Orphia in the Underground: Postcolonial London Transport

Résumé 0

London transport has been at the heart of diasporic life for many postwar migrants and their descendents from the once-colonised countries: first, as a major employer of migrant labour and, later, as a significant imaginative location in fictions of what I call ‘postcolonial London’. The vignette of Orphia’s descent into the London Underground to find her lover in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) is one of several examples in fictions of postcolonial London where the underground rail system is used as a figure of diasporic trauma and transformation—examples which also include Lord Kitchener’s 1950s calypsos of London and Hanif Kureishi’s film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1988). This essay engages with these three aforementioned examples to show how, as Sam Selvon once put it, ‘working the transport’ has been at the heart of the imaginative and social rescripting of London as a site of stubborn diasporic accommodation and postcolonial flux. As I argue, the Underground railway system has been imaginatively appropriated often to signify new diasporic movements of peoples and cultures initially subterranean and surreptitious, driven underground by the cold reception of an intolerant capital city—movements which, as Rushdie’s example suggests, determinedly produce the metamorphosis of the city at large through the creative kinesis of their cultural endeavours.