ABSTRACT
There is a line in Sam Selvon’s well-known 1956 novel of migration, The Lonely Londoners, where the character-cum-narrator, Moses, muses on how ‘the sex life gone wild’ (Selvon 2004, 109). Given that this is a work critiqued for its triumphalist rendering of Caribbean masculinity and concomitant devaluation of black and white female experience, it is perhaps not difficult to imagine what it is that Moses might be referring to.1 The lyrical passages in question celebrate the loosening of social (and sexual) restriction ushered in by the arrival of summer, emphasising the smiling faces and changed demeanour of those navigating London’s park life. However, any assumption as to the erotic delights Moses is championing proves quickly to be unfounded. For the scene itself actually outlines in persistent detail, a range of voyeuristic and exploitative sexual behaviours on the part of white English individuals. As Moses explains, the smiling Londoners he meets: ‘want you to live up to the films and stories they hear about black people living primitive’ (108). Accordingly, he is invited to sleep with one woman in her husband’s presence, paid to be observed having sex with a prostitute, and shown off in a club by a wealthy white female; hardly the innocent eroticism of first reading. Revisiting Moses’s evocative phrase in its entirety then, he says:
It have a lot of people in London who cork their ears and wouldn’t listen but if they get the chance they do the same thing themselves everybody look like they frustrated in the big city the sex life gone wild. (109)
This reference to ‘cork their ears’ is, I suggest, the author’s warning to his readers that denying the existence of those racialised sexual currents animating these liaisons is not an option. Instead, it must be acknowledged that ‘everybody’ is implicated in the disavowed sexual undercurrents of empire, for these constitute the ‘wild’ element of the city’s sexual landscape, not the men in question.
