During the summer, the West Indian immigrants of The Lonely Londoners go to Hyde Park to fraternize with white women, often pairing off with them to have sex. Because the park is charged with so much sexual intrigue, it comes to symbolize a sense of freedom and lack of inhibition that is otherwise considered taboo in British society. For example, after describing an encounter Moses has with a white woman one night in the park, the narrator declares, “the things that does happen in this London people wouldn’t believe when you tell them,” eventually calling the park itself a “happy hunting ground” where things take place that are “hard to believe.” In addition to this atmosphere of sexual excess, though, the park also becomes perhaps the only place where black Londoners like Moses enjoy something approaching racial equality, since in all other contexts of British life white women and black men are separated by racism and general prejudice. Although both white women and black men fetishize one another during their sexual encounters—often objectifying one another and reducing each other to stereotypes—the mere fact that they are able to have this one form of intimacy across societal boundaries makes Hyde Park a noteworthy symbol of a certain type of freedom for the “lonely Londoners” of the novel.
Hyde Park Quotes in The Lonely Londoners
The cruder you are the more the girls like you you can’t put on any English accent for them or play ladeda or tell them you studying medicine in Oxford or try to be polite and civilize they don’t want that sort of thing at all they want you to live up to the films and stories they hear about black people living primitive in the jungles of the world that is why you will see so many of them African fellars in the city with their hair high up on the head like they ain’t had a trim for years and with scar on their face and a ferocious expression going about with some real sharp chicks the cruder you are the more they like you[…].
Hyde Park Symbol Timeline in The Lonely Londoners
