A Brighter Sun by Samuel Selvon

First published: 1952

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: World War II

Locale: Barataria, a village east of Port of Spain, Trinidad

Principal Characters:

• Tiger, the protagonist, the sixteen-year-old son of Indian Hindu cane field laborers
• Urmilla, Tiger’s teenaged wife
• Joe Martin, a former “sweetman” in Port of Spain
• Rita, Joe’s common-law wife
• Sookdeo, an old Indian who lives “on rum and memories”
• Boysie, a vendor of manure

The Novel

Because A Brighter Sun opens with a catalog of events, both local and international (and repeats this device subsequently), it might be approached as a quasihistorical narrative; however, this technique places the characters, their actions, and aspirations in social perspective, counterpointing major and minor happenings and emphasizing the concerns of the ordinary struggling individual. World events are distant; local and personal concerns dominate the characters’ lives.

The arrangement of the novel into twelve chapters suggests the form of the epic, with its hero battling against great odds, and the title (like that of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises) intimates the possibility of amelioration, of the dawn of a new era, of the potential for achievement. The novel is clearly a bildungsroman, a story of the maturation of a youthful hero who sets goals for himself and overcomes disappointments and setbacks; furthermore, it is in the tradition of the social realist novel that depicts a section of working-class life in detail and with sympathy. Tiger, though disappointed in life, nevertheless adopts a mature philosophy: He rejects a return to his family’s village and life on the sugarcane estate or a departure from Trinidad for either America or India in favor of making a life for his family in Barataria’s multiethnic community. That is, he rejects a return to the past and accepts a modern social attitude.

Rather than being merely the record of the first five years of Tiger’s married life, the novel is a study of changing mores in Trinidad (and hence the West Indies), with Tiger as a metonymic character, one who represents the larger community. The plot is chronological, though only half the novel concerns Tiger himself: The rest consists of episodes from others’ lives that provide Tiger with material for his growth.

The marriage of Tiger and Urmilla (he did not even know the name of his arranged-marriage bride before the wedding) was for the Chaguanas district “the biggest thing to happen, bigger than the war,” for Tiger, a nonreligious Hindu, had accepted his ethnic imperatives to maintain the cohesiveness of the Indian community. Immediately, however, the new couple moves to Barataria, which both physically and symbolically represents a break with tradition, for it is a newly constructed, distant, mixed community. Tiger’s father, Baboolal, provides Tiger’s new mud hut and land—but no furnishings. Tiger, though still boyish, thinks that marriage has made him a man; nevertheless, he smokes, drinks, and abuses his wife in the belief that these are necessary indications of masculinity.

When Chandra, their daughter, needs a bonnet, Tiger goes to Port of Spain with Boysie to buy one. Here, Tiger is introduced to racial discrimination when a creole clerk serves a white customer first, though Tiger was the first to arrive. In the quiet of the botanical gardens, he muses on the necessity of education and the effect of wealth. He decides to work for the Americans building a road through the development and plans to save to build a house comparable to his neighbor Joe Martin’s—with sewer, power, and floor. When he learns that Urmilla is pregnant again, he suspects infidelity and mentions this to Rita, who throws him out of her house.

Because he can read a little and is complaisant—even fawning at times—Tiger receives preferments on the surveying and construction crews. He expands his vocabulary, seeing language as a means to status and power, and he invites his American bosses to dinner, for which Rita provides the necessary utensils and furniture—even stringing an electric light from her house (to Joe’s chagrin). The dinner is a pathetic example of inept cultural communication, a semiotic disaster.

When Urmilla is ill, Tiger seeks a doctor in the wet night. An Indian doctor and a black doctor refuse to attend her, though a white physician does and charges a mere token. The next day, Tiger confronts the Indian doctor: “All you don’t have pity, all you don’t know what it is to suffer.” He is disillusioned by status-seeking nonwhites: Their lack of identification with their own folk he considers “the hurtful part.” Later, when Urmilla is ready to deliver, the local midwife is away; Rita (who has helped other women) acts as midwife. The baby, a boy, is stillborn. With growing maturity, Tiger philosophizes, “A man should be glad for what he have.”

When the road is completed, Tiger is unemployed, but he uses his savings to build his house while Urmilla recuperates at her parents’ home. Again he contemplates life and reaches mature conclusions such as “you just have to go on from where you stops” and “always the sun shines.” With the completion of his house, he has completed his maturation from boy to man; he has rejected the old ways in favor of the new, and he has rejected expatriation in favor of working for the betterment of Trinidad and himself—perhaps as a politician devoted to the education of his countrymen.

The Characters

Although there are numerous characters in A Brighter Sun, the novel is essentially focused on Tiger. Even Urmilla is not foregrounded. She is (like Joe, Rita, Sookdeo, and Boysie) a foil to Tiger, though she is also the means of depicting the role of Hindu women in Indian social life. Joe is a nonphilosophical, pragmatic person, friendly yet distant; Rita is self-assured, congenial, and unpretentious—a fine example of a true neighbor. Tall Boy and Otto (Chinese shopkeepers) are introduced, it seems, merely to represent one of the minuscule racial and ethnic groups in the Caribbean. Tall Boy is the astute entrepreneur, the family man; Otto is the older, opium-addicted stereotype. They offer a Chinese analogue to the Indian communities in Chaguanas and Barataria.

Tiger is not given a family name (a not uncommon practice in Indian villages), and thus he can be accepted as a representative individual, rather like one called “Yank” or “Aussie.” He represents that large section of the population of Trinidad, Fiji, and Guyana who are descendants of the indentured plantation workers who were imported at the end of slavery to work on the large estates and who were long denied education, opportunity, and political representation. Accordingly, we can understand Tiger’s intense interest in language and education, in owning land and a house, and in entering politics. He has set his sights high and looks to the future with “a brighter sun” than that of the past. Symbolically, Tiger’s personal war against the old order (and against being regarded as a child) coincides with World War II, which cemented the superpower status of the Soviet Union and United States while setting into motion a number of revolutions in colonized lands in Central and Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

In the botanical gardens, Tiger contemplates the harmonious mixture of vegetation and what he calls “the big thought”: Why should he have to restrict his friends to members of the Indian community? His mind engages also other mature matters. Thinking about Sookdeo, he wonders, “What he come on earth for?” Tiger concludes that you “don’t start over things in life” but push on regardless of disappointments and failures. That is, only a few years after Tiger has turned sixteen, his mind has already become adult; he has developed from a physical creature to a thoughtful—if not yet wholly intellectual—one contemplating matters that impinge on himself, his family, his community, his nation, and humankind. Selvon has moved from observing children “walking in that sweet wonder of childhood” to observing Tiger walking in serious contemplation of life.

Joe, who is seen only occasionally and whom readers learn relatively little about, is an interesting character and an easy foil to Tiger, not only because he is static rather than dynamic but also because he is accepting, rather than questioning, by disposition. His transformation from “sweetman” (one who lives off the earnings of a woman companion) to provider has already occurred, and he has accepted the responsibility to rear Rita’s sister’s son as his own, showing his generosity and acceptance of the extended family. He has not bothered with a formal marriage, however. He sees Rita as property, he puts great value on ownership of a house and its modern appurtenances, and he is not generous beyond the extended family. He has few verbalized goals, perhaps because he believes that he has gained all that is achievable. For him there appears to be no idea of things becoming brighter; after all, “Joe might easily not have been born,” his aunt, Ma Lambie, says, alluding to his prostitute mother’s plan for an abortion. He has survived. Rita, confident, ebullient, courageous, is a perfect foil to Joe, and she is a model neighbor. She seldom thinks deep thoughts, but she acts with kindness and spontaneity, out of generous, commendable motivations.

Urmilla is a mere cipher: She is reticent, withdrawn to the point of obsequiousness, and unquestioning in her obedience to customs and to her husband. She is stereotypical and static, even pathetic. Many readers feel deeply for her (especially when she is kicked and abused), yet she is uncomplaining about not having a floor, a bed, or working kitchen equipment. Her single goal seems to be to please her domineering husband.

The many minor characters are presented in vivid and memorable detail through vignettes, cameo appearances, anecdotes, and occasional allusions or rumors. They serve an important role as models to be imitated or avoided, as foils, and as part of the mosaic that is Trinidadian society.

Critical Context

Although Selvon attracted critical attention incommensurate with his contribution to West Indian prose fiction and poetry, his work is gaining in stature, especially among those who are specialists in Commonwealth literature. Part of the explanation for this early oversight must be that Selvon was beginning to write when there was still a critical disposition against Commonwealth writers, and British and American writing was the focus of attention; further, Selvon’s style—one that clearly reflects his own personality—is gentle, unprepossessing, and engaging rather than dramatic, convoluted, or opaque, which was in vogue in certain critical circles in the 1960’s. A Brighter Sun, however, has now gone through reprintings and has gained in readership and renown.

Selvon has since been the focus of much informed criticism, and his special strengths are being acknowledged. His work has been praised because it depicts so vividly the sociology of Trinidad at a time of critical change in the years between colonial dependency and national independence, when West Indians were adapting to the dictates of life in the metropolitan culture rather than the peripheral one. He depicted the lives and struggles, the aspirations and failures of this large expatriate group with particularly poignant—if at times comic—sympathy. He showed the effects of voluntary as well as involuntary ghettoization based on race and ethnicity and also showed the residual commitment to beauty and idealism of the expatriate islanders in the face of adversity and bias. (In his later novels about Caribbean life, the optimism was somewhat muted.)

In Turn Again Tiger (1958), a sequel to A Brighter Sun, Tiger and Urmilla return to the sugarcane district and rent out their new Barataria house only to encounter several disappointments and disillusionments. From this harrowing experience, Tiger emerges undefeated and confirmed in his philosophy: “We finish one job, and we got to get ready to start another.” This is the basic message of A Brighter Sun, and it doubtless represented Selvon’s own outlook.

Bibliography

Barratt, Harold. “Dialect, Maturity, and the Land in Sam Selvon’s A Brighter Sun: A Reply.” English Studies in Canada 7, no. 3 (Fall, 1981): 329-337. Takes issue with both Birbalsingh and MacDonald (below). First, Barratt demonstrates that Tiger’s developing consciousness is the paramount element of the novel and that the novel is more than “a mere photographic representation of quaint, exotic local customs”; second, he argues that Tiger’s focus is not on dialect and language but on education, and that he does not want to escape from the land.

Birbalsingh, Frank. “Samuel Selvon and the West Indian Literary Renaissance.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 8, no. 3 (1977): 5-22. Proposes that the narrative technique in A Brighter Sun is freely associative, loosely interweaving episodes in Tiger’s life with occasional insights into politics and sociology, and that the dominant tone is comic and farcical rather than pathetic.

Cartey, Wilfred. “The Rituals of the Folk: The Crossing of Rhythms.” In Whispers from the Caribbean: I Going Away, I Going Home. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Argues that A Brighter Sun depicts rigid ethnic and racial attitudes in the older folk but a movement toward a merging of races in the younger ones. There is harmony between Tiger and the earth, the elements, that is really symbiotic.

Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, and the Cultural Performance of Gender. Mona, Jamaica: UWIPress, 2005. Includes a chapter comparing Selvon’s representations of masculinity and homecoming in A Brighter Sun and Turn Again Tiger.

Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Asserts that education and the mastery of the colonial language are viewed as the source of knowledge that will permit Tiger to transcend the “cane culture” of his family, and that the building of the new highway symbolizes the coming displacement and modernization of the Trinidad countryside.

MacDonald, Bruce F. “Language and Consciousness in Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun.” English Studies in Canada 5, no. 2 (Summer, 1979): 202-215. Argues that the novel is structured with an eye to the potential of dialect and language as determinants of social class and as indicators of personality. Selvon’s treatment of Tiger is seen as much gentler, less caustic than V. S. Naipaul’s treatment of similar upwardly mobile and aspiring characters.

Nasta, Susheila, ed. Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988. A helpful compendium of statements by Selvon, articles on Caribbean literature, and critical assessments of Selvon’s major works. A bibliographic section lists all the author’s works in addition to reviews and critical articles.

Zehnder, Martin, ed. Something Rich and Strange: Selected Essays on Sam Selvon. Leeds, West Yorkshire, England: Peepal Tree, 2003. Collection of essays by noted scholars on Selvon’s life and work.