Black Migrants and Climate Change Vulnerability Amid the Great Smog of London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners

What would it mean to reread Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) as a narrative about the representation of Black migrants during the smog? The smog, the 1950s’ concerning ecological and climate issue, results from the mix of coal-burning smoke with London fog. Upon combustion, coal emits visible black smoke into the lingering fog, causing various health and respiratory hazards. The Lonely Londoners depicts the 1950s, when the Windrush generation of migrants, particularly Black Afro-Caribbeans, arrive in London during the smog and, at the same time, encounter growing racial and anti-immigrant sentiments. A close reading of the novel reveals a running analogy between black smoke and Black migrants as Selvon excavates the parallel of air pollution and racism. The analogy underwrites the assumption that the blackness of the smog is toxic, and in the popular imagination, Black immigrants presumably “pollute” England. In this essay, I will argue that The Lonely Londoners astutely places racialization and pollution as figures and metaphors of each other, as though their qualities overlap and/or are shared.

The nuanced equation between Black migrants and black smoke helps read The Lonely Londoners’s way of thinking about migration as pollution and pollution as unhealthy infiltration of blackness. Such misunderstood and prejudiced thinking about migration as pollution underwrites my claim for the novel’s status as concerned with the nexus of climate change and migration. This nexus also helps recognize how apparently disparate discourses can interpenetrate, making both problems hard to solve because each one is somehow always more than itself. As the narrative unwraps the sociopolitical antagonism toward incoming Black migrants, it further navigates our understanding of the common and racist misconception of the time which recurrently appears in Selvon’s text. These figurations insinuate that only the visible black (smoke) is harmful and thus should be redirected far away or outside, given the blackness in the smog and skin color are too visible and too easily made into analogs of each other. This essay will help establish Selvon’s narrative as an early instance of the correlation between climate change and migration and will help consolidate the connections between racializing (or racist) discourses and mainstream worries about pollution.

Reading the fallacious association of the visible black smog, as an exclusively dangerous pollution, with the visible Black migrants helps further understand the then-existing environmental inequality and climate injustice. On the one hand, the movement of pollutants creates a meaningful tie-in to environmental justice and how pollutants disperse disproportionately, thus creating disproportionate exposures for different communities. Particles of pollution have different weights and thus disperse differently from point sources. For example, PM10 is a heavy, visible pollutant that stays near the point source, but sulfur dioxide travels far from the source, and both contribute to health and respiratory illnesses. On the other hand, migratory patterns under environmental and climate justice reveal how the most marginalized people are the most acutely exposed to environmental hazards. Environmental inequalities directly correlate with socioeconomic lines by confirming how communities’ income affects their ability to afford to live in cleaner areas where there is at least a fair “distribution of environmental burdens.”[1]

Both pollution particles and migratory patterns disperse disproportionately. The difference is that the former is the obvious result of a scientific weight distribution while the latter is entirely intervened by socioeconomic, structural, and systemic factors. Selvon’s text shows instances of environmental inequality among the Windrush generation of Black migrants who are now in the site of the empire (and not an ostensibly distant or underprivileged location) while suffering from climate injustice. As marginalized ethnic minorities and racialized and socially vulnerable communities, Black migrants in the London of the 1950s were more exposed to environmental racism, poor housing and labor conditions, and toxic waste and air pollution primarily by the structural and hostile socioeconomic environment they were categorized in accordingly at the time.[2]

The Lonely Londoners shows a social imbalance between white Britons and migrants of color. It develops the urban and spatial identity of Caribbean migrants in 1950s London while characterizing Black migrants in a state of loneliness, as the title of the novel connotes, albeit in a collective and mobile way. That is, the sort of solitude and loneliness that Selvon’s subcultural Black Caribbean migrants live through is not individual nor limited to one character in the community. It, rather, tells a story of being collectively lonely as a whole community of migrants altogether.

With regard to this isolated and alienating social setting, The Lonely Londoners explores the urban and spatial identity formation of Caribbean migrants and their encounters with the landscape of London amid the smog. The novel “charts a shifting cartographic representation of London” as it represents the wandering, mobile, and in-transit migrants by exemplifying “migration as an everyday practice.”[3] Selvon’s migrants remain within the borderscape of being recognized as migrants for as long as they are in London, be it over ten years, like Moses Aloetta, or within a couple of hours after arrival, like Henry Oliver Esquire, alias Sir Galahad. They are alienated and othered regardless of how many years they have lived in the site of the London metropole.

The novel narrates the arrival and presence of Caribbean migrants into the United Kingdom as it intersects with the widespread combustion of coal (for both households and industries) and the widespread and severe air pollution caused by the smog. For example, Moses, whose presence presumably pollutes the White-dominated landscape of London, is himself subjected to the same invasive pollution. He breathes in the smoky fog, and black residue appears on his handkerchief.[4] A Black-skinned migrant curses what comes out of his “black lung,” which David McDermott Hughes recognizes as “coal’s signature.”[5] His black mucus occupies “the small-scale segment that reflects the whole,” particularly his surrounding ecological environment.[6] His character becomes a mirror facing up another mirror, in a Derridean mise en abyme, by endlessly reflecting back and thus deconstructing the accusation of being a pollutant as a migrant.[7] For one, Moses is in the city, which has already been polluted by the smog. All such invasive pollutants seem to coexist in simultaneity, “[d]ismissing the logocentricity” in the novel: the blackness of coal, the blackness of the smog, and the blackness of the fossil fuel economy. They altogether hide behind the Blackness of London’s migrant population as their scapegoat or tunnel issue (Dickmann, “Using mise en abyme,” 78).

The historical framework of Selvon’s narrative seems influenced by the common narrative in the legislative lexicon and media coverage of the smog. As one of the contributing factors to the construction of race and minoritization of people of color, the language of the law at the time laid out the hazards of the black smoke differently. It insisted that dark and black smoke would be recognized as harmful and detrimental even though the study of chemistry was relatively advanced in the 1950s.[8] In the Clean Air Act 1956, as in the Beaver Report on Air Pollution, certain regions under smoke control areas were referred to as “black areas,” like Tyneside in Northern England.[9] On December 14, 1962, British news magazine The Spectator writes, “[a]fter ten years only a quarter of metropolitan London is ‘smokeless.’”[10] Here, the emphasis is on the smoke, the visible gaseous pollutants, instead of using neutral phrases like poor air quality or air pollution, the general invisible gaseous pollutants. In the same article, The Spectator mentions that the population increase between 1931 and 1951 was mainly due to migration of “British subjects resident” into the Eastern and Southern regions of London, the so-called black areas.[11]

The Lonely Londoners calls attention to the question of whether the fusion of smoke and fog in the discourse of London air pollution is genuinely a warning about a health hazard and environmental concern about gaseous pollutants of the time, or rather if it is suggestive of a racial bias, given the flow of Black migrants into the United Kingdom in the 1950s. The novel shows how pollution overlaps with racial logics of visibility by understanding pollution as a question of visibility. Obviously, it could be a different debate if the harm of black smoke was considered an aesthetic argument, since black smoke defaces public buildings and facades and is more obvious. Invisible, odorless, colorless gases like carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, methane etc., if not more deadly and toxic, are dangerous and harmful. Once they are released from a point source, their particles disperse differently. Regardless, the language used in the media and Clean Air Act regulations does not follow an aesthetic concern about the growing black smoke.

By the mid-1950s, popular media started to fear the rapid change in city demographics. It saw the end of the empire with the Commonwealth being associated with the alien and by the arrival of dark strangers in Britain, echoing not only antimigrant sentiments but also anti-migrant-of-color biases.[12] There is an evident racist tone in this association between visible black smoke and incoming Black migrants which invokes traces of racism in the discourse of pollution in the novel. The racist tone echoes an anti-immigrant-of-color sentiment mixed with the visibility of black smoke, suggesting they can both, on the face of it, pollute England.

As such, Selvon alludes to the analogy of incoming Black migrants as an abject alien and a sense of estrangement in the blackness that comes out of Moses’s body. Feeling obliged and bothered to meet Galahad, a fellow Black migrant, in the station, Moses blows his nose and realizes, “[t]he handkerchief turn black and Moses watch it and curse the fog” (Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 1). The blackness of smoke has permeated into his body, generating an abject figure out of his own mucus. He is disgusted and disrupted by this visceral experience of the smoke coming out of his own body, in addition to being frustrated to meet every newcomer at the station.

The equation would have resonated for Selvon’s audience, as it does for the workers that Galahad overhears in the public toilets. After hearing the workers’ comments, Galahad starts theorizing and decides to separate Blackness from his own body, turning his skin color into an abject figure. In a public washroom, Galahad overhears “two white fellars” comment on the uncleanliness of lavatories in London and blame it on Black migrants who, to their mind, cause pollution and contamination (77). The comment makes Galahad regard his Black body differently. He internalizes the hate (given he has also internalized and consumed the pollution of the smog) and regards his Blackness as a separate and disembodied phenomenon. Galahad thinks to himself,

Colour, is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world. Is not me, you know, is you! I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people and them, is you! . . . Why the hell you can’t change colour? (77).

Through the dissociation of self from the body and Blackness, Galahad starts “protecting the ego from its corporeal embodiment and in the process preserving a deep sense of selfhood that cannot be reached by the external negative stimuli.”[13] For Galahad, becoming white is beyond reason, but becoming red or blue is by far better than being Black in the London of the time. Whiteness, as a state of privilege in his mind, is so far-fetched that he does not even desire it. Galahad’s theory that any alternative color would be better than Black underwrites his process of self-abjection. He finds both Blackness and blackness uncannily undesirable and regards them as triggers for his miseries of a lonely migrant Londoner.

Along the same lines, Galahad shares another theory with Moses suggesting, “[i]s not we that the people don’t like . . . is the colour Black” (Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 77). Mpalive-Hangson Msiska reads this dissociation as an indication that Galahad as “a subject of racial denigration avoids falling victim to it, by displacing it onto the consciously disowned and alienated body” (Msiska, “Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners,” 16–17). If we acknowledge the racist undertone in foregrounding the blackness of the smog at the time, Galahad’s calling on his Blackness is more likely the cause of his discomfort during the smog in the urban atmosphere of postwar Britain. His theory harkens back to the biased language of the Clean Air Act 1956, openly suggesting black smoke is the harmful pollutant.

Galahad’s encounters with the smog and harsh weather of London further link the novel with fossil fuels’ combustion. Coal-burning, used as a heating method, contributes largely to poor air quality and ultimately, albeit gradually over time, accumulates to constructing today’s crisis of global warming, “the unintended by-product par excellence.”[14] Given the context of Selvon’s narrative, the evident “by-product” of coal burning in the form of the smog may not have been an uncharted territory for the Londoners of the time. If not specifically recognized under the name of “global warming” or “a warming world” as an environmental concern, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of years later in 1990, Londoners in the 1950s would know about the harmful consequences of sending smoke up the chimneys and into the air, given Britain’s first coal power plant opened as early as 1882.[15]

Galahad, the unobserved observer of the phenomenon, does not engage predictably with London’s cold winters and coal-burning heating method. The irony goes to extremes when Galahad first gets off the boat into London’s winter and is wearing a “tropical suit . . . and no overcoat or muffler or gloves or anything for the cold” arriving in, what Moses calls, London’s “beast winter” (Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 12). Galahad claims that he is even “feeling a little warm . . . [and] [t]his is a nice climate” (13). And paradoxically, “[w]hen that first London summer hit Galahad he begin to feel so cold that he had to get a overcoat” (71). It is as if he, even though in England, follows a different weather pattern (that of the Caribbean) and has somehow brought the climate of the south with him while irresistibly denying the obvious.

The irony in Galahad’s encounters with London’s cold winters and warm summers creates a defamiliarizing effect in the English reader’s mind by encouraging them to see the weather through an immigrant’s eyes. Nick Bentley, with reference to Homi Bhabha, associates ironic and defamiliarizing feelings about the weather as being “a strategy often used in postcolonial texts to represent the distance between ‘cold’ English culture, with its emotional connotations, and the heat of tropical and desert climates, with its connotations of chaos, mystery and excess.”[16] The noticeable contrast in how Galahad feels about the weather is shaken off by how he regards the gloominess of the sun amid the smog and associates it with emotional connotations of confusion, hostility, and excess.

As the novel proceeds into London’s cold winter, Selvon’s narrative emphasizes that the only source of energy to keep warm in Londoners’ households of the time is coal. While coal at the novel’s time does not appear as what amalgamates over years to cause our climate-changed future, “the fossil economy” has already initiated since the British Industrial Revolution (1760–1840) when “fire began to be fed by the material fuel of fossil energy” (Malm, Fossil Capital, 11). When coal combustion “heat” could be converted “into motion” via the steam engine, British coal becomes the necessary architect behind thermal energy (16). The fossil fuel of coal represented in the novel generates the origin of the fossil economy. Over time with “the machine and the vehicle” increasingly raising “the pressures of economic competition and military invasion” for other countries, the fossil economy gradually becomes a necessity to survive the competition leading to today’s fossil-fueled “business-as-usual” (17).

However, the severe weather, more than an environmental encounter, registers an affective response in Galahad. Selvon’s representation of Galahad “takes up the trope of weather to underline the experience of estrangement and haunting isolation.”[17] Galahad seems in denial with how he physically senses the cold or any extreme weather. And instead, he approaches the strangeness of the weather and ecological impacts emotionally. It scares him that the sun is more symbolic than functional during the smog, giving away what the future of a climate changed world will look like, where life-giving natural phenomena will become death-bearing.

Another way to understand Galahad’s encounter with the cold weather and the smog is to read his noticeable denial under Lachlan Fleetwood’s notion of habitability versus uninhabitability. Fleetwood thinks through notions of “habitability” from its colonial context to a climate changed milieu. With an overview of how the notion of habitability has undergone various definitions and delineations over time, Fleetwood highlights that “imperial environmental imaginaries and practices, and their legacies” have inevitably defined our understanding of habitability today.[18] Given the context of Selvon’s novel (British fiction about the flow of the 1950s’ migrants from the colonies), we can trace the irony Selvon foregrounds through Galahad’s responses to the weather and the smog.

Habitability in the context of the empire versus the tropics is influenced greatly by the legacy of European colonialism. For example, “‘temperate’ Europe was almost always the norm against which other places were measured and read as aberrations” (Fleetwood, “Histories of Habitability,” 6). Besides, the Britons’ tolerance of severe climate conditions in London, for example, would be tantamount to their being more powerful and resilient. On the other hand, if migrants from the tropics could not acclimatize to London’s winters or poor air quality, that would be an indication of their weakness. On this ground, a dichotomized view of habitable Europe versus uninhabitable tropics is established, which uses the tropics as a foil and creates the assumption that tropicality exemplifies the opposite of “temperate nature, to all that is modest, civilized, cultivated” (6).

Through representing migrants in London encountering the harsh weather, the smog, and anti-immigrant biases, Selvon’s narrative encourages to reconsider the widely held idea that, “[t]he injustice of climate change is that those who have caused it are not the ones who suffer most from its consequences (UNDP 2008; Scott 2014).”[19] The logic bases its claim on the assumption that climate change “impacts are disproportionately borne out . . . on communities that are already vulnerable and on individuals who are already living in poverty and precarity” (Bates-Eamer, “Border and Migration Control,” 1). The language, which suggests the poor or precarious pay the cost of fossil capital, commonly denotes that the people in remote and far-flung places of the Global South are paying the price. As Selvon’s novel rightfully captures this idea, the precarious at home are also paying the price disproportionately, too. Through Selvon’s representation of minoritized immigrants in London of the time, readers can see how West Indian migrants are doubly underprivileged, in their home country and the site of the empire. 

There is convergence between migration and climate change through having the migrants from the Global South in London paying the price in Selvon’s representation. Still, the immigrant population’s precarity is amplified because of the popular narrative that pushes the responsibility onto them, as vulnerable beings, while making it close to impossible for them to voice concerns against the status quo. The immigrant population of color in the novel are both blamed for the climate and ecological crisis, and they are at the same time hit by it the harshest in both their native and host countries. Climate-vulnerable beings, people who do not engage with elusive and euphemistic ways of talking about climate change, have no choice other than surviving climate impacts. As Selvon’s narrative portrays, the alternative to burning coal is nothing other than facing the beast winters of London.