ABSTRACT
As was the case with Chapter 2, the works discussed here – Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), Austin Clarke’s The Meeting Point (1967) and Andrew Salkey’s The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) and Come Home, Malcolm Heartland (1976) – display a persistent and deeply felt concern with white fetishisation of the black male body. Whereas previously though, I emphasised the extent to which male characters were forcibly conscripted into notions of hypersexual black masculinity at the expense of both their sanity and selfhood, now I focus on those demonstrating a far more willing embrace of the stereotype. Accordingly, these novels, by three lifelong friends, show greater ambivalence in their execution. Much as the difficulties of migration are made clear, they evidence the extent to which their menfolk revel in the illicit thrill engendered by relations with white women. As a result, they have tended to be viewed as celebrating triumphalist modes of black masculinity.1 While this holds some truth, the chapter offers an alternative framing: that these texts constitute a seam of playful critique within post-war Anglophone Caribbean fiction which has not yet been fully appreciated. It has been obscured precisely because of the double-edged, or ambiguous nature of their engagement with the sexual legacies of empire, which is akin to that demonstrated by Dany Laferrière in the later work, How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (1985). These novels are therefore indicative of what Mercer describes as the breadth of ‘contradictory strategies’ marshalled in analysing the problem of finding ‘lines of flight out of the dilemma of how one can posit a full and sufficient black self in a culture where blackness serves as the sign of absence, negativity and lack’ (Mercer 1999, 202). Their knowing embrace of stereotypical behaviours also complicates what Forbes describes as the sense of ‘social responsibility made so much of by the nationalist writers’ (Forbes 2005, 95); if anything, questions of responsibility are turned outwards here, to society at large.
