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George Lamming (b. 1927) | |
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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. Like Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming has used the themes of exile and return in his search of the black West Indian identity. "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, 1960) George Lamming was born in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. His mother 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. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he 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. In London Lamming worked briefly in a factory and also as a freelance writer. He 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, Africans and Asians, 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. This partly autobiographical novel about growing up in poverty in the Barbados and Trinidad gained a huge success. 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. 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. In 1967-68 Lamming was a Writer-in-Residence at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. He has also been 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. In 1965 and 1967 he was a coeditor of Barbados and Guyana independence issues of New World Quaterly, Kingston. He also contributed to the journal Casa de las Américas, published in Havanna. From London Lamming eventually settled in Barbados. In the collection of essays, THE PLEASURES OF EXILE (1960), Lamming examined the Caribbean colonial past, decolonization, and his own identity. Lamming identifies with Caliban, Prospero's slave on a remote island in Shakespeare's play The Tempest. Their much examined relationship mirror 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." 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. In 1971 appeared WATER WITH BERRIES, 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 a journey of a slave ship toward San Christobal during the early colonial period. In 1974 Lamming edited CANNON SHOT AND GLASS BADS, an anthology of black writing. In the 1970s Lamming had a close association with the Barbados Workes Union. "But the history of labour, as told by the forces of labour, is not very prominent in official texts of history," has Lamming said. "I do not know whether literary scholars make the connection, but one of the functions of the novel in the Caribbean is to serve as a form of social history." He wrote the foreword to A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 by Walter Rodney, the leader the of Working People's Alliance of Guyana, who was killed in 1980 as the government was preparing to bring him to trial for his political activities. CONVERSATIONS, a collection of essays, addresses and interviews, appeared in 1992. Lamming's language is compassionate and intense, full of lyrical images. In dialogue he has used Creole extensively. Lamming's West Indian immigrants repeatedly face prejudices in their new circumstances in England. Sometimes the rejection is mutual as in the short story 'A Wedding is Spring', in which a sister doesn't accept that her brother marries a white English woman, and plots against the wedding. "It ain't God join my brother wid any hawk-nose English woman," she says. "It his stupid excitement." But also the bride's parents refuse to attend the occasion. When Beresford, the brother, arrives with his friend to the church on a bicycle instead of riding in a limousine, which his sister Flo had canceled, she realizes that she cannot humiliate him before the idle crowd outside the church. The wedding has lost importance to her, it is a trifle compared with his disgrace. The vicar shouts, "Which is the man?" "It don't matter," Flo says. "You ju' go marry my brother." For further reading: The Islands in Between, ed. by Louis James (1968); Kas-kas: Interviews With Three Caribbean Writerrs in Texas, ed. by I. Munro and R. Sander (1972); World Authors 1950-1970, ed. 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 J. Jonas (1990); Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction by M.P. Joseph (1992); Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History by Supriya Nair (1996); Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 3, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming's Fiction as Decolonizing Project by A.J. Simoes da Silva (2000) - For further information: House of Nehesi Publishers - Selected works:
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