Under the kiff-kiff laughter, behind the ballad and the episode, the what-happening, the summer-is-hearts, he could see a great aimlessness, a great restless, swaying movement that leaving you standing in the same spot.
…As if the boys laughing, but they only laughing because they fraid to cry, they only laughing because to think so much about everything would be a big calamity—like how he here now, the thoughts so heavy like he unable to move his body.”
"—
Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, pg. 125-6. Final pages.
Selvon’s book provides insights into the African diaspora’s London experience, which rhymes wonderfully with Claude McKay’s Banjo: A Story Without a Plot and its focus on vagabonds in Marseilles. The places and times are very different, but many features overlap: the formal play with creole English, the “take it easy” response to the metropole’s modern pressures, the collection of character portraits rather than linear narrative, etc. No need to move in a straight line when you can wander ‘aimlessly’, vagabonding through a few years. The price, however, is an existential crises, brought on by modernity’s questions, which undercut the responses. No longer aimless but restless, not swaying but held down by leaden thoughts.
