Ways of Sunlight

Sam Selvon

Penguin (2024)

Review by Franklin Nelson

‘Forty miles south of Port of Spain, the town of San Fernando is built picturesquely around a hill, so that the hill itself rises like a giant monument from the centre of the town, and can be seen even from a distance of sixty miles on a clear day… whether you approach the town from the north or south or east… you climb uphill steeply and then plunge, as it were, into the heart of the town, flashing by canefields that falsely look level with the eye.’

For most of these two sentences, which open Sam Selvon’s short story ‘The Mango Tree’, the reader feels in safe hands. The prose, winding like the uphill journey it describes, seems almost ethnographic, in part because it is unadorned and transparent. Until the final clause, where it becomes clear that appearances can deceive.

This interplay between what is and what is not, what we see of people and places and what they allow us to see – and how that changes when they are viewed from a different angle – captures the essence of this collection of Selvon’s short stories, Ways of Sunlight. Indeed, that title hints at the different scattered, sunlit routes taken by some of the stories, and where they lead.

First published in 1957, the book comprises nineteen stories grouped in two parts: first ‘Trinidad’ and then ‘London’. Selvon’s fifth work of fiction, the collection appeared a year after his landmark novel The Lonely Londoners, which dramatised the experiences of mainly Caribbean migrants new to the so-called ‘Mother Country’ in a newly invented literary form of creolised English. The humorous, bittersweet stories in Ways of Sunlight reprise that vernacular experimentation and take in themes of love, family, the power of myth, and – even if only implicitly at points – the afterlives of empire. 

In ‘Johnson and the Cascadura’, an unwell Englishman is lured back to Trinidad by a spurned lover because she cooked him curry ‘cascasdoo’; those who eat it are fated to ‘end their days in the island no matter where they wander’. In ‘Wartime Activities’, a young man rejects the marriage that his parents are arranging for him and heads for the city in search of sex and ‘Yankee money’. These two stories, together with others in the first section, evince a clash between tradition and modernity that is not resolved by abandoning or embracing one or the other. The author’s message seems to be: ‘Both are alluring but also flawed, so look out’.  

Across the Atlantic, in the ‘London’ section, Selvon picks up where he left off with The Lonely Londoners, portraying the hopes and hardships of Caribbeans as they try to integrate and to improve their lot. One memorable story is ‘Eraser’s Dilemma’, in which a bus driver from the island of St Vincent notices that a regular elderly passenger has left behind a parcel after alighting one day. Keen to return this piece of ‘live coal’ lest he be accused of theft and lose his job, Eraser sets about tracking down this nameless white woman. After several days he finds her, and learns that the package was meant for him. ‘Inside, it had a happy nylon shirt, green, with red stripes’, the narrator observes, in a nod to the kindness of strangers. 

Selvon, himself a son of San Fernando, Trinidad, is on terra firma in both Britain and the Caribbean. Yet the London stories exude a confidence that is not so easily detectable in his Trinidad tales, in terms not just of plot but also form. Take the collection’s final story and, for me,  its highlight, ‘My Girl and the City’. At points it feels more like a modernist prose poem in the way it plays with tense and stream of consciousness. In the opening paragraph, the narrator recounts: ‘Hurtling in the underground from station to station, mind the doors, missed it!, there is no substitute for wool: waiting for a bus in Piccadilly Circus: walking across the Waterloo Bridge: watching the bed of the Thames when the tide is out – choose one, choose a time, a place, any time or any place, and take off, as if this were uninterrupted conversation, as if you and I were earnest friends and there is no need for preliminary remark’. 

The unsettled tone gives way to pangs of existential doubt – ‘what is the meaning of all these things that happen to people, the movement from one place to another… lighting a cigarette… working the crossword puzzle in the Evening Standard?’ – and finally to sombre reflection. Recalling the title of Selvon’s own novel, the narrator observes: ‘You could be lonely as hell in the city, then one day you look around you and you realise everybody else is lonely too, withdrawn, locked, rushing home out of the chaos: blank faces, unseeing eyes.’ The shift from doubt to dolefulness speaks to London’s capacity, in literature of the immigrant experience, by turns to attract and alienate. Nevertheless, the capital is ultimately the place for this narrator and his lover, as it was for the Trinidadian calypso singer Lord Kitchener. 

The stories collected in Ways of Sunlight present the reader with a range of people trying to negotiate different locales and hierarchies. If the tales have something in common, it is in their ending: most leave us with a question whose answer we shall never know. Will Johnson recover his health now he is back in Trinidad? Will the gift of a shirt open the door to a friendship between Eraser and his passenger? Abrupt though they may seem, one senses that this series of premature endings is gesturing – to return to the title of Ways of Sunlight – to something else: chinks of hope, and the possibility of new beginnings.  

https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/31720/sam-selvon

Franklin Nelson

Franklin Nelson works for the Financial Times, commissioning and writing on UK politics, the economy and society as well as books and the arts.