Galahad’s Identity CrisisQuestioning the Essence of Race

The first section of the novel focuses on Galahad’s first few days of contact with his new city. Henry Oliver, a Trinidadian bachelor, had “descend[ed]” into Britain with such audacity that Moses instantly renamed him Sir Galahad.1 The bus queue and the employment exchange are two public spaces that test Galahad’s ability to adjust to his new environment. Enforcing the unwritten rules of urban conduct, locals disapprove of Galahad’s behaviour when he pushes his way to the front of the queue. The conductor corrects him “‘Ere, you can’t break the queue like that, mate,’” “an old lady look at him with a loud tone in her eye,” and a young woman tells her companion that “‘They’ll have to learn to do better, you know’” (25). That Galahad’s act causes so many reactions indicates the hurdles that new arrivals are required to overcome to be considered Londoners, just as the wording of the corrections—we don’t do that “here,” “they’ll” have to do better— indicates the outsider status to which immigrants were automatically assigned, despite the conductor’s friendly use of “mate.” Similarly, in the employment exchange where Moses takes Galahad to get him registered with the Ministry of Labour, the desperate atmosphere “hit Galahad so hard that he had to stand against the wall for a minute” (27). The narrator describes the space where “a lot of men get together to look for work and draw money from the Welfare State” as a place “where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up” (27), a description that can also be applied to Selvon’s dystopian representation of the city as a whole.

Despite his boldness, when Galahad is alone for the first time “a feeling of loneliness and fright come over him all of a sudden” (23). It is clear then that in his isolation, Galahad consciously performs rather than intuits bravado. He dons this overconfident mask as a means of better negotiating his surroundings. Galahad becomes increasingly aware of the scope of his loneliness in London even though his naivety is such that, in his understanding of himself as a British citizen, he does not consider himself as Other. Accordingly, he looks to negotiate his surroundings by attempting to frame London in the tropical terms that are familiar to him.

This proves impossible, however, and Galahad realizes that he had “never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange” (23). Galahad perceives London’s sky as “so desolate it make him more frighten” (23). In addition to his insecure psychological reflex, the shock of arrival begins to manifest physically and, for him, the sky takes on “a kind of melancholy aspect … that make him shiver” (23).

Despite the problems that Galahad initially has in the city, he soon begins using place-names at every opportunity in order to connect himself to the glamour that certain areas of London represent:

He had a way, whenever he talking with the boys, he using the names of the places like they mean big romance, as if to say “I was in Oxford Street” have more prestige than if he just say “I was up the road.” … Jesus Christ, when he say “Charing Cross,” when he realise that is he, Sir Galahad, who going there, near that place that everybody in the world know about (it even have the name in the dictionary) he feel like a new man. (71-72)

1 In Arthurian legends (the legend of King Arthur and his court at Camelot, a legendary kingdom located in Great Britain), Galahad was the purest and noblest knight in King Arthur’s court and the only one ever to see the Holy Grail.

Although London had demoralized him when he first arrived, Galahad’s sense that he is a “new man” is oddly also a result of his relationship to the city. As the above passage indicates, Galahad connects London’s “big romance” and “prestige” to his own identity—since he has by this time become a Londoner at ease on Oxford Street or Charing Cross. Even the nickname Galahad, which Moses gives the newly arrived Henry Oliver on his first day in London, is an indication of the strong influence of British culture—particularly the literary aspects of that culture, including tales of legendary medieval knights—on Caribbean migrants educated in the colonies. Unlike Galahad, Moses is no longer stirred by the city’s well-known sites and place-names, and his character offers a striking contrast to wide-eyed new migrants. Moses sounds wearied by his experiences when he tells his protégé, “Ah, in you I see myself, how I was when I was new to London. All them places like nothing to me now” (73).

Galahad’s preparations for donning his British gentrified persona, allow him to subvert the power of the British establishment and of British popular culture. This is beautifully and subtly emphasized when Galahad does not just give his shoes a quick polish, but puts on “a little more Cherry Blossom and give them extra shine” (73). Galahad intensifies their blackness so that he can proudly “see his face in the leather” (73). It is ironic that Galahad is so relaxed in his blackness even as he prepares to imitate a characteristically British dress style. This is another indicator of Galahad’s self-division, itself a tactic of survival. As Galahad continues making his toilet, Selvon’s narrator’s vocabulary shows how West Indians internalized the colonizer’s language with its pseudo-scientific claims that blacks were an inferior “race.” Galahad is portrayed not as simply looking in a mirror, but as “concentrating on his physiognomy,” and as finishing his preparations like a medical “specialist” (74).

By focusing on a single evening in Galahad’s life, Selvon is able to expose readers to the everyday joys and sorrows of this new location for Caribbean migrants. Piccadilly Circus symbolizes all that Galahad loves about London, and it continues to affect him as it did when he first arrived: “that circus have a magnet for him, that circus represent life, that circus is the beginning and the ending of the world” (74). While walking through the city in his expensive new clothes and thinking about the young woman he has a date to meet under the big clock in Piccadilly tube station, Galahad is aware only of the exciting and pleasant side of London, until a child’s stare reminds him that he is seen racially. When he smiles and tries to be friendly, “the child cower and shrink and begin to cry” (71). By this stage in the novel, Galahad has established himself in London; yet, unlike the more jaded Moses, he seems still to appreciate its beauty. Through this crucial moment of racial recognition, Selvon awakens his character from his fantasy and plunges him in the dark world of binary oppositions.

Studying the colour of his hand, he begins a kind of schizoid dialogue between two irreconcilable versions of his identity, one hegemonic, one subordinate, between someone he regards as “me” (an entity that can be integrated into universalized manhood) and the adversary of “me,” the colour black:

Galahad watch the colour of his hand, and talk to it, saying, ‘Colour, is you that causing all this . . . You know is you that cause a lot of misery in the world… I ain’t do anything to infuriate the people…, is you!’ Galahad talking to the colour Black, as if he is a person, telling it that is not he who causing botheration in the place, but Black, who is a worthless thing for making trouble all about. (77)

For Galahad, “Black” is worthless because it fixes him in the world of subordination, restricting his access to the grand narrative of masculine legitimacy and the material, sexual, and psychological rewards it promises. For Galahad and the other boys, a life lived according to the terms of epic masculinity demands that they renounce large parts of themselves, and their obsession with fitting into a particular framework causes them to misread the possibilities of their own lives and instead to struggle to fit inside the limited parameters posited by a grand narrative of heroic masculine behaviour.