George Lamming, an intellectual biography.
...arib 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!" (Lamming, G. ’The Pleasures of Exile’ 1960) George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" can be seen to explore issues relating to migration, slavery, suppression, (mis)representation, race, gender, place, and responses to the ‘influential master discourses of imperial Europe’ including history and philosophy but namely that of the fundamental issue of Language. His next novel, ‘The Emigrants’, was based around a group of West Indian expatriates who, like the Author, lived in England. His works then began to take the form of semi-autobiographical form. ‘Of Age and Innocence’ and ‘Season of Adventure’ take place on a fictional Caribbean Island of San Cristobal. The novel was representative of Lamming’s inner struggle to rediscover a history of himself ‘by himself’. “When I review these relationships they seem so odd. I have always been here on this side and the other person there on that side, and we have both tried to make the sides appear similar in the needs, desires, and ambitions. But it wasn't true. It was never true. When I reach Trinidad where no one knows me I may be able to strike identity with the other person. But it was never possible here. I am always feeling terrified of being known; not because they really know you, but simply because their claim to knowledge is a concealed attempt to destroy you” (Lamming, G. ‘In the castle of my skin’ 1953) ‘Water with Berries was his next novel, and was delicately, yet purposely structured to describe the flaws of West Indian society seen to himself, through the utilisation of the storyline and plot of William Shakespeare's ‘The Tempest’ whereby he identifies with ‘Caliban’, who is a slave on an island in Shakespeare's play. Lamming often employed the technique of a shifting perspective and his works frequently switched between realism and allegory whilst also tracing the prompt changes of a colonial society on its way to independence. Within the shifts in points of view found in his work, Lamming examines the Caribbean colonial past, and specifically focuses on the exploration and representation of the earlier mentioned ‘common’ themes that can be seen fluently through Caribbean Literature in general, including decolonization, identity; of lineage, origin and that of his own self. An example of which is the parallel created between himself and ‘Caliban’ mirroring the relationships of colonizer and the colonized, both in physical terms, and that of a colonised spoken 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." (Caliban. ‘The Tempest’) A highly political author, Lammings works often are likened to those of V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott and Merle Hodge, whose work is also concerned primarily with the redevelopment and emergence of the Caribbean identity, which can be interpreted as having been ‘lost’ as a result of the suppression and oppression that is characteristic of colonialism. “The novels of Kincaid, Hodge, and Lamming reflect the seeping in of the European civilization through the veins of the children growing up in the A...