This semester we're getting into the real words behind fictional personas. Read along with me in my multi-cultural writing module, telling stories of truth.
Across the coming weeks of second semester I will be delving into a range of fiction and facts. This is what I’ve read so far, without spoilers!
The Lonely Londoners, Sam Selvon, 1956
“It have people living in London who don’t know what happening in the room next to them, far more the street, or how other people living. London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to”
To start the semester, we had a classic by Samuel Dickson Selvon, a Trinidad born novelist, who moved to England in the 1950’s.
Through a combination of referential Trinidad Creole English, social stereotypes and a stream of consciousnes, Selvon depicts life in London from the perspectives of hybrid identities.
Along with others, characters Galahad and Moses are the voice of few immigrants in a time of transition - they face the ‘unrealness’ and deception of London. A city where immigrants hoped for more, but received less than expected.
This book amplifies the collective experience of loneliness and ‘actualities’ of idealised expectations of immigrants in London.
For the Apple Podcast users, here is an enriching podcast by Henry Eliot featuring Susheila Nasta, as they venture through the literary locations of the novel. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/on-the-road-with-penguin-classics/id1549179379?i=1000510587336
In The Ditch, Buchi Emecheta, 1972 & Second Class Citizen, Buchi Emecheta, 1974
“Everything in this book really happened; it happened to me.”
“Adah’s eyes are my eyes, her thoughts are my thoughts - but they are the thoughts of some time ago and the thoughts of a younger woman living as Adah was”
Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta enlightens us on the struggles of ‘double colonisation’
In her novel In The Ditch, Emecheta observes and reports on her experience of housing problems, race relations and the social services as a single Nigerian woman in England.
Emecheta’s third person narrative speaks on behalf of other women, as it’s a broad experience many others have also been through. She reinforces a sense of truth.
Emecheta also depicts life with a dominant husband as a black woman in a white community in Second Class Citizen. She exclaims how being black and in such a position was and how she was ‘conditioned to expect inferior things’
A heart warming Bildungsroman, opening your eyes to the struggles of black women.
Sour Sweet, Timothy Mo
Last on the list, before reading week, is Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo, a Cantonese-Chinese and British author.
With a satirical title, Mo guides us through sour starts and sweet comings of life in the UK through the family life of a Chinese immigrant.
The perspective in this book allows readers to consider the adjustments immigrants have to make in order to succeed in a different country: such as altering iconic, but not traditional Chinese dishes for them to be palatable for the British. Timothy Mo takes into account the postcolonial theory of ‘orientalism’ - the subordination of the East and superiority of the West.
Mo includes elements of comedy, as well as realism, making this like a book I’ve never read before.
Stay tuned for my favourites after reading week!
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