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Samuel Selvon's A Brighter Sun has been largely approached in terms of Selvon's use of language and his social themes. In this paper, I start from the premise that approaching Selvon's text from a gendered, masculinity studies perspective produces alternative insights into this text. I focus on protagonist Tiger's journey from boyhood to manhood and argue that, through his depiction of Tiger's engagement with his culture, Selvon constructs a central metaphor where the tenor is masculinity and the vehicle is prison. To examine Selvon's representation of Tiger's journey, I utilize Michel Foucault's idea of the panoptic and Judith Butler's notion of gender as performance, suggesting that Selvon develops a carceral conception of normative Indo masculinity, supervising and restricting Tiger.
KEYWORDS SAMUEL SELVON, A BRIGHTER SUN, MASCULINITY, METAPHOR CRITICISM
A pioneer in West Indian literature, Indian Caribbean writer Samuel Selvon received international acclaim with his first novel, A Brighter Sun. The novel was published in 1952 and is set in Trinidad, Selvon's native land. There has been some speculation that this novel was already completed when Selvon, like many West Indians at the time, migrated to Britain after World War II Dyer, 2002, p. 113). Selvon puts this idea to rest in his interview with Michel Fabre (1988). When asked whether the book was written in Trinidad, Selvon responds, "No, I wrote it, or completed it in London. In Trinidad, I wrote poems and a good deal of short stories ... but I mostly worked" p. 65). The novel was significant for a number of reasons, one of which was that, according to Ivan Van Sertima, "It was in A Brighter Sun that an East Indian writer himself spoke for the first time ... about the life of an Indian family in the Caribbean" 1968, p. 43). Harold Barrati notes that the novel also received critical acclaim because of Selvon's use of Trinidadian dialect 2003, p. 28).
Selvon has stated that the protagonist, in A Brighter Sun, Tiger, is based on a "really old man [whom] he knew," Fabre, 1988, p. 69). At the beginning of the novel Tiger is married off to a girl, who, like himself, is Hindu. He moves from Chaguanas to Barataría. Tiger "starts off by gradually discovering about life" Fabre,...