Integration in The Lonely Londoners Carlos Bispo College

It have some men in this world, they don’t do nothing at all, and you feel that they would dead from starvation, but day after day you meeting them and they looking hale, they laughing and they talking as if they have a million dollars, and in truth it look as if they would not only live longer than you but they would dead happier. Cap was a man like that.
– Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin Books, 2006) (page 31)

The Lonely Londoners was published in 1956 during a period of intense mass-migration from Britain’s colonies to England due to the post-war situation and its demand for labour. The perspective of a possible better life filled up many people’s aspirations with romantic expectation. Once they arrive there, they face a distinctive reality. The book shows how these migrants try to succeed in London among so many others of them and the British silent prejudice: “when you go in the hotel or the restaurant they will politely tell you to haul – or else give you the cold treatment” (21), Moses says about it. Each character epitomises certain features of the migrant community that the author, Sam Selvon, tries to pass to the reader.

Captain is the only black African in the group of West-Indians migrants, the...