In 2012, members of Britain's Royal Family celebrated Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Reign by visiting countries that were part of the British Empire. Many of these overseas possessions were either "acquired" or had their acquisitions reinforced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1819-1901).
By 1922, the British Empire covered almost one quarter of the Earth's total land area, and ruled over about 460 million subjects, one-fifth of the world's population.
India was one of the largest conquests and in 1876, Queen Victoria took on the title Empress of India. Indians from the western part of India were enlisted as indentured sugar labourers to Fiji and to parts of the Caribbean while Indians from the east and Gujarat were given the opportunity of settling in east Africa.
I was born in Colonial Fiji, which is why I became interested in author V.S. Naipaul's stories set in Trinidad, also a former colony. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, Naipaul was born in Trinidad but has spent most of his life in London. The Mystic Masseur, The Mimic Men and A House for Mr. Biswas, written with as much humour as pathos about displaced Indians in Trinidad, evoke the colonials' experience in the post-colonial world. The Indian characters in Naipaul's novels could easily have been born in Fiji or anywhere in the South Asian Diaspora.
Sam Selvon moved from Trinidad to Canada, where he taught creative writing as a visiting professor at the UVic, and later became writer in residence at the U. of Calgary. In The Lonely Londoners, we meet Moses, Galahad, Big City, Tolroy, Five Past Twelve and other West Indians who have come to the Mother Country in search of a dream, only to face the reality of racial discrimination, poverty, harsh and bitter winters, but with a hope for a better tomorrow. This novel is truly an ode to the survival instinct of the modern immigrant. The London adventures of Moses continue in Moses Migrating and Moses Ascending during the same period that Batersby, a West Indian exile in London, encounters hardships and amusing situations while searching for suitable and cheap housing in The Housing Lark.
While Naipaul writes in the Queen's English, Selvon uses local English dialect of the West Indians - as a protest, perhaps, to the British rule, which used language as a powerful governing tool. I have become familiar with this speech as I have many friends from the Caribbean who speak to me in this English dialect. To read it is both charming and pleasurable for me.
The following are other writers of colonial fiction worth investigating: Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh and Chinua Achebe.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Teresa Rehman works at Coquitlam Public Library.
