitude.

Thomas Dixon (@ProfThomasDixon) is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (2008) and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (2015).

Thomas Laqueur is Professor of History at University of California Berkeley. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003) and The Work of the Dead: a Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015).

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post A Creature for Whom It Matters That You’re There appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Much like the work of our own project, Sarah’s work contributes to our understanding of the complex inner experience of solitude and, in particular, the embodied physical experience of being alone. For those interested in thinking about this experience further, we would suggest the following texts, all of which show how, in the experience of solitude, mind and body, and self and other, are (to borrow Sarah’s words) ‘intrinsically and dynamically coupled’:

• The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation by Daniel Heller Roazen – an account of what has been variously called the inner touch, the master sense, or, in Brian Dillon’s review of the book, ‘the sensation of sensation’, this book offers a journey through the rich philosophical and literary tradition of thinking about this everyday, immediate but also elusive sense.
• The Hands of the Living God by Marion Milner – a book that allows us to think about the conditions required for such a sense of being a self to exist, and the ways in which this would shape the ability to experience solitude.
• ‘Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition?’ by Marie Christine Lazanik et al – a psychoanalyst working with infants likely to receive a diagnosis of autism, writes about the effects of ‘motherese’ or ‘parentese’ (the particular prosodic intonation of surprise and delight that parents or their substitutes use in speaking to infants) in shaping the infant’s ability to respond to an other.
• ‘Brain-body interactions underlying the association of loneliness with mental and physical health‘ by Lisa Quadt et al – a narrative review of current research on the manifold interactions between loneliness, affective symptomatology, neural and embodied processing relevant to physical health, mental health, and neurodiversity.

Sarah Garfinkel (@DrSFink) is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and a ‘Nature Index’ 2018 Rising Star. 

Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

You can listen to Sarah Garfinkel on our ‘Space of Solitude’ podcast here. 

The post ‘A Keen Vision and Feeling of All Ordinary Human Life’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

As if by accident, I find my head
Washed up window-side of his bed.

Is there a park left in South-East London, I wondered, where women have not stood talking about ‘Thanksgiving’? I was walking back from Peckham Rye, rain beading hair and wool scarf, glasses fogging up. Natasha, her baby and I got locked into Ladywell cemetery. We climbed out through a hole in a fence that a man pointed out with the bottle in his hand, and we jumped down a wall. Lucky we didn’t have a buggy. In Peckham Rye, still giggling, it was time to say goodbye. And Natasha, smiling baby strapped to her chest said: that poem you sent me, I’ve been thinking about it.

I’ve been thinking, she says, of that space in the poem:

I’ll leave not a mark
On his pillow, papers,
Knife, DVDs or wineglass.

That space of absence, of disappearing – is there something appealing about it? An absence from which something just might emerge, the pleasure of vanishing or — she bounces the baby — does it just feel dreadful, awful?

And then we say — ask — together: or both?

We can’t embrace so we stamp our feet on the ground in some sort of dance. And then as I’m walking home I think, already in Hilly Fields Marcella and I were talking of the poem. And Clare has spoken of it to Hetta and they live in south London too. And Carmen! Her hair so abundant and gold as we sat conversing on Telegraph Hill.

All the women I love, one, two metres apart, as we pass Rachel’s words between us.

This whole time, I’ve been holding,
squeezing, wringing, folding,
bending, nodding, thank you, God,
for giving me someone who makes me hold
my breath. I will be so light
upon his life he won’t realise
he’s kept me.

2.

The first section of My Darling from the Lions is called ‘Open’ through which five poems with the same title are spaced at almost even intervals. Each draws the attention of the reader to the layering of meaning and interpretation, even in the briefest of instances. Something can be more than one thing. Both, and. Like all of Rachel Long’s poems, they make a claim to the pleasure of ambiguity.

It is lonely, I think, to be just one thing. This is the loneliness of forms, checkboxes, where are you really from. Rachel’s book is an antidote. What it might be to be open.

3.

At my first academic post-seminar dinner in London, I sat listening in to a conversation between the famous academic who had just spoken to us, and the convenor of the seminar. It was a Thai restaurant with a set menu. The convenor asked her where she lived and she said, oh Holloway Road. And someone else said: oh that’s a really nice part of London, isn’t it.

And she said: it’s not that nice, there is a Poundland just down the street.

I didn’t know Holloway Road, but one of the bits of advice I was given when I moved to England was to find, and remember, the location of the Poundland.

I wasn’t embarrassed, I just thought — what is your world?

You’re kidding
If you think that a box of wings and chips
Won’t be eaten over your fresh weave,
Leftover finger-grease used to smooth it.

Hey! I know that place, I thought. I walked past it. I’ve let someone, distracted, burn me with wax because of the crepe roll of her belly and way she lets it press against me. Sometimes I wonder if London is some sort of city of mirages, the men in suits, the women at the seminars just can’t see the jackfruit, can’t see the fresh coconut, can’t see the okra by the bowl. Sometimes I want to grab people by the shoulders, they’ve been here years longer than me, and say: where, where have you been living?

Sometimes I imagine I will have a daughter in this city, and I will tell her: never trust a neighbourhood without yams.

When Rachel writes about hair, an entire city comes into view.

4.

Her writing is open to ambiguity, and it is open to dreams.

After that I had a sleep-dream
In which I grew a bright green face;
Granny-smith hued, high polished.

In the early twentieth century psychoanalysts, anthropologists, men with offices spent years wondering if people — people outside Europe (and America) — had dreams. They asked, found out. Yes, they dream too. But were these dreams just their myths? Easy to read against a code, ready-made for deciphering?

Sometimes when I read a book review, watch a writer being interviewed I wonder—these journalists, writers, people with words—are they still asking this same question? What is your book about? How is your book shaped by your experience of…?

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that every dream has a navel, or umbilicus, linking it to the unknown. A dream squats on the unacknowledged, and it rises like a mushroom from its mycelium.

Sometimes I imagine I will have a daughter and I will tell her: never trust a book without a mycelium.

Rachel Long (@rachelnalong) is a poet and leader of Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour. Her book My Darling From the Lions was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post ‘Alone Miracles’ appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Susheila Nasta: Sam Selvon was one of a group of major Caribbean writers who came to London during the 1950s or just before. Amongst them were people like George Lamming (with whom he travelled by chance on the boat where they fought over a typewriter as they both tried to finish their first novels), V.S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris, Andrew Salkey, Roy Heath. There were a whole group of them, but they didn’t actually come as a group that knew each other because they came from separate islands.

Sam Selvon was an East Indian Trinidadian who’d actually worked as a journalist in Trinidad before and during the war. He had started writing pieces in the Trinidad Guardian under various pseudonyms and had some of his poems and short stories read out on a major BBC program called Caribbean Voices. This is where many of these writers met for the first time, earning tiny bits of money for the broadcast which went back across the seas to the Caribbean.

The Lonely Londoners is based on the people Selvon met and the stories he heard living in London. It’s about being a newcomer to the city as well as being a black migrant. In fact there’s a passage at the end of The Lonely Londoners when the main character, Moses, has really begun to feel like he’s had enough of the repetition, of listening to the same sorts of stories from newcomers as they arrive at Waterloo. He’s heard it all before.

There’s a constant sense of movement in the stories the ‘boys’ tell about the city; it’s a new world they’re just discovering but they end in a sort of bleakness. I suppose any new arrival in a city may seek out and meet people in similar situations, in a hostel or a hotel where they try and bond through recounting stories of their encounters. Sam Selvon calls these stories ‘ballads’ and with all ballads the stories operate on a number of levels, creating a sense of community in  an alien and alienating world but also a deliberately inflated sense of a false confidence and bravado.

HH: I think the loneliness in Selvon’s writing feels quite unique. You’ve got this real sense of community and busyness, lots of voices crowding in on the reader, but then real flashes of isolation. In what ways are these lonely Londoners lonely or solitary?

SN: There’s so many layers to the loneliness and actually, it’s really important that it’s called The Lonely Londoners and not ‘The Black Londoners’ or ‘The Black Lonely Londoners’, because I think Sam is really pointing to a much broader sense of atomisation in a modern city just after the war, a city trying to pick itself up. He’s not only talking about black characters, although, of course, they are the dominant figures. But he is also talking about the Poles. He’s talking about women who have lost their husbands in the war. He’s talking about poverty and he’s talking about London streets and all of these rooms, as he says, kind of pushed up against one another, where people don’t even know what they’re doing next door.

So there’s a broad sense of a kind of modern exile which is very real for the migrant and especially in the hostile environment of postwar London, the black migrant. At the same time, his London is also much like T.S. Eliot’s city, it’s an ‘unreal city’.

So, to return to questions of loneliness, the characters in the novel are lonely first and foremost because they were colonial migrants. They had imagined the mother country was going to embrace them and welcome them. But in fact, what happened was they became alienated. They didn’t really know at first why they were alienated. There’s a very good scene in the novel where Galahad, who’s christened Sir Galahad when he arrives in London – before that he’s just an ordinary man from the Caribbean named Henry Oliver, he’s kind of reborn  – is going out for the first time. He strides about like a lord, as if he’s in Trinidad in a small place where it’s sunny. But standing outside the Tube station, he discovers that he’s absolutely terrified that the sun in the sky doesn’t look anything like any sun he’s ever seen before and he’s alone. He’s alone in this huge metropolis and he hasn’t got any money and he hasn’t really got anywhere to live.

And later, you have that whole issue of loneliness, again represented through Galahad, as the colonial going to Piccadilly to see Eros.

You know, he’s excited, he’s out in the big city, centre of the world, going to meet a girl, but then he also meets a child who stares at him aghast because he’s black. Later, when he gets home, the reality hits as he looks at the colour of his hand and says, ‘it’s you that’s causing all this botheration’. So it’s a kind of loneliness that’s both individual in terms of these black migrants who can’t find work, who are broke, who’d expected to come to the ‘real’ world when in fact, they’re in an unreal world. But there’s also this broader sense of them seeing their own blackness through the eyes of others, of facing racism and recognising that as a kind of ethical loneliness.

HH: Yes. I mean, I was struck by that passage as well – I think where he says his sun is like an orange.

SN: A force-ripe orange.

HH: It’s such a striking image. This uncanny sort of unreality. But also, as you suggested, perhaps being caught between two worlds?

SN: That’s right. It’s the island and the city. And of course, if you read the whole of Sam Selvon, he didn’t just write about London, he wrote about Trinidad too, he’s writing about the island and the city.

HH: Yes, absolutely. And you’ve got the island in the city, as you say, but also this sense of worlds within worlds in London. I’ve got a quote here from Selvon, who describes London at some point: ‘divide up into little worlds and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what’s happening in other ones’. So there’s this sense that London is quite divided. Is there more world-hopping going on than we might think? I felt, reading it, that there is a real sense of division, but also of crossing of these world barriers as well.

SN: Absolutely. In fact, one of the privileges his boys have (and ‘the boys’, is obviously deliberate, they’re kind of innocents abroad, they haven’t quite matured in the city) is that there are these lock-up worlds which many of the British are in, but one of the privileges the boys have is that they coast the lime, they go round the city, they travel at night, they work in the night.

Although they create little areas for themselves, which are kind of West Indian, Caribbean areas (and he mocks that city very carefully in the novel), they also traverse those borders. And there’s this very delicate shift in the way in which he portrays his boys, between this almost stereotypical cardboard cut-out element of these characters and their actual real lives. And it’s only towards the end of the book that we start to realize that Bart, who’s constantly searching for his girlfriend, Beatrice, is like a fantasy figure from a Dante-ist purgatorio.

And then there’s Moses, a prophet in the wilderness, whose voice by the end (as both narrator and participant)  begins to shift as he stands apart from the group and you start to get a new voice of a writer emerging, separate from the scene that’s being described. But this is not only a black story; the loneliness is very much part of a wider modernist vision. Moses is like a flaneur. He walks the city at night and like Selvon himself, he carries and transports the stories.

HH: Yes, and particularly at night, when the flaneur can see a slightly different world and perspective to usual. Some of the characters seem more successful than others at navigating the new world. And one, for example, is the elderly aunt Tanty, who manages to persuade a London grocery shop owner into opening a line of credit for her, which is something that had been common practice for her in the West Indies, but not so common in West London. You’ve described the novel in your introduction to the most recent Penguin Classics edition, as a colonization in reverse. I wondered if you might say a bit more about that idea.

SN: I suppose one needs to return to the issue of language and culture – and of course, it’s the language that makes the culture – Tanty does colonize in reverse by trying to establish customs that make the world familiar, that were part of her much smaller world in Trinidad or Jamaica. She does this through food, through banter, behaviour. But I think the ‘colonization in reverse’ idea is much broader than that. There’s a very famous Louise Bennett poem, which begins: ‘What an awful news, Miss Mattie / My heart gonna burst. / Jamaican people coming, / colonizing England in reverse’. That’s where I’ve taken the line from.

It’s a kind of ironic parody: look at all these people says Selvon, everyone’s worried (and we still have this now of course) all these immigrants coming in, overcrowding the place, but the joke is actually, they’re going to turn Britain into something else, which they have done, of course. So Selvon is exploring how the language can both make and colonize a city and what he does by creating these ‘ballads’, through creating this Caribbean literary vernacular, is to recreate the city through the eyes of the new people that are living in it. And, of course, that kind of reinvention and recreation or reimagining of the city is absolutely critical to their survival.

I suppose to go back to Tanty she wants to be able to buy what she needs in the grocery shops, it’s like what you can buy easily in Deptford or Brixton and elsewhere in the city now. Food is important and she was making sure she got the things she wanted to buy, what she wanted to eat.

HH:  I’m really glad you brought up language, because I’ve read that Selvon originally tried to write the novel in a standard English and then gave up and changed it to a sort of Creolised English that we get in the novel. I honestly can’t imagine it being written any other way. How important is that sort of stylistic decision in bringing out the experience of the lonely Londoners?

SN: It was absolutely critical because he closed the gap between the teller of the tale and the tale itself. Otherwise what you have is a standard English-speaking narrator and so-called ‘dialect-speaking’ characters, which implicitly creates a distance. When I used to teach The Lonely Londoners or talk about it in many, many different contexts, so many people were surprised to learn that Sam Selvon spoke standard English. It was almost always, doesn’t he speak like this? And you think, well, no, this is a strategy he used to write the characters in this book. He started writing it in the States on a residency when he was distanced from Britain – and that’s where he made the decision to write in this creolised version of the Trinidadian vernacular, which would be readable by anybody. He always said it was like being transported or sitting in a bus; the language took over and the writing took off once he’d made that decision.

I think the modified version of Trinidadian English he creates really draws a lot on the tradition of calypso: a form of oral political satire or what was called a kind of piquant humour, which works on deflation, inflation and humour. Most calypsos are ballads! In fact, the pathos of the book is heightened by this tension in the language: between inflation and deflation. These black migrants are invited to the city, it’s a city supposedly where the streets are paved with gold but they soon hit the realities of an almost nightmarish, purgatorial existence where they’re forced to live in basement rooms, surviving the damp, the darkness, the greyness and where no one knows what X or Y or Z is doing.

HH: Yes, we’ve talked quite a lot about loneliness and I’ve brought up some of the moments of the novel that stuck with me or were more poignant, but it is really funny as well. I mean, dark humour for sure. A particularly bleak moment is the bit where Cap is desperate for something to eat and he sees some seagulls sitting on the ledge and decides he’s going to try and catch one. It’s a really funny scene but it’s a really tragic scene as well. You’ve called it tragicomedy in your introduction [to the 2006 Penguin edition] and I think it’s perfect. I think that humour and the language together feel like the best way to immerse a reader in my experience.

SN: And he’s taking the mickey out of the old lady in her fur coat in Kensington Gardens with Flossie, her dog, while they’re all similarly trying to catch pigeons. The pathos of that situation where they’re desperate to eat and make a good Trinidadian curry, but she thinks they’re behaving like terrible black men. I think the humour, the empathy and the breadth of vision is why the book has remained in print ever since it was published.

It speaks to all sorts of different audiences. And it says very complicated things in quite a direct way, which doesn’t simplify them.

HH: Certainly. It might have been written over 60 years ago, but this novel feels very relevant to today, doesn’t it?

SN: It certainly does and in a number of ways. Not least through the stories of today’s migrants and refugees attempting to make a life in Britain. And the question of forgotten histories too, how black and Asian migrants in the post-war period were so formative in the making of Britain. People are only just beginning to recognise how black writers have long challenged issues of social and political justice and Selvon’s novel was prescient.

At one moment in The Lonely Londoners, he flags how the ‘sweat and labour’ of his migrants (echoing the longer history and atrocities of the slave trade) had built the city. This moment from the book was used in the 2018 Windrush exhibition, held at the British Library, a couple of years ago. Ironically, it celebrated 70 years, at the very same moment as the injustices of the ongoing ‘Windrush Scandal’ came to light. And right now of course there is the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the disproportionate suffering of the BAME community with COVID.

It seems incredible that we are still party to a similar discourse: whether around migration, race and Brexit. Conversations that Sam was already so conscious of when he first attempted to subvert that vision of Britain in The Lonely Londoners.

Susheila Nasta (@susheila_nasta) is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London and the Founding Editor of Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing. She is a friend of Sam Selvon, a critic of his work, and continues to act as literary executor of his estate.

Hetta Howes (@HettaHowes) is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at City University of London.

This discussion took place as part of our ‘Spaces of Solitude’ podcast series, which you can listen to here. 

The post The Loneliness of the Lonely Londoners appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.