I. Seventy Years On: The Legacy of Windrush

1In the cultural imaginary, the docking of the Empire Windrush on June 22, 1948, at Tilbury, which brought the first labourers from Jamaica and Trinidad to Essex, has become almost synonymous with the beginning of mass migratory movements to Great Britain and with the Caribbean diaspora especially.2 2018 marked the seventieth anniversary of this watershed moment, yet 2018 also witnessed a nationwide scandal in that respect: while the generation of immigrants who arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1971 from the West Indies, coming from the British colonies, entered the UK legally as Commonwealth citizens, their citizenship has recently become uncertain, culminating in the so-called “Windrush scandal” in April 2018, a scandal that has come to stand emblematically for Britain’s ever-complicated relationship with its former colonies and the “hostile environment” the conservative government under Theresa May has created for immigrants in Great Britain.3

2This latest attempt on part of the conservative party to deny formerly granted citizenship, reminiscent of earlier efforts to reinstall borders between the “native” population and, as Nasta has it, the “‘dark strangers’ crossing the nation’s threshold” (2016, 25), joins the ranks of longstanding quarrels over citizenship and the systemic discrimination the Windrush generation and their descendants faced in Britain.4 Both the “native Englishman[’s]” (Lamming 1998, 4) and the immigrant’s mutual feeling of alienation is best illustrated in George Lamming’s description of the situation in the 1950s:

Can you imagine waking up one morning and discovering a stranger asleep on the sofa of your living room? You wake this person up and ask them ‘What are you doing here?’ and the person replies ‘I belong here.’ This was exactly the extraordinary predicament quite ordinary English people found themselves in when they awoke one morning and saw these people metaphorically on the sofas of their living rooms and the people—meaning the authorities—who had brought these strangers into the ‘native's living room’ had not asked permission or invited consultation about this invitation. On the one hand, the sleeper on the sofa was absolutely sure through imperial tutelage that he was at home; on the other, the native Englishman was completely mystified by the presence of this unknown interloper. (4)

3Even though many immigrants were confronted with hostility and felt alienated in their new surroundings, London had, however, also become a place for re-invention: in the wake of a pre-independence rise of nationalism and the proliferation of national literatures from the various Caribbean islands, national borders could be transcended here, resulting in the hope that writers would be able “to imagine a new, larger space into which they could return, a space that would be imaginatively and materially large enough to allow them to finally produce a genuine national literature at home rather than from abroad” (Szeman 2001, 179). Here, the migrant (and the migrant author especially) occupies a crucial position—Rushdie in his discussion of artist Sebastião Salgado’s photography fittingly calls him a “man without frontiers, [...] the archetypal figure of our age” (2002, 356) who visualises the “hierarchy of mobilities” that—still—characterises our globalised world.5

4Surmounting these borders between the British and the immigrants but also those within the immigrant community itself has become a prominent subject in literature and is particularly relevant in the works of authors of the Windrush generation, who have yielded a vast field of critically acclaimed literature and who show a preoccupation not only with erasing or permeating the boundaries imposed upon them by categories of race or ethnicity, but, as this paper will illustrate, also those of the English literary canon, of the cultural sector itself.6

5In the following, the negotiation of these restrictions in post-war West Indian literature will be analysed in two exemplary works of authors of this generation: The Emigrants (1994 [1954]) by George Lamming and Moses Ascending (1984 [1975]) by Sam Selvon—two writers with very distinct and different styles who, coincidentally, arrived in London on the same ship in 1950, with Lamming coming from Barbados and Selvon from Trinidad. While many critics indeed point to the differences between these two authors, where Lamming is typically considered as the more politically engaged one and Selvon as having a more playful, “tongue-in-cheek” style, the similarities in their engagement with demarcations and marginalisation within the immigrant population and within the cultural market and with questions of representation itself is striking. Borders, in their writings, are particularly relevant as an aesthetic means,7 and their negotiation is dramatised in both authors’ repeated employment of a writer persona as the main narrator and/or focaliser in their novels: They thus raise questions regarding the social function of art and the artist’s responsibility, resonating with Kobena Mercer’s “burden of representation;” that is, the (reductionist) perception of black artists as “‘representatives’ who speak on behalf of, and are thus accountable to, their communities” (1994, 240), or, on a more optimistic Deleuzian note, the writer’s task of fabulating, i.e. “invok[ing] a people” (Deleuze 1995, 174) instead of resorting to conventional modes of representation and to merely “‘express’ (a meaning), to ‘represent’ (a thing, a being), or to ‘imitate’ (a nature)” (Bensmaïa 1986, xvii); in short, to resort to a “sort of ordinary use of language” (Deleuze & Guattari 1986, 20). These issues are especially relevant when considering the work of this first generation of West Indian writers in Britain, since, as Mercer states, “[w]hen black artists become publicly visible only one at a time, their work is burdened with a whole range of extra-artistic concerns” (1994, 240, original emphasis), such as its counter-discursive potential or the degree of authenticity exhibited.

6Both writers, it is argued, also make use of spatial tropes (such as the house or the ship) as microcosmic “laboratories” for probing national and cultural affiliations, for engaging with the demand for a utopian trans-Caribbean space and literature, as well as the negotiation of larger intranational borders. These places are reminiscent of Foucault’s notion of heterotopian spaces and are marked not only by their difference from other places, but also their inherent possibility of transgressing boundaries and norms of society through their permeable borders: “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault 1986, 27). Places of temporary dwelling, especially the house, have gained symbolic meaning in the discourse surrounding Windrush immigration: Fourteen years after the first ship docked on British land from the Caribbean, the borders were effectively closed for Caribbean immigrants with the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 following a, as Procter calls it, “laissez-faire phase of postwar black settlement” that came to be known as “open door politics” where the “threshold of the British homestead took on the significance of a national frontier” (2003, 22), with the black settlers being “consistently figured on the other side of the domestic threshold” (45).8

II. “suppose you had one island”9: National and Artistic Borders in Lamming’s The Emigrants

7Lamming’s second novel The Emigrants (1994 [1954]) was written at a time when “the boundaries between the centre and the margin became forever blurred” (Szeman 2001, 182) and employs the trope of the threshold in portraying the emigrants’ crossing borders into the “mother country” and its cultural institutions. In the book, a group of West Indians cross the Atlantic on a ship tellingly named the Golden Image, a setting reminding of the Empire Windrush. Focalised through a variety of characters with Jamaican, Trinidadian, or Barbadian background, the novel presents at once individual perspectives on the journey yet unites these separate accounts in their topical similarity. The book is divided into three sections that trace the emigrants’ journey from crossing the ocean to Great Britain, from their initial state of being alienated, un-belonging there until their more forceful occupation of public space in the last part of the novel. The ship as a semi-private, semi-public place on which the first part of the book is focused constitutes a particular semantic space, one that is resonating with Foucault’s definition of heterotopias—at once outside of all other places, yet bearing a specific relation to them (Foucault 1986, 24), simultaneously isolated and penetrable. Accordingly, the Golden Image proves to be an ambivalent place, whose liminality is foreshadowed in the initial description of its location in the borderland area between land, sea, and the city:

The pier ended abruptly on all sides forming within the buildings that limited it an area free for the first traffic between land and sea. [...] The ship had dropped anchor right alongside, making another partition to the enclosure. [...] Beyond the warehouse the land made a brief ridge and then levelled into a wide open space that made way for the encroach of the city. (Lamming 1994, 3)

8Crucially, the novel begins with the emigrants being in a state of transit, of being in-between; the ship is simultaneously a microcosm of the West Indies and isolated from the world, its temporary inhabitants at once belonging and unbelonging. From the outset, the ship functions as a laboratory where “exercises in cartographies of self and place that reverse and exceed those mapped by England’s colonial adventurers” (Page 2011, 28) take place.

9On the ship itself, the emigrants from the Caribbean islands are portrayed as members of a West Indian community whose space is on the lower deck and in the dormitory:10 “All you down here [in the belly of the ship] is my brothers” (Lamming 1994, 39) states the character named “the Governor” for instance. The Golden Image becomes a place where the imagination of a common West Indian project as a post-war, post-nationalist space becomes ever more possible the more the emigrants are physically removed from their countries:

Now the interruptions were at an end. But for the Azores which they would see from the deck [...] [o]nly the ship remained. These men who met during the day on the lower deck now lay under the light talking easily as a group. [...] The dormitory was their temporary abode. It was like home; and they regarded its limitations as the limitations of a home for which they were responsible. They had come together without effort or invitation [...]. (32–3)

10This is later also emphasised from Tornado’s point of view:

They were a group. Those who had met and spoken belonged to the same situation. It wasn’t Jamaica or Barbados or Trinidad. It was a situation that included all the islands. They were together. [...] He felt at one with Higgins and the Jamaican and the Barbadian. (77)

11The ship is portrayed as an almost ideal locale that, like a Foucauldian heterotopia of compensation, functions as an “other space” and constitutes “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (1986, 24). This idealistic version of a united Caribbean nation is marked by a distinct group consciousness, and the collective nature of experience is also emphasised in the shift from homo- to heterodiegetic narration (Lamming 1994, 24), where the individual point of view gives way to a variety of focalisers. The focus on collectivity is also evident in the musings of the character referred to as “Jamaican” (he is one of the emigrants in the novel who are tellingly only identified by their countries of origin), who debates the category “West Indian:”11

We never hear so much talk till lately ‘bout West Indies. Everybody sayn’ me is West Indian. We is West Indians. West Indian this, West Indian that. [...] This West Indies talk is w’at a class o’ doctor call symptomatic. [...] When them stay back home in they little island them forget a little an’ them remain vomit; [...] but when them go ‘broad, them remember, or them get tol’ w’at is e’at, an’ them start to prove, an’ them give w’at them provin’ a name. A good name. Them is West Indians. Not Jamaicans or Trinidadians. Cause the bigger the better. (65–6)

12While the signifier “West Indian” is potentially able to transcend national boundaries and to conceive of a trans-Caribbean collective, the “vomit” in the Jamaican’s musings also anticipates the essentialism and stereotypes that will go along with that marker in Great Britain: On the ship, the boundaries that separate the islands from one another are partly obliterated; after their arrival in Britain, however, a new frontier between the British and a homogenised West Indian immigrant population will emerge—echoing Sam Selvon’s narrator Moses’ assertion that “English people believe that everybody who come from the West Indies come from Jamaica” (2006, 7). The Jamaican’s thoughts foreshadow the prevailing conception of the West Indian immigrants as a border-less entity, as essentially “other,” bound together by the distinctive marker “black.” Gilroy has pointedly described the inclusiveness of this signifier which unifies West Indian, African, and Asian diasporas in the racially hostile context of the 1970s where:

despite their differences, the ‘black professional’ in a local authority social services department, the Afro-Caribbean ancillary in a hospital and the hip-hopping Asian youth of West London may all discover within that colour a medium through which to articulate their own experiences and make sense of their common exclusion from Britain and Britishness. (2002, 323)

13Selvon resorted to a more cynical description in stating that “as long as you were not white, you were black, and it did not matter if you came from Calcutta or Port-of-Spain” (1989, 217). As Hall states in his seminal essay “New Ethnicities,” “black” came to stand for the shared experience of marginalisation in Britain, and “‘[t]he black experience,’ as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between the different communities, became ‘hegemonic’ over other ethnic/racial identities” (1996, 441). The architecture of the Golden Image already foreshadows new separations, with the dormitory as the main setting for the West Indian collective and the deck as theatre for the few interactions with the English passengers, the ship itself takes on characteristics of a borderland, a “vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” that is “in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3); it is an ambiguous and overdetermined space, created by the “emotional residue” in form of remembering the existing borders between the islands while also already embodying the coming hardships in Britain.

14The responsibility to envision and represent this trans-Caribbean collective rests on the shoulders of the artist who is tasked with the burden to represent the “authentic” story of the “black,” or, in this case more specifically, the West Indian community. It is telling that for large parts of the description of the voyage on the ship, readers follow the focaliser Collis, an aspiring writer. The narrative situation oscillates between hetero- and homodiegetic, with Collis sometimes emerging as the narrative voice—he not only “indiscriminately fractures psychological boundaries by traversing first and third person as well as dialogic representation” (Page 2011, 29), but his labyrinthian “movements” in and out of the narrative also mirror the emigrants’ crossing of thresholds on a structural level. Collis serves as a device to analyse the potential this inclusive space and the signifier “West Indian” carry for the formation of subjectivity, and he crucially also seems to notice the limits of both. In a direct encounter with his fellow intellectual and “roommate” Dickson, Collis becomes acutely aware of the literal and figurative space that exists between the emigrants: “the passages between the bunks were dark alleys crossing in all directions along the floor” (Lamming 1994, 33). The ship as locale of an imaginary collective Caribbean space is always already permeated by borders, thereby countering any notion of hybridity or a shared space in-between and threatening the provisional home the emigrants have built. This becomes most evident in Collis’ and Dickson’s hostile relationship and Collis’ evaluation of the space between them:

He avoided Dickson but he felt the other’s rigidity. The passage between their bunks was the space of two bodies, yet Collis felt that he had filled it completely. He flapped the pyjamas against his bunk and his body in its stoop seemed to graze Dickson’s bunk. He glanced over his shoulder and was reminded of the space between them. There was no fear of touching the other man. Yet he felt that Dickson’s body was speaking, warning that it shouldn’t be touched, fearing its action if it had been touched. (30–1)

15Dickson’s rigid and forbidding body constitutes a border in itself; this sudden corporeality of the frontier precludes a suspension of borders between the West Indian immigrants. For Collis, the Golden Image is not an ideal space or enacted utopia, but rather a “space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as even more illusory” (Foucault 1986, 27). Collis creates awareness of the constructed nature of “West Indian” as a unifying signifier and the futility of trying to portray a (a priori non-existent) “real,” “authentic,” essential Caribbean experience, with which the author is tasked in the public’s opinion.

16While the employment of metaphors of accommodation functions to unveil and thus to “symbolically destabilise the ways in which [the novel’s] spaces are racialised” (Procter 2003, 45), they also anticipate the situation of “minority authors”12 and their interpellation into a “world-literature” niche in the literary market itself. With Collis as writer-protagonist, the novel creates a mise-en-scène of the conditions and plights of authorship, it negotiates the boundaries and frontiers the minority author has to cross, from the cultural margins to the centre, and of the literary market itself, where writers like Lamming and Selvon are—to some extent still—bound to their positionality in a paradigm of representativeness which determines their reception according to what Sedlmeier calls “institutionalized paratexts” (2014, 22) that function in form of “postcolonial” or “multicultural” discourses and serve to “[naturalize] cultural differences, based upon notions of authenticity, experience, and self-enunciation” (2). Collis’ aforementioned fear to “fill the space completely” echoes the anxiety of the minority author to speak for and impose a voice upon the marginalised and to perpetuate hegemonic structures of representation. His reaction to the Yugoslav, who reminds him of the writer’s responsibility—“A writer’s work is public property [...]. You are articulate not only for yourself, but thousands who’ll never see you in person” (Lamming 1994, 101)—and to Dickson also speaks to that: The Yugoslav’s words affect Collis to such an extent that “he found himself for a while forgetful of what was happening” (101), and the immediately following reproach by Dickson on his way to the dormitory to collect his luggage to leave the ship—“the day I find out you’ve been telling lies about me I’ll get you [...]. I happen to know that you write” (102)—results in complete stasis: Being trapped in the dormitory (as opposed to the ship’s deck), semantically the collective Caribbean space, illustrates the writer’s inability to “cross over,” to break through the confines of representation. And while Collis, as oftentimes main focalising or even narrative instance, to some extent bridges and connects the otherwise loosely arranged episodes and transcends intratextual boundaries, the plot and structure of the novel mirror the artist’s struggles: after the first chapter leaves readers in anticipation of a collective West Indian vision of nationhood and belonging that might come to fruition throughout the novel, the subsequent chapters have Collis’ vision deteriorate, and the emigrants’ attempts to move into the public British space ultimately leave them again confined in spaces that are “other,” restricted to the emigrants only.13

17Collis’ arrival in the last chapter, however, leaves readers with a more positive outlook, when “this street” which he “had walked [...] for more than two years” finally becomes his: “Now it was my street” (231). On a structural level, too, it could be argued that Collis transcends intratextual (for instance between hetero- and homodiegetic narrator) and also intertextual borders: The trope of the struggling artist which Lamming applies here frequently recurs in other novels of the Windrush generation,14 the figure of Collis thus also transcends the borderlines of the very novel itself in its evocation of the writer figure in other texts and creates a reference to the common literary tradition that emerged with this group; he can be seen as an instance of débordement, an overflow of meaning that collapses the boundary between inside and outside text.15

III. Upstairs – Downstairs: Selvon’s Moses Ascending and the (Im)Mobility of the Artist

18Crossing the borders not only of race and ethnicity, but specifically those underlying the cultural and literary scene also preoccupy Lamming’s contemporary, Samuel Selvon. He, too, makes use of the trope of a confined and clearly demarcated space—in this instance, the house—to not only mirror the crossing of national or societal borders of the emigrants, but as a self-reflective authorial comment, as the movements within the house trace the author’s position in society—the subjection to structures of power, striving for cultural legitimation, and forms of agency within what Bourdieu in Rules of Art (1996) has analysed as the “literary field.” Selvon’s middle novel of his “Moses trilogy,” Moses Ascending, starts with the eponymous protagonist Moses, a Trinidadian immigrant having lived for many years in London, finally overcoming insecure living conditions and acquiring a property which he turns into a boarding house, where he, however, does not “let out to black people” (1984, 2). Moses’ purchase of property draws upon a common topos in West Indian literature, that is, the house as an insecure site where, contrary to its figuration in the European novel, boundaries are not securing the subject, but are always porous, as Brathwaite outlines:

One of the main problems facing the West Indian writer is how to write a novel about houses. A house suggests clearly defined boundaries: physical, emotional, traditional. The traditional English/European novel is a ‘house’ and is usually, in one way or another, about houses. (1976, 199)

19The continuity and ontological security the house represents for the English writer is a priori unattainable for the West Indian writer, and the house becomes a site where belonging/unbelonging is negotiated. Brathwaite’s claim also points to the metaphorical connection of the topos of the house and literature itself, reminding one of Walcott, who, in Another Life, states he “had entered the house of literature as a houseboy” (1973, 77). Acquiring property and ownership also has a radical political dimension, where, for the West Indian immigrant, the private suddenly becomes a public matter. In his 1966 book Journey to an Illusion, Donald Hinds already highlighted the importance of shelter: “When a West Indian buys a house, it means more to the neighbours than the fact that another family is moving into the street. For them it is a nation, a race and a world” (99).

20In the same way, finding shelter—no matter how dilapidated—for Moses also comes to signify an attempt to fortify—in a Crusoean sense—the body and the self,16 to draw a boundary between himself and the thousands of immigrants living in insecure, poor conditions. Moses’ attempts to cross—which, paradoxically, also serves to reinforce—the borders of race align with crossing and reinforcing borders of class, as is then also metaphorically played out within his house, for instance with him moving from the basement into the highest flat:

Having lived below the surface of the world all my life I ensconced myself in the highest flat in the house [...]. I cannot tell you what joy and satisfaction I had the day I move into these new Quarters. Whereas I did have a worm’s eye view of life, I now had a bird’s eye view. I was Master of the house. (Selvon 1984, 3–4)

21Instead of settling in the middle—literally, on the middle floor, figuratively and in Homi Bhabha’s sense in that productive, hybrid space in-between—Moses aims straight for the top. This also parallels his writing process: Moses’ reversed position in the house (and, by extension, in society) coheres with him pursuing an archetypal Western literary tradition: “As soon as I had explained his duties to Bob and he took the responsibilities of my shoulders, I relaxed and started to work on my memoirs” (5), in what he deems to be the highest form of expression, “the Queen’s language” (105). Moses’ attempts to physically transgress boundaries from the basement to the attic correlates with the attempt to ascend to the spheres of English—“high”—literature.

22While these observations seem to indicate that the novel only confirms the rigid boundaries between the native population and the immigrants, black and white, “low” and “high” culture,17 precisely by Moses’ attempt to locate himself on the other side, it is for once Moses’ house itself that also resonates with Foucault’s heterotopia of compensation in its reimagination of, as Fallon has it, “the island situation”—the original island homes are reimagined “as liminal, transitory, multinational,” they transcend national boundaries in their respective diasporic spaces and stand metonymically for a larger postcolonial experience (Fallon 2011, 61). Moses’ footman Bob, his “man Friday” (Selvon 1984, 4), for instance, rents out apartments to tenants from Barbados, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Australia and Pakistan, strikingly all countries that belong to the Commonwealth. Moses, then, reproaches Bob: “It looks like you clutter up the house with a lot of foreigners [...]. Have we no genuine English stock? [...] Black Power in the basement [...] and Pakis in residence—no wonder my house is under surveillance” (32). The transgression of national boundaries is portrayed en miniature in Moses’ house; the house itself resembles a Deleuzian collective assemblage of enunciation,18 a space for dialogue that, in its admittance of a plurality of voices, resembles the very book Moses writes: while “Memoirs are personal and intimate” (42), the book readers are presented with are arguably Moses’ very memoirs and thus contain not only his individual story, but a variety of other accounts, from black and white Britons alike. Contrary to Lamming’s (unfulfilled) imagination of a united Caribbean space, Selvon, then, even extends this idea to a trans-Commonwealth vision.

23In opposition to the otherwise humoristic tone of the novel, the emerging questions of how to gain access to the literary market as a minority writer, to enter “the house of literature” (Walcott 1973, 77), leave a more sombre impression. Here, too, the borders within the house are significant, as they mirror the borders of the cultural market: following Jung’s psychology, where the image of the house represents the structure of the psyche, Moses’ movements between upstairs and the basement gain additional meaning. Bachelard, for instance, sees the attic not only as a place of poetic tranquillity (resonating with the image of the Romantic genius withdrawn from the world), but also as a possible source of terror, similar to the cellar, which in Jung’s thinking is the seat of the unconscious.19 In Selvon’s novel, the attic “penthouse” is where Moses withdraws to write “literary masterpieces” like those “written by men who shut themselves away from the distractions of the world” (1984, 43), in a fashion “just as good as anything Shakespeare or Billy Wordsworth ever write” (11); this space thus represents the seat of a Bloomian “anxiety of influence” (1973), of the ambiguous and inhibiting relationship to one’s literary forefathers. The basement is simultaneously the seat of the black power movement, who dwell in Moses’ cellar, and a “stock room” for contemporary black literature: “All this time Brenda was settling down to some serious work for the Party, unbeknownst to me. The basement stockup with all kinds of Black literature, Lamming and Salkey and Baldwin” (Selvon 1984, 27). After having once again descended to the basement, Lamming’s work is literally in Moses’ way, a metaphorical impasse of breaking the confines of writing about “the struggle” (42): “‘Ah Moses’, [...] what a let-down you have suffered.’ ‘What can I tell you?’ I say, kicking a batch of Lamming’s Water for Berries that was in my way to stand up by the window” (138). Moses’ struggle against his “antagonists” in the novel, especially Andrew Salkey and George Lamming,20 is an ironic dramatisation—and, when considering the nature of the memoirs as a “collective assemblage” that gives voice to a variety of (immigrant) experiences and thus to new forms of Britishness, fictional reversal—of Selvon’s conscious withdrawal from emphasising the need for the author to be politically engaged and for creating a counter-discourse. Moses’ ignorance of “committed writing” is a critique of the responsibility to faithfully render what Stuart Hall called the “essential black subject” (1996, 444). Furthermore, the critique here extends to the (Western) literary market which precisely places these boundaries upon the postcolonial writer. Both spaces, the top floor with its connotation of canonised “high” literature and the basement with postcolonial literature, are contained in a struggle to form Moses’ ego, and both are necessarily part of the writer’s persona.

24The novel then tellingly ends with Moses descending again: “after the ballad and the episode, it is the white man who ends up Upstairs and the black man who ends up Downstairs” (Selvon 1984, 139–40). Moses’ descent into the basement is equivalent with not only the failure to ultimately break the barriers of race and class, but those of the market as well—in the end, the writer is metaphorically stuck in the niche of “World” or “committed” literature. The ending, however, also reminds of the final lines of the novel’s precursor The Lonely Londoners in its explicit thematisation of the writing process: Moses’ musings if “he could ever write a book like that, what everybody would buy” (2006, 139) resonate with Moses having “an epilogue up [his] sleeve” (1984, 140) in Moses Ascending, portraying a continuous writing process that spans the two novels (and even continues in Moses Migrating). Moses’ situation is, moreover, as fragile and insecure as it has been at the end of The Lonely Londoners, the hope for progress and upward mobility21 is deferred. The reader is thus led back to the first novel of Selvon’s trilogy, left suspended and in-between and, just like Moses, dwelling in a metaphorical borderland between being secured (owning and being master of one’s house) and without a steady home (as in the Lonely Londoners with its emphasis on the immigrants’ insecure situation in boarding houses and hostels), between arrival and departure (the latter in Moses Migrating), and between becoming and having failed as an artist.

25Spaces, such as the ship and the house, are oftentimes ambivalent and contradictory in themselves in these novels. On the one hand, the places analysed are to some extent signifiers of stability in a changing world, with both the emigrants’ ship as a place of (transient) belonging on the passage to Britain and Moses’ boarding house as an anchor for the new arrivals in the metropolis. Simultaneously, they also signify mobility and flux and are permeated by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion: They are the very vehicles of “crossing over” into another culture, this both literally, in Lamming’s case with the topos of the voyage and in Selvon’s novel the boarding house as a base for human trafficking of illegal immigrants, and figuratively, with Moses gaining a foothold in Britain by means of owning property and the focus on the writer figure as a negotiation of the struggle for literary recognition. Both novelists—yet Selvon more radically than Lamming—have their protagonist not only cross borders in a literal sense by moving into the European space, but this concrete border crossing finds its figurative analogy in the protagonist’s attempt to penetrate its canon, literature, and philosophy, and consequently his challenge to:

universal thought—reason, theory, the West—that has historically masked the presence of a particular voice, sex, sexuality, ethnicity and history, and has only granted the ‘Other’ a presence in order to confirm its own premises (and prejudices). (Chambers 1994, 70)

26This focus on the immigrant’s mobility is already mirrored in the titles of the novels with their emphasis on “emigrating” and “ascending,” and the places analysed signify progress, the transgression of boundaries, and fluidity, but also the fragmented, incoherent, and displaced nature of the immigrant experience. The works are thus emblematic of the conflicted nature of diaspora: they are not setting out to portray the immigrant experience but offer a counter-essentialist notion of diaspora and race, one that is contradictory, always in flux and in becoming.

27It is crucial to acknowledge that, contrary to the common myth of Windrush as the origin of a multi-racial Britain and the beginning of intranational racial conflicts, the arrival of the immigrants in England has not “birthed” processes of othering and discrimination, but has only brought already existing currents to the forefront; as Susheila Nasta puts it, “[i]t is worth recalling that the sight of these ‘dark strangers’ crossing the nation’s threshold, captured in the oft-recycled black-and-white-Pathé news-reels, opened an already embedded narrative of racial exclusion” (2005, 25). In the same vein, Paul Gilroy in an interview from 2013 highlights the continuing importance of race and warns that, in our neo-liberal, supposedly “post-racial” times, it merely “provides a useful way to mark out the boundary between then and now: racism is presented as anachronistic—nothing more than a flimsy impediment to the machinery of colourless, managerial meritocracy” (2013). A re-reading of these novels in light of the recent developments mentioned at the outset of this paper is thus overdue, as they, typically for the time when they have been written (between the 1950s and the 1970s), can be said to “unfold in the present” (Procter 2016, 129) and reveal an urgent immediacy regarding racial, ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries. Considering the “Windrush scandal,” these works seem to have lost nothing of their actuality, as their negotiation of the categories “West Indian” or “Black British” as a priori instable and insecure—now evidenced by the descendants of the Windrush generation facing the danger of becoming illegal aliens—proves.

28Regarding the subtler questions of how to write “great” literature or how to invent the “people who are missing,” both authors not only dramatise these issues in their novels, but permeate the boundaries for later “minority” authors themselves: This performative nature of their literature, then, renders the “border” (be it an ethnic or institutional one) a place where binary oppositions are challenged and conventions are transcended by the sheer possibility of their crossing. The boundary here becomes, to use Heidegger’s words, more than “that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, [rather] […] that from which something begins its essential unfolding” (1993, 356, original emphasis). In this way, the novels not only make of their protagonists, but of readers “border crossers,” that is, “subjects who refuse to occupy a single territory” (Henderson 1995, 2).