“Is all o’ we one?”: Creolization and ethnic identification in Samuel Selvon’s “Turning Christian”

Samuel Selvon’s fiction reveals the author’s abiding concern with questions of identity and community and his investment in reconciling the seemingly conflicting subjects of creolization and ethnic identification in Caribbean societies, particularly in his native Trinidad. The pervasive and often violent ethnic conflict between Trinidadians of Indian and African heritage is linked to constructions of the nation in which claims to, as well as exclusion from, Creole identities play an important role. In response, Selvon’s fictional interventions position Indian communities (whether peasant, working- or middle-class) in relation to other ethno-racial groups in ways that construct Trinidadian-ness as an inclusive and dynamic negotiation of self and culture across the various communities represented in the nation. Drawing on Kamau Brathwaite’s seminal concept of creolization as well as the work of other theorists (including Mintz, Bolland, and Munasinghe) of Creole identities and the creolization process, the analysis of “Turning Christian” — a short story excerpted from Selvon’s unfinished novel — provides an account of Selvon’s identity politics in this and his other works of fiction