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George Lamming (1927-2022) |
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Barbadian novelist, critic, and social commentator, whose In the Castle of My Skin (1953) is one of the classics of West Indian literature. It anticipated in many ways the themes in Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth (1961) and other key texts of anti-colonial literature. Like Kamau Brathwaite,
George Lamming examined the complexities of the black West Indian
identity and the relationship between exile and return. His language is
compassionate and intense, full of lyrical images. "The indigenous Carib and Arawak Indians, living by their own lights long before the European adventure, gradually disappear in a blind, wild forest of blood. That mischievous gift, the sugar cane, is introduced, and a fantastic human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported crooks and criminals, defeated soldiers and Royalist gentlemen fleeing from Europe, slaves from the West Coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans, and Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on an unfamiliar soil, in an unpredictable and infinite range of custom and endeavour, people in the most haphazard combinations, surrounded by memories of splendour and misery, the sad and dying kingdom of Sugar, a future full of promises. And always the sea!" (from The Pleasures of Exile by George Lamming, foreword by Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992, p. 17; originally published in 1960) George Lamming was born in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed
African and English parentage. His mother, Loretta, was unmarried, but
after she
married, Lamming grew up partly in his native village and in St David's
Village, where his stepfather worked. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys'
School and Combermere High School on a scholarship. There he showed his
skills in cricket; he was a great batsman. Encouraged by his
teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started
to write. As an occupation, writing was in the Caribbean not so
honourable as playing cricket. While studying at Combermere High School, Lamming devoured works by H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, J.W. von Goethe, André Gide, and Jane Austen. The Cuban poet Nicolas Guillén and the French poet Aimé Césaire had a formative influence on him. Before moving to England, Lamming worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding-school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's "Caribbean Voices" series broadcast his poems and short prose. Upon arriving in London, Lamming briefly earned his living as a factory worker. Lamming hosted in 1951 a book review program at the BBC's
West Indian Service. In England Lamming had the opportunity to meet
fellow Commonwealth citizens, and he become very aware of Africa.
However, In the Castle of My Skin, dedicated to his mother and
Frank Collymore, there is no conscious linkage with African influences.
Its introduction was written by the American author Richard Wright at
the request of his editor at Harper's. Wright noted paralles between his
own life and Lamming's experiences in British-controlled Barbados. "I,
too, have been long crying these stern tidings; and, when I catch the
echo of yet another voice declaiming in alien accents a description of
this same reality, I react with pride and excitement, and I want to
urge others to react to that voice. One feels not so alone, when, from
a distant witness, supporting evicence comes to buttres one's own
testimony." ('Introduction' by Richard Wright, In the Castle of My Skin, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1954, p. vi) Lamming himself said once in an interview, that the Black writing from the United States was not really a part of his word at all. Reflecting on the role of America in In the Castle of My Skin he said that the United States "existed for us as a dream, a kingdom of material possibilities accessible to all. I have never visited the United States before writing In the Castle of My Skin; but America had often touched our lives with gifts that seemed spectacular at the time, and reminded us that this dream of unique luxury beyond our shores was true." (Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War by Cedric R. Tolliver, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019, p. 66) This partly autobiographical novel about growing up in poverty
in the Barbados and Trinidad gained a huge success. In France, Castle was selected by Jean-Paul Sartre for his Les Temps Modernes series. The story moved
between allegory and realism and at the same time traced rapid changes
of a colonial society on its way to independence. Lamming also employed
its shifting point of view in the second novel, The Emigrants (1954).
Again the story was partly autobiographical, focusing on a group of
West Indian emigrants in Britain, who try find their identity in the
hostile environment of the "mother country." In Of Age and Innocence (1958) Lamming created his own Yoknapatawpha or Macondo, the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal. Season of Adventure (1960) was also set in San Cristobal, where a middle-class woman explores her mother's background and undergoes self-transformation. In 1955 Lamming traveled in the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Three years later he received the Somerset Maugham award and in 1962 a Canada Council Fellowship. While in London, he had a liaison with the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence (1926-1987), whom he first met in Vancouver in the summer of 1962. Laurence said that he was "the kind of personality that hits you like the spirit of god between the eyes." (Alien Heart: The Life and Work of Margaret Laurence by Lyall Harris Powers, Winnipeg, Man.: University of Manitoba Press, 2003, pp. 485, 519) In the 1950s Lamming traveled in North Africa and the Caribbean, where he returned for a long period. During the next decades, lecture tours and grants took him among others to Australia, India, Tanzania, Denmark, and the United States. From
London Lamming eventually
settled in Barbados. In 1967-68 Lamming was a Writer-in-Residence at
the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He was,
among others, a
visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the
University of Pennsylvania, and taught at the University of Miam's
Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing. Before settling
permanently back home in Barbados, Lamming spent more than 50
years as a highly respected writer, lecturer and intellectual at
several universities and institutions. He also ghostwrote speeches for Caribbean prime ministers. Lamming was in the mid-1960s a coeditor of Barbados and Guyana independence issues of New World Quaterly, Kingston, with the poet Martin Carter and the Jamaican poet and scholar Edward Baugh. In addition he contributed to the journal Casa de las Américas, published in Havanna. Lamming had met Carter in 1955 in Guyana, when it was in a state of emergency after a constitutional crisis. Carter had been in the colonial prison and was still under a kind of house arrest. When Lamming arranged a party for all the people involved in his radio programmes, the Governor, Sir Patrick Muir Renison, came there too, and Lamming introduced Renison to Carter. In the collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Lamming examined the Caribbean colonial past, decolonization, and his own identity. The title of the novel was from a poem by Derek Walcott. Lamming identifies with Caliban, Prospero's slave on a remote island in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Their much examined relationship mirrors the opposition between colonizer and colonized. Caliban is not only exiled from his nature but also colonized by language. "For I am a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of language—not to curse our meeting—but to push it further, reminding the descendants of both sides that what's done is done, and can only be seen as a soil from which other gifts, or the same gift endowed with different meanings, may grow towards a future which is colonised by our acts in this moment, but which must always remain open." (Ibid., p. 15) The Caliban symbol has also inspired such Caribbean writers as Jean Rhys, Aimé Césaire, and Sam Selvon. After Season of Adventure, Lamming did not publish novels for years. Water with Berries (1971) was about the lives of Caribbean exiles in London. Natives of My Person (1972), which some critics have considered Lamming's major work, was an allegorical account of a journey of a slave ship to the Americas via West Africa during the early colonial period. The Commandant of the ship, Reconnaissance, represents the archetypes of Prospero and Ahab, with additional personalities: "A man like [Sir John] Hawkins would have been very much on my mind—a cmposite of Hawkins, a composite of [Sir Francis] Drake, of any of these oversized figures of the period," Lamming said. (The Novels of George Lamming by Sandra Pouchet Paquet, London: Heinemann, 1982, p. 101) In
the 1970s Lamming had a close association with the Barbados
Workes Union. However, he never joined a political organization, and
failed his attempt to join the Communist Party in England in the 1950s.
But political concers were always intertwined with his writing. "I am
very opposed to the notion that politics and the political is a
polluting factor when it is bought into the novel," he said in 2009. ('The Aesthetics of Decolonisation: Anthony Bogues and George Lamming in Conversation,' in The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation, edited by Anthony Bogues, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2011, p. 228) Before his death, the historian Walter Rodney, the leader the of Working People's Alliance of Guyana, asked Lamming to write an introduction to his book, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (1981). Rodney was assassinated at the age of thirty-eight as the government was preparing to bring him to trial for his political activities. Thousands of Guyanese attended his burial on the evening of June 23, 1980. "Directive had gone out to government employess that they should avoid this occasion; yet no one could recall, in the entire history of the country, so large and faithful a gathering assembled to reflect on the horror that had been inflicted on the nation.For Guyana had become a land of horrors. Democracy was no longer on trial here. The question was whether it would survibe this official crucifixian." ('Foreword' by George Lamming, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 by Walter Rodney, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. xvii) In 2003 Lamming was made a
Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) and in 2011 he was
awarded by the Association of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) the
Caribbean Hibiscus Prize. George Lamming died on June 4, 2022 at his home in Bridgetown. He was 94. For further reading: The Islands in Between: Essays on West Indian Literature, edited by Louis James (1968); Kas-kas: Interviews With Three Caribbean Writerrs in Texas, edited by I. Munro and R. Sander (1972); 'Lamming, George,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); The West Indian Novel by Michael Gilkes (1981); The Novels of George Lamming by Sandra Pouchet Paquet (1982); Critical Perspectives on George Lamming by Antony Boxhill (1986); Anancy in the Great House: Ways of Reading West Indian Fiction by Joyce E. Jonas (1990); Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction by Margaret Paul Joseph (1992); Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History by Supriya Nair (1996); 'Lamming, George,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming's Fiction as Decolonizing Project by A. J. Simoes da Silva (2000); Caribbean Reasonings - The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation, edited by Anthony Bogues (2010); Rich Man in His Castle, Poor Ones Take the Street: Integrating the 'Canonical' Text & Popular culture: A Study of the Novel 'In the Castle of My Skin' by George Lamming by Margaret D. Gill (2013); Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg (2015); Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diaspora Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War by Cedric R. Tolliver (2019); After the Postcolonial Caribbean: Memory, Imagination, Hope by Brian Meeks (2023) Selected works:
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