“Is all o’ we one?”: Creolization and ethnic identification in Samuel Selvon’s “Turning Christian”

Abstract

Samuel Selvon’s fiction reveals the author’s abiding concern with questions of identity and community and his investment in reconciling the seemingly conflicting subjects of creolization and ethnic identification in Caribbean societies, particularly in his native Trinidad. The pervasive and often violent ethnic conflict between Trinidadians of Indian and African heritage is linked to constructions of the nation in which claims to, as well as exclusion from, Creole identities play an important role. In response, Selvon’s fictional interventions position Indian communities (whether peasant, working- or middle-class) in relation to other ethno-racial groups in ways that construct Trinidadian-ness as an inclusive and dynamic negotiation of self and culture across the various communities represented in the nation. Drawing on Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal concept of creolization as well as the work of other theorists (including Mintz, Bolland, and Munasinghe) of Creole identities and the creolization process, the analysis of “Turning Christian” — a short story excerpted from Selvon’s unfinished novel — provides an account of Selvon’s identity politics in this and his other works of fiction.

Despite the continued proliferation of scholarship on Samuel Selvon’s body of work, there are still important aspects of his writing that remain unexamined. One of those aspects is Selvon’s interest in the conditions that influence Caribbean peoples’ forging and experience of communal identities — whether those affiliations are re/forged in the world of his Trinidad novels and short stories, or in the metropolitan localities of his London-based fiction. Selvon’s investment in collective national and regional identities as opposed to more singularly ethnic- or island-based ones is evident not only among the lonely Londoners of his most famous novel (The Lonely Londoners, 1956) but also in his careful exploration of peasant, working-class, and middle-class lives in Trinidad.

From 1978 to 1994 when he lived in Calgary, Canada, Selvon continued to self-identify as a Trinidadian/West Indian, and as a West Indian writer — just as he had done when he lived in London in the previous three decades. The significance of Selvon’s continued insistence on identifying himself and his work in this manner becomes clearer when one remembers that Canada during these years was at the epicentre of the emergence of Indo-Caribbean writing as a category of Caribbean literature — the identifier gaining traction among diasporic Caribbean writers of South Asian descent as well as literary critics. But, as Austin Clarke remembers it in A Passage Back Home: A Personal Reminiscence of Samuel Selvon, even though Selvon was “hunted down by young writers, in particular the burgeoning group which called itself the Indo-Caribbean Writers Association” whenever he visited Toronto,

Sam did not really have much time for such minute categorization of the literature he had been producing. He was uncomfortable in their midst […] Sam regarded himself as a Trinidadian first; and secondly, he was writing West Indian literature, not Indo-Caribbean literature! (1994: 106)

Selvon’s reluctance to be identified as “Indo-Caribbean” indicates his unease with being viewed primarily through an ethnic lens, preferring instead to see his own experience and those of his characters as part of the larger, more complex, and culturally dynamic experience of being Trinidadian or West Indian/Caribbean. During those years spent in Canada, Selvon visited Trinidad several times, and on one of those occasions he gave the opening address at the East Indians in the Caribbean conference convened by the University of the West Indies. In that address, later published as the essay “Three Into One Can’t Go — East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian” (1987), Selvon weighed in on the contentious subject of the widespread discord between Trinidadians of Indian ¹ and African descent and, for the first time in public outside of his fiction, expressed his advocacy of a unified Trinidadian consciousness that effectively negotiates its relation to all the ethno-racial traditions and cultural worldviews it encompasses.

In that last decade and a half of his life, Selvon was also writing new fiction. In addition to publishing a handful of short stories, Selvon was at work on a novel, which he started in 1986. In the Editorial to a special issue of the Canadian journal ARIEL devoted to Selvon, Victor J. Ramraj writes that Selvon planned the novel as his “‘big’ novel, the work that would tie together all he had done before, encompassing Trinidadian life from the turn of the century to the present” (1996: 8). The confluence between Selvon’s identity politics and his decision to return to Trinidad as the setting for his new novel suggests a strong likelihood that he planned to give the question of the in/compatibility between ethno-racial and national identities further fictional treatment. Since Selvon died before completing the novel, we will never know for sure exactly how he would have developed the story. But we do have a good indication of where he was heading from the cohesive sections of the manuscript he left behind. One such section was published in 1989 as a short story titled “Turning Christian” in Foreday Morning, an anthology of Selvon’s short fiction and prose pieces edited by Susheila Nasta and Ken Ramchand; it was reprinted in the year of Selvon’s passing in Concert of Voices, an anthology of world literature edited by Ramraj. ² “Turning Christian” shows Selvon at his best — a masterful craftsman able to capture in vividly rendered language the tone and texture of the lives of ordinary West Indians. The story is rich in other ways as well, in that it is more than a humorous episode or entertaining ballad about human foibles and aspirations, although Selvon also mastered those forms. Most significantly, in a story that runs to only a few pages, Selvon was able to return to and advance some of the weightier themes he tackled in novels such as A Brighter Sun (1952), An Island Is A World (1955), and The Lonely Londoners (1956): that is, the exploration of Creole identities and the creolization process in Trinidad; questions about individual and collective identity; the conflicts and crises inherent in cultural contact; and the challenges to, and potential for, cultural adaptation and evolution.

Recently, when I was preparing to teach the story, an extensive search yielded only two critical articles on “Turning Christian”. One is by Clement H. Wyke. His article is available in a 1996 issue of ARIEL, one of the first special issues published in Selvon’s memory. Wyke analyses four examples of what he calls Selvon’s “late short fiction”, including “Turning Christian”. He returns to a familiar preoccupation of Selvon critics: the author’s use of language in his fiction — in this case an analysis of voice and intonation in the story using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of utterance as the critical lens. The second article was published in 2002 in the Journal of Caribbean Studies. It is authored by Ramraj who was Editor of ARIEL at the time Wyke’s article appeared, and a professor in the English department at the University of Calgary where Selvon spent his last years on an extended writer-in-residence stint. My reading of “Turning Christian” takes Ramraj’s critical assessment of the story as a starting point, mainly because his article offers the more sustained and provocative reading of this piece of fiction. Ramraj’s purpose is to situate the story within a tradition of literary criticism that offers a general/izing framework for reading writing from the Caribbean and other former colonies of the British Empire, and so his approach to “Turning Christian” has a decidedly postcolonial slant. Ramraj argues that “‘Turning Christian’ belongs to a fictional genre that has been emerging in the postcolonial period — a genre that could be termed ‘convert narratives’”. He goes on to explain the features of this genre:

Written from the convert’s rather than the missionary’s perspective or from templates provided by the missionary, these narratives seek to counter the rendition of conversion that envisages the colonial figure as: “clay which could easily be molded into a Christian and Western shape.” They depict the colonial “turning Christian” for pragmatic and opportunistic rather than spiritual reasons — conversion that can be regarded in terms of Homi Bhabha’s camouflage mimicry. (2002: 175)

To prove his point, Ramraj goes on to identify a literary genealogy for “Turning Christian”, one that includes other “Indo-Caribbean” works such as Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays (1974), Clyde Hosein’s short story “I’m a Presbyterian, Mr Kramer” (1990), and V. S. Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), as well as Brian Moore’s Canadian novel Black Robe (1985). The latter is included to allow for cross-cultural comparisons in a manner true to the postcolonial critical ethic of drawing parallels and finding patterns across the national literatures grouped together under the postcolonial rubric.

But while it is true that the subject of the non-Western subaltern converting to Christianity is taken up in “Turning Christian”, especially in its first section, Ramraj soon encounters an interpretive problem as the details of Selvon’s story do not line up all that well with the conventions of the convert narrative as he describes them. Indeed, the story diverges in a number of ways from the literary models Ramraj draws on for comparison — and not in a manner that one can reasonably argue problematizes and extends the conventions of the genre. So, in an attempt to fit “Turning Christian” as neatly as possible within the convert narrative frame, Ramraj draws conclusions that are not supported by the details of the story, or its historical context. Ramraj argues that Selvon does not engage, as is the practice in convert narratives, in a critique or exposé of the colonial structures and institutions that imposed conversion on subaltern communities and seems to suggest that this is a failing of the story. Ramraj puts it this way:

[W]hat sets Selvon’s convert narrative apart from these writers is his hesitancy to condemn outright the colonial policies that forced colonials to resort defensively to camouflage conversion […] Selvon’s indictment of the Canadian [Presbyterian] Mission’s complicity with the government in perpetuating the indentured system of Trinidad and its disruption of families and friends is muted. (2002: 177; 185)

In trying to raise the volume on Selvon’s non-engagement, Ramraj claims that although the critique is not amplified, “Turning Christian” censures the Canadian Mission “for its role in sustaining the divide between Indo- and Afro-Trinidadians” because “the discord between the two solitudes [black and Indian] is Selvon’s primary concern” in the story (2002: 180). The second part of “Turning Christian” does depict an unsettling encounter between Changoo, the Indian protagonist, and several black characters he meets in the town of San Fernando. But, as my discussion below demonstrates, the careful unfolding of the characters’ motives and choices and the attention paid to registering the subtleties of their responses indicate that the real focus of the story is an exploration of the potential for mutual exchange and recognition across seemingly disparate groups rather than, or in spite of, any apparent conflict or disharmony.

In her explication of what she calls the “intimacies of four continents”, Lisa Lowe provides a comprehensive account of the conditions that produced encounters and interminglings like the ones Selvon describes in “Turning Christian”. Among the meanings on which Lowe elaborates are the “intimacies” expressed in the “variety of contacts among slaves, indentured, and mixed peoples living, working, and surviving together in the Americas” (2015: 34). Earlier, Lowe anticipates this argument that the collision of Europe, Africa, and Asia within plantation societies in the Americas was in service of advancing European modernity and was made possible by other “intimacies” such as

the political economic logics through which men and women from Africa and Asia were forcibly transported to the Americas […] [where] native, mixed, and creole peoples constituted slave societies, the profits of which gave rise to bourgeois republican states in Europe and North America. (2006: 193)

Lowe’s use of “intimacies” to account not only for “the range of labouring contacts [ . . . ] necessary for the production of bourgeois domesticity” but also the “proximity and affinity” of subaltern groups which gave “rise to political, sexual, intellectual collaborations, subaltern revolts and uprising” (2015: 35) succinctly indicates the political and economic contexts that inform the nineteenth-century world Selvon recreates in “Turning Christian” and explains the larger significance of the cross-racial alliances and intercultural contacts he explores in the story. Although there is no public uprising or revolt in the story, the characters — especially the Indian protagonist — experience seismic changes in their lives throughout the course of the narrative. These changes, which occurred in the seemingly ordinary and everyday interactions between groups in the post-emancipation period, were part of a larger process that effectively destabilized colonial authority and resulted in the modern Caribbean’s Creole societies.

When the critical response to “Turning Christian” is informed by an understanding of the inter-group relations that were emerging in Trinidad in the nineteenth century, as well as established patterns in Selvon’s body of work, it becomes clear that the story’s focus on an important moment of cultural contact in Caribbean history — that is, the arrival of Indian indentured labourers — reveals a narrative interest in questions of identity and community. In the Caribbean context, these questions are invariably linked to creolization, which Sidney W. Mintz has defined in Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations as “the creative synthesis undertaken primarily by the slaves, interacting with each other and with free people, including the master class, particularly in the tropical New World sugar plantation colonies”. He adds: “By this synthesis, new social institutions, furnished with reordered cultural content, were forged to provide a basis for continuing cultural growth” (2010: 190). Mintz takes his cue from the seminal work on the subject, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, in which Kamau Brathwaite defines the process of creolization as “a cultural action — material, psychological and spiritual — based upon the stimulus/response of individuals within the society to their environment and — as white/black culturally discrete groups — to each other” (1971/2005: 296). Importantly, in refining the concept a few years later in Contradictory Omens, Brathwaite includes not only the European master class and the slave underclass in the intercultural exchange at the heart of creolization, but also later arrivals such as the Indians and the Chinese. Brathwaite identifies a “more truly creole norm” where the “mulatto”, which is “the ‘white’ and ‘black’ still locked in competition for ascendancy”, is “called upon to respond to […] new waves of cultural incursion: the Chinese and East Indians, introduced into the plantation system to fill the gap left by the African slaves after emancipation; and more recent/modern Americanization”. Brathwaite develops this expansive conceptualization of creolization when he argues that “[t]he wholeness of [Caribbean] society therefore […] now depends not only upon our ‘mulatto’ capability (already defined as unstable!) but on the response of the ‘new’ groups to this, and this to them” (1974: 6).

Nevertheless, some critics have faulted formulations of the Creole society thesis — especially in the case of Trinidad — for bypassing the contributions of the Indian community in favour of seeing creolization as a two-way process between blacks and whites. As Viranjini Munasinghe puts it,

although the concept [of] Creole society nominally includes Indo-Caribbeans as part of the heterogeneity characterizing [the Caribbean] region, attempts to theorize the nature of Creole societies in terms of a complex dialectical movement between contradictory principles structuring the creolization process have largely focused on the African and European elements in the New World. (2001: 135)

Munasinghe identifies other problems with the theory and practice of creolization, including the tendency among some Trinidadians to see the “Creole society thesis as a formal ideology for Afro-Caribbean nationalism”; a practice the author argues, that “further reifie[s] the identification of Creole with specifically African elements”, “foreclose[s] the possibility of applying the rich analytical insights afforded by the theory of creolization to Indo-Caribbean practices and values”, and assesses “the degrees to which Indo-Caribbeans have creolized […] on the basis of Indo-Caribbean adoption of Afro-Creole patterns” (2001: 139).

Selvon’s depiction of the creolization process in “Turning Christian” is more in line with Brathwaite’s ideation in Contradictory Omens since it allows for the modification of existing Creole norms (which are always in flux) by new ethno-cultural influences and contacts. In this light, “Turning Christian”’s pre-twentieth century setting ³ becomes an even more significant narrative choice as it allows Selvon to explore the first tentative steps towards an intercultural experience taken by members of the Indian community in a society in which creolization had been underway for some time. In Selvon’s depiction of white–Indian–black relations, Creole identification claims are not associated with any one group. Neither are such claims associated more with the native over the foreign-born. Rather, Selvon’s moment-of-arrival setting allows him to present creolization as a complex process of negotiation involving all the groups identified, regardless of how long they have been present in the region or at what point they enter into cultural negotiations. Indeed, Selvon’s imagining of the complexity of the response of the newly-arrived labourers to unfamiliar social and cultural experiences undermines nineteenth-century colonial constructions of the indentured labourers as culturally saturated aliens unable and unwilling to adapt to different environments. In fact, in Selvon’s hands, the Canadian Presbyterian mission to the Indians — which was fully supported by the colonial government as a means to “socialize the Indians into becoming a docile and tractable force” and separate them from ex-slaves who were being displaced from plantation settings (Haraksingh, 1987: 31) — is a major, if unwitting, facilitator in the three-way creolization process underway in the story.

The concern with creole identities and the creolizing process is very much in evidence in “Turning Christian”. Selvon had long demonstrated an interest in these themes and they can be readily traced throughout his writing, even though critics — strangely enough — have not given as much attention to this aspect of Selvon’s work as they have to, for example, his use of language and his comic strategies. Roydon Salick is a rare scholar who has given attention to Selvon’s exploration of Caribbean creolization, particularly in relation to Indian communities in Trinidad. Both self-identified and described by others as a Creole, Selvon always held up creolization as a social and political ideal for Trinidad, even (or especially) when ethnic strife and violence reared their ugly heads — as they so often do in Trinidad. Salick contends that in advocating for this ideal in his fiction, Selvon shows no interest in “facile creolization” — that is, in the kind of ethno-cultural rootlessness that hamstrings the cosmopolitan characters in his middle-class novels (for example, Adrian in I Hear Thunder (1963) and Foster in An Island Is A World) as they sample and borrow from various communities but can find none for themselves. Selvon’s interest, Salick continues, is in a more “meaningful creolization […] [that] necessitates the unconditional acceptance of ethnicity, to which the values and customs of a plural society are added to form a less restricting, more protean, richer cultural experience” (2001: 88).

This is a good point from which to begin looking more closely at “Turning Christian” to ascertain the ways in which Selvon’s imagining of the experience of the first waves of Indian labourers into Trinidad unravels their different responses to the challenges and pressures to adapt their worldview, cultural practices, and sense of themselves to the exigencies of their new environment. In this light “Turning Christian” is less, if at all, concerned with the act of conversion itself, or with critiquing the socio-political and religious institutions that regulated and benefitted from the subalterns’ conversion experience. Rather, by drawing on the historical fact of the widespread Christianizing of indentured servants from India, the author finds a narrative occasion for dramatizing his characters’ potential for meaningful creolization. Thus, the story’s title can be read as both a statement and a question, and underlines Selvon’s interest in imagining what consequences such a choice had for the various communities participating in that particular moment of cultural encounter.

My argument that Selvon’s interest in the religious conversion of the Indian labourers to Christianity is primarily as a means of testing the potential for their creolization in the early years of post-emancipation cultural contact involves assessing these newcomers’ relationship to the black/African as well as the white/European communities in Trinidad, who were both already involved in a creolizing process. So there are three, rather than two, solitudes (to rephrase Ramraj’s borrowed terminology) to account for in the world of the story. Even though there are no directly participating white characters, “Turning Christian” does make several references to “estate proprietors”, “sugar owners”, and “white bosses” (Selvon, 1995: 381); ⁴ and there is also mention of a “Canadian minister” who leads a Presbyterian congregation of Indian newcomers in the town (380), and a “Canadian missionary”, who goes to the sugar estate to offer lessons to the Indian children living there (379). The physical absence of white characters does not mean they are marginal to the story. The presence and power of the white ruling class are concretized in the pervasiveness of Christianity and its anglicizing influence in the lives of all the characters because, in “Turning Christian”, Christianity is metonymic of the white community comprised of planters and missionaries.

This form of representation allows Selvon to foreground the imbalance of power between the white community and the Indian and black communities. The hegemony asserted by the white bosses and the Canadian Presbyterian mission together is signalled in the story’s description of an emerging social economy in which upward mobility and increased access for members of the subordinate groups are determined simultaneously by the extent to which they are Christianized. But the story does not set out, as Ramraj’s convert narrative framework requires, to “condemn” or “criticize” the superordinacy of the colonial authorities and/or the Presbyterian mission. Instead, by focusing on the anglicizing action of Christian conversion as a modality of that particular moment of Caribbean cultural encounter, the story identifies the white community as both participant in and unwitting agent of the complex creolizing process unfolding in post-emancipation Trinidad. Unequal status between participating groups did not hinder interculturation because, as Kamau Brathwaite reminds us in Contradictory Omens, an important aspect of creolization as an historical process in the Caribbean was the (oft-times fraught) exchange between “dominant and sub-dominant groups” (1974: 63).

In his essay “Three Into One Can’t Go — East Indian, Trinidadian, Westindian”, Selvon draws attention to the importance of recognizing the participation of the white community in the creolizing process in Trinidad:

Now, in defining the Trinidadian, we have to remember that every one of us comes from the immigrant stock, unless we can claim ancestry with an indigenous Carib or Arawak […] and in the mixture that makes up the population, it is easy to forget, as the Blacks and the Indians dominate the arena and cross swords, that there are white people, for instance, who were born and bred in these islands […] Massa day may be done, but he left a string of white piccaninnies throughout the Caribbean who make an essential ingredient in the melting pot. (1987: 21–2)

In fact, even before any of the black characters are introduced, the cultural encounter that initiates the crisis of identity the Indian protagonist experiences in “Turning Christian” involves the Indian and white communities. The precipitating event is the interest the protagonist’s son is showing in taking catechism and English instruction from a Canadian Presbyterian missionary. The boy even runs away sometimes to attend the Mission school. When we meet Changoo, our protagonist, he is living with his wife Kayshee and their son Raman on the Cross Crossing sugar estate. The story opens with Changoo himself at a crossroads. He and Kayshee have recently decided to let Raman go to live in the nearby town of San Fernando with his uncle Jaggernauth so that the boy can attend a Mission school full time. Although he follows through on the decision, Changoo is conflicted. On the one hand, echoing his younger brother Jaggernauth who had long urged this move, Changoo tells himself that he is “just going to give [Raman] a chance” (380) so that the boy can do better for himself and prosper like other Indians who have been branching out of the ethnic enclaves of indentured life on the estates. But on the other hand, he is being distanced from his own community by his best friend and fellow Hindu Gopaul who accuses him of “taking [his] son to town to give him away to the white people religion” (380). Changoo’s crisis of identity finds him caught between the imperative to adapt to a new society and redefine his sense of himself within this unfamiliar environment, and the equally pressing imperative to remain separate in an attempt to preserve motherland traditions and Old World identities and maintain community affiliations with those like Gopaul who refuse to adapt.

In Changoo, Gopaul, Raman, and Jaggernauth, the reader is presented with four possible responses to creolization from within the Indian community. Changoo’s forging of tentative links with the larger society through his son’s Christian education identifies him as, in Salick’s words, one of “a few bold adults [who] take the huge step of sending their sons to schools in the city” (2013: 37). Such characters appear from time to time in Selvon’s novels and short stories. Although “Turning Christian” is one of Selvon’s later stories, genealogically Changoo is the precursor to characters such as Ramlal and Rookmin in “Cane Is Bitter”, one of his earlier stories published in the collection Ways of Sunlight (1957/1987). We do not know if, like Ramlal, Changoo will later repent his decision and then insist that his son embraces only traditional Hindu culture. What we do know is that in “Turning Christian” Changoo, however hesitantly, becomes a facilitator of and participant in the creolization process. In allowing his son to participate in the world beyond the estate, Changoo is not renouncing his ancestral identity in favour of another, but is allowing his family to experience creolization as “an acquired and requisite stratiform opulence of multicultural experience” (Salick, 2001: 9). That experience will grow and strengthen with Raman (who is the story’s second generation representative) ⁵ as his education and English-language skills — both courtesy of the Canadian Presbyterian mission — will be his gateway into the wider Trinidadian society. In this regard Raman is the pre-twentieth-century iteration of the two Romeshes and Tiger who move towards an understanding of the complications, frustrations, and rewards of the creolizing process in “Cane Is Bitter”, The Plains of Caroni (1970/1985), A Brighter Sun, and Turn Again Tiger (1958). Salick argues convincingly that through such characters Selvon furthers the theme of the value of education in advocating for creolization (2001: 9) and insists on “the inestimable value of education and schooling” to Indian participation in wider cultural and political processes (Salick, 2013: 97).

Changoo, Raman, and Jaggernauth stand in stark contrast to Gopaul who resists any form of engagement with the “Other”, whether that engagement is presented as an incentive — which in this story is the prospect of greater prosperity for those who adapt to and participate more actively in the wider society — or as a threat — that is, the loss of the Indians’ religion, beliefs, and familiar way of life. Characters like Gopaul who are invested in preserving and defending a limiting notion of cultural authenticity often do not fare too well in Selvon’s fictional universe although, as is the case with Gopaul, Selvon’s depiction is usually more compassionate than dismissive. They are seen as relics of the past who are unable to participate in contemporary life in any meaningful way. If Changoo and Raman are seen as vehicles for change, then one could argue that Gopaul represents a sector of the Indian community whose desire to maintain motherland traditions wholesale and unchanged is “inimical to the Indo-Trinidadian’s chances for social mobility and acceptance in a plural society, for religious freedom and equality in a polycredal experience, and for intellectual ascendency in a progressive, competitive world” (Salick, 2013: 37). Still, it would be misleading to suggest that, in this story or in any of his other writing, Selvon is advocating a rejection of Indian culture and traditions as necessary to creolization. Selvon clearly articulates — both in and beyond his fiction — a view of Indian creolization that requires a balance between a more cosmopolitanized/multicultural experience and a healthy sense of ethnic identification. Interculturation, rather than assimilation, is the ideal. Salick’s notion of “meaningful creolization” discussed earlier is grounded in comments Selvon makes on the subject in “Three Into One Can’t Go”. At one point in the essay, Selvon takes to task his younger self — and his friends from other ethnocultural backgrounds — for ignoring or being ashamed of their histories and heritage in their pursuit of a quintessential Trinidadian identity. He recalls feeling a

certain embarrassment and uneasiness on visiting a friend in whose household Indian habits and customs were maintained, as if it were a social stigma not to be westernised. The roti and goat-curry was welcome, but why did they have to play Indian music instead of putting on a calypso or one of the American tunes from the hit parade? (1987: 15–16)

For Selvon, that embarrassment and uneasiness undermined the cosmopolitan identity he and his friends were attempting to cultivate and provide evidence of a subtle and unconscious indoctrination process not very different from the racialism he grew up with. There are signs of this indoctrination in Selvon’s characterization of Jaggernauth. At first glance, with his emphasis on social mobility and the material benefits of turning Christian, Jaggernauth may appear typical of the pragmatists of postcolonial convert narratives as described by Ramraj. But Selvon’s characterization of this English-speaking, Christianized, former indentured servant turned successful jeweller is far more layered. The story gives only a brief close-up of Jaggernauth, but it is very telling. After Jaggernauth reassures Changoo that he will take full responsibility for providing Raman with “clothes and shoes to wear, and send[ing] him to school and church” if his brother brings the boy to town the following week, the omniscient narrator intervenes into their dialogue with the following words:

Jaggernauth wanted a feather in his cap, though he did not know what it meant; it must be something good, for the Canadian minister in the church told the congregation it would be a feather in their cap if they could persuade any heathens to be converted to the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. (380)

Clearly, whatever his other reasons for being part of the Presbyterian community, Jaggernauth is also motivated by pleasing the Canadian missionaries and finding favour with the minister of his church. His interest in a Christian education stems at least in part from a desire to belong to and be accepted by a community that he thinks has more to offer than his own. Jaggernauth does not seem to be interested in evolving a polycredal experience or worldview. Rather, his attempt to Christianize members of his extended family is as much cultural as it is religious proselytizing. Such behaviour betrays an unquestioning belief in the superiority of Western peoples and cultures and is one of the outcomes of an insidious process of colonial indoctrination. As Selvon points out in “Three Into One Can’t Go”, those who adopt this perspective believe it is “a social stigma not to be westernised” (1987: 15). Their choice in the context of cultural contact is to assimilate as fully as possible into the dominant culture, which often means a denial or rejection of their own heritage. There is no ambivalence about or menace in Jaggernauth’s mimic man response. Not surprisingly, his colonial mimicry validates the dominant groups’ “desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” as itself (Bhabha, 1994: 86).

In this light Jaggernauth’s encouragement of his relatives to “turn Christian” appears less the strategy of the pragmatist and more an indication of a genuine belief that Christianization is not only an improvement on indentured life but also on being Indian. In a telling moment, the story reveals that Jaggernauth’s experience of Christianity is only an approximation of the conversion experience to which he aspires. Jaggernauth is very proud that Raman can recite the Lord’s Prayer, and in English too. But he seems unaware that the boy’s rendition is mangled. To Raman’s “Our father which art in heaven, hollow be thine name”, Jaggernauth responds with “Look at that!” and turns to Changoo “as if he was the father showing off his son’s accomplishments” (379). The suggestion that Jaggernauth’s understanding of the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer is flawed is an effective means of emphasizing the gap between him and the Canadian Presbyterians, despite his attempts to be one of them.

Selvon is also careful to point out in “Three Into One Can’t Go” that “all the races in Trinidad were involved in [the creolizing] processing and coming under the influence of western culture” (1987: 16), and his depiction of the black characters who appear in the second section of the story bears this out. The main black character is Norbert, an ex-slave turned policeman. Norbert zealously executes his duty of keeping the Indians tied to the estates and away from the towns on the order of the estate owners who are concerned about losing the labour of the indentureds. So when Changoo and Raman arrive in San Fernando, they immediately appear out of place to Norbert and the other black people. Although his focus is on his morning break — he is looking forward to a nice meal and getting acquainted with a pretty “high-brown” girl he spotted earlier — Norbert quickly accosts father and son, with the very vocal encouragement of the other black characters. The encounter is tense and almost volatile. It would be easy to read the altercation as evidence that, as Ramraj argued, Indian–black inter-ethnic discord is the primary concern in the story. But consistent with what I have been arguing, I suggest that Selvon imagines this incident as a way to demonstrate that even in those early years of cultural contact a tentative mutual recognition was emerging through the fear and suspicion the two main subaltern groups harboured against each other.

Like Jaggernauth, Norbert’s motives are more layered than they might first appear. His dominant emotional registers are fear and pride, and these emotional responses reveal (although it is not apparent to him) the interweaving bonds of his relationship with both whites and Indians. The reader learns that wearing the police uniform “doubled Norbert’s concepts about himself”. He “felt like a giant” and his “swagger” spoke of the sense of confidence and authority he had as a representative of the “LAW” (380). That pride stems from him being able to share in, even if it is in a very small way, the authority of the white community. And it is pride in his position and what it enables him to be and do that bolsters his policing work — work that depends on maintaining an Us/Them distinction between blacks and Indians. Norbert has nightmares that blacks could be re-enslaved, so he reasons that it is better to “Let the coolies sweat with hoe and cutlass in the hot-sun for Massa [for the black people were] done with that” (381). Since as readers we know that Norbert’s policing is motivated by fear of the black people’s precarious position in an increasingly plural society, we can also see how his perception of the Indians as an alien race that needs to be kept in place derives from a larger socializing practice wherein the colonial government, the planters, and the missionaries encouraged estrangement between blacks and Indians in order to maintain white hegemony.

The creolizing process involving the black and white communities prior to the arrival of the Indians also accounts for Norbert’s and the other black characters’ sense of the indentureds as different. After centuries of slavery, blacks and whites had come to share a common language: Trinidadian English — a creolized version of Standard English. They also recognize a central religion: Christianity. But the Indians have different and unfamiliar languages and religions, and the question now is how the existing Creole norm will respond to this latest wave of cultural infusion, as well as how the newcomers will respond to the Creole culture they come in contact with. Answers are teased at the climax of the Norbert–Changoo altercation. Under siege from the threatening and mocking crowd who shout “Don’t let the coolie go!”(384), a frightened and angry Changoo hits upon the idea that if he explains he got permission to leave the estate so his Christian brother who lives in the town can help Raman become a Christian too, all will be well. The narrator avers that Changoo “thought that mention of this Christian business would end the interrogation, because Jaggernauth had told him so many times that it would take care of all his troubles” (383). And so he communicates this explanation to Norbert and the crowd. It is Changoo’s longest piece of English communication in the story, and it has the desired effect. Norbert, who “had never arrested a coolie who offered religion as an excuse” (383) is confused, as are the other black characters who “began to argue among themselves at this turn [of events]” (383).

Changoo’s explanation, and his ability to communicate it in a language shared by all three groups, forces a moment of mutual recognition between the indentured servant and the ex-slaves. The English language, like Christianity, represents the anglicizing element in the creolizing process that is ongoing in post-emancipation Trinidad. Selvon’s rendering of the characters’ speech in dialogue and interior monologue shows similar non-standard English syntactical patterns between the blacks and Indians, which suggests that Changoo most likely picked up the language from non-Indians on or around the sugar estate, such as Creole foremen and managers (and perhaps also from his brother and his son) long before the moment in time taken up in the story. It is reasonable to assume from his familiarity with Trinidadian Creole that Changoo had contact — albeit in a small way because of the enforced spatial separation of the two groups — with the black population before his trip to San Fernando. This is Changoo’s first time in town, and he is at first “disconcerted” by Norbert and the crowd only because “it was the first time he had ever seen so many black people together” (82). Indeed, Mintz’s reminder that the term “creolization” was “first used to describe the process by which a new language was created in the interaction between slaves and masters” (2010: 189) is pertinent here as Changoo’s ability to speak Trinidadian English/Creole is evidence that a more expansive creolizing process, now involving the Indians, was already in play prior to the opening of the story; or at least was occurring in tandem with Changoo’s conflict over being Christianized. In “Turning Christian”, then, Selvon’s use of Trinidadian Creole does not merely demonstrate his skill in rendering Caribbean voices authentically on the page. It is a narrative strategy — also evident in my explanation below of the linguistic mirroring effected between Changoo and Tanty Matilda — employed to reflect an evolving three-way creolizing process.

Norbert responds to Changoo’s clear communication of his “Christian business” in a way that “wasn’t in keeping with his usual arrests” (384). Instead of his usual habit of encouraging “public participation when he was called upon to do his duty” (382), Norbert asserts his authority against the crowd’s wishes and lets Changoo and Raman go. Norbert rationalizes his decision by telling himself it would be a personal inconvenience to escort father and son “all the way back up the road in the hot sun, to the police station”, especially as nothing was amiss with Changoo’s travel pass. He also tells himself that the high-brown girl is testing his manhood by pretending to egg him on along with the others to make an arrest, and so to show his power and also win her favour he will not allow himself to be swayed by the crowd (383). His decision, as I will show, ends up initiating another moment of potential exchange and recognition. But as important as his decision is to undermining the enforced separation of blacks and Indians, Norbert does not consciously set out to achieve this end. Rather, it is his actions based on personal motives that lead to transformation on a larger scale.

In an article on The Lonely Londoners, I argue that in Selvon’s hands the minor politics of everyday negotiations and struggle have the same transformative possibilities as the major politics of grand schemes and protest movements (Simpson, 2011: 197). I make the point that it is not Selvon’s style to tackle, in a direct or forceful manner, the grand political schemes and protests of Caribbean experience. Rather, he prefers to show how ordinary people spur on social and cultural transformation from the ground up simply by navigating the unfamiliar in their everyday lives and adjusting their sense of themselves and the choices they make, one personal encounter at a time, in response to the challenges that sustained contact inevitably brings. This also rings true for the characters in “Turning Christian”. Echoing Selvon’s depiction in The Lonely Londoners of the metropolitan centre as a space of transformation, it is in the urban landscape of San Fernando that the characters in “Turning Christian” come closest to participating in and experiencing an evolutionary, interculturating process of creolization. In Selvon’s Trinidad-based fiction, towns and cities encapsulate a Creole world where the sociocultural dynamic is in marked contrast to that of the rural villages and isolated sugar estates occupied predominantly or exclusively by Indians. As such, it is not surprising that the narrative in “Turning Christian” culminates in the town adjoining Cross Crossing. A vertical creolizing process between the white community and the Indian newcomers is initiated on the sugar estate through Changoo’s decision about Raman’s education, and evidenced in reports of other Indians “turning Christian”. But it is in San Fernando — a space in which all three major ethno-cultural groups are more likely to live in closer contact — that creolization on a fuller scale can take place. This involves not only the simultaneity, but also the intersection of vertical and lateral creolizing processes — the latter, in this case, between the two subaltern groups of ex-slaves and indentured labourers.

Similar to interculturation between dominant and subordinate groups, lateral creolization is characterized by, and also transcends, confrontation and conflict. As O. Nigel Bolland points out:

Creolisation […] is not a homogenising process, but rather a process of contention between people who are members of social formations and carriers of culture, a process in which their own ethnicity is continually re-examined and re-defined in terms of the relevant oppositions between different social formations at various historical moments. (2002: 38)

Contention and re-examination underlie Tanty Matilda’s response to Changoo. Here, the story raises the question of whether or how the religious culture of the Indians will be integrated into a norm in which Christianity, though dominant, is also permeable to influences from traditional African religions with which it exists along a continuum in the Creole religious experience. Tanty, who had slaved beside Norbert’s now deceased father before emancipation, appears to be something of a maternal figure to the policeman. And unlike the other black onlookers, she supports Norbert’s decision to let Changoo and Raman go. However, she does so not because she feels any affinity with or sympathy for Changoo, but because she fears what appears to be his and his people’s strangeness. When Changoo holds up his son’s impending Christian conversion as a talisman to the hostile crowd, Tanty is not convinced of his insider status and her advice therefore is: “Let him go, Norb, don’t interfere with religious business, them coolies have their own bassa-bassa what work for them!” (383). She does not know what to make of this strange hybrid: a “coolie” invoking Christianity. Nor does she know whether it bodes good or bad for black–Indian relations. So she prefers to not engage.

Tanty’s characterization of Hinduism as bassa-bassa (trouble) recalls a similar denigration of traditional African religions in their encounter with Christianity. But although her choice of words seems to resurrect the spectre of ethnic differentiation and separation, the story hints at the possibility of recognition between her and Changoo. A subtle mirroring is effected between the two characters in their ability to identify, and also in the similarity of the phrases they use to pinpoint, the crux of the identity crisis in the moment of encounter between Indians and blacks. For Changoo, it is this “Christian business”, and for Tanty it is this “religious business”. Both are, in their own way, apprehensive about the impact a new religious ethos is having on how they understand themselves and live their lives; and each is attempting to negotiate an outcome beneficial to their side. In the end, they both desire the same thing: Changoo’s release. This outcome undercuts the ethno-cultural separation and differentiation an arrest was supposed to maintain. And whether or not the participants in the encounter are aware of it, this is a major step towards black–Indian integration in the narrative.

The second major step comes in the story’s closing sentence. As Changoo takes advantage of Norbert’s uncharacteristic decision and hurries away into town with Raman, the policeman looks around for the high-brown girl, only to see her “running up the road after the man and boy …” (384). The use of ellipses leaves the outcome of the meeting between the girl and the Indian characters uncertain. ⁶ However, given the narrative’s trajectory, it is very likely that this next moment of encounter will be more congenial than the one that just ended, thereby expanding the three-way creolizing process even more. The high-brown girl is the physical embodiment of what Brathwaite describes as a “black/white” or “mulatto” norm (1974: 6) that is still in the process of establishing itself in the world of the story. Her willingness to engage the newcomers beyond conflict and confrontation suggests that the Indians are being positioned to influence that norm. In not saying exactly how the story ends, Selvon leaves it to the reader to decide for herself. The ending we write for the story will indicate the extent to which we are invested in creolization as a cultural and political ideal for Caribbean societies. Creolization — both as a concept and in practice — provides an integrative model for Caribbean societies, and is particularly relevant when discussing modern nations such as Trinidad where ethnic strife continues to undermine national unity. Approximately 30 years ago when Selvon wrote this story, Trinidadians were, as they still are, struggling with division and conflict along ethnic lines, mainly between Indians and blacks. The views he expresses on ethnic division in the island in “Three Into One Can’t Go” show Selvon’s support for a unified national identity that cuts across ethnic insularity and inculturation, while also honouring ancestral forms and their contemporary expression. For those familiar with Selvon’s body of work, the pre-twentieth-century setting in “Turning Christian” is unusual for an author whose preference is to locate his narratives in periods contemporaneous with his own. Of course, the story’s subject matter made that choice necessary. But I am also suggesting that in returning to an originating moment in Trinidad’s history, Selvon offers a version of the national narrative in which the plot involving Indians and their encounter with blacks and whites leads inevitably to exchange, adaptation, cooperation, and a continually evolving collective New World identity.