ABSTRACT
Whereas Chapter 1 sought to expose the way in which anxieties about national cohesiveness played out on and through the bodies of female characters in texts set within the Caribbean, here the focus moves to narratives of migration. Such novels have been critiqued for their depiction of relations between black men and white women and a concomitant erasure of black female experience. Samuel Selvon’s 1956 work, The Lonely Londoners proves emblematic of such trends, with its repeated inscription of white women as ‘things’ or ‘pieces’ and its now notorious assertion that, in the mother country, no self-respecting black male would ‘hit a spade when it have so much other talent on parade’ (Selvon 2004, 207). Undeniably, these and other, similar constructions weaken much of the period’s writing, the deep sympathies of which lie with male experience. Now, however, I turn the lens around. Rather than looking at the problems of how women are portrayed, this chapter focuses primarily on experiences of and assumptions about black masculinity, highlighting the pain undergirding triumphalist portrayals of black male sexuality.
