Within a month of the presentation of a Guyana Prize Special Award to Wilson Harris at a conference at the University of Warwick, another outstanding Caribbean novelist has been honoured. In like manner, Barbadian novelist George Lamming was made a Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) during a conference in his honour at the University of the West Indies, Mona last week-end.

The presentation to Lamming was made by another IOJ Fellow, Prof Rex Nettleford, Vice-Chancellor of UWI and authority on Caribbean cultural affairs. Both the honour and the conference were meant to express recognition of Lamming’s “sterling contributions to Caribbean peoples and the struggles against colonialism and defence of sovereignty.” Organizers of the conference, UWI (Mona), UWI’s Centre for Caribbean Thought and the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University of Georgia, USA paid tribute to the novelist as an “outstanding Caribbean literary icon.”

The IOJ, located in Kingston, is a very important establishment known for its long association with literature, publishing and historical archives. Among its publications is one of the leading journals in the Caribbean, Jamaica Journal, which was once edited by poet and fiction writer Olive Senior. The newest IOJ Fellow has associations with UWI through his receipt of an Honorary Doctorate in 1980 and his period as Writer in Residence at Mona from 1967 to 1968.

Distinguished Kenyan writer N’Gugi Wa Thiong’o delivered the keynote address at the UWI conference and paid tribute to Lamming and his achievements. Excerpts from Wa Thiong’o’s citation follow.

“Lamming belongs to a long line of intellectuals produced by the Caribbean and the whole world... His novel In the Castle of My Skin came at a high noon in the struggle against colonialism.

It was a period that marked the end of imperialism in the world when the power maps were being redrawn, starting with the independence of India in 1947 and gathering momentum in Africa, Asia and, lastly, the civil rights movement in the United States. Lamming’s work started the literature of decolonisation.”

George Lamming was born in Barbados in 1927 in Carrington Village near Bridgetown, the setting of his most famous novel. He won a scholarship to Combermere High School, then left for Trinidad in 1946 where he taught at the College of Venezuela and acted as an agent for the journal, Bim. In 1950, he migrated to the UK, travelling on the same ship with Sam Selvon, who became his close friend.

His first and most acclaimed novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953) was written and published shortly after his arrival in London, followed by The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Water with Berries (1970) and Natives of My Person (1971). Two important collections of critical essays are The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews 1953-1990 (1992) edited by Richard Drayton and Andaiye. Lamming joined Martin Carter as Guest Editors of a Special Independence Issue of the New World periodical in Guyana in 1966. He was awarded many fellowships which took him to several countries and was Writer in Residence at a number of universities. After returning to Barbados from England, he took up residence at the Atlantis Hotel at Bathsheba and continues to go on lecture tours to different universities.

Two books stand out in Lamming’s outstanding contribution, as a ‘Caribbean literary icon,’ to the Caribbean peoples’ struggles against colonialism, which prompted his most recent honour: In the Castle of My Skin and The Pleasures of Exile. The novel stands out as one of the early works of post-colonial fiction in a number of ways, but among them is its sustained attack on the way the colonial education system produces alienated misfits and the way the economic system uproots poor Caribbean peasants from their native land. It is semi-autobiographical fiction covering the life of the narrator G (George) from his ninth birthday, which he “celebrates” in the middle of heavy rains bringing a flood that dislocates many villagers to the forced uprooting of his aged mentor, Pa, from his home nine years later. G leaves Barbados following his graduation from secondary school with a tragic sense of dispossession and alienation.

The novel begins with an ironic note “Rain, rain, rain... my mother put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing.” Those same showers of blessing soon wash away houses and disrupt lives. The story ends with the pathos that surrounds the parting of G and Pa. “Twas a night like this,” (the old man) said, “nine years ago when those waters roll without end all over this place. Twas a flood as I won’t want ever to feel for nothing in the world.” And as they part, G narrates, “The earth where I walked was a marvel of blackness and I knew in a sense more deep than simple departure I had said farewell, farewell to the land.”

In The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming, who was previously a poet, tells how he became a novelist, admitting that the story was autobiographical. He was deeply moved by the way black Barbadian peasants, because they were poor in a colonial system that left them dispossessed, were forced in the 1930s off land on which they had lived and worked for generations. He writes

“When I was about 12 years old I had the shattering experience of seeing old Papa Grandison, my godfather, forced to move his small house from the site which generations of children had learnt to speak of as “the corner where Papa who keep goats does live.”

Lamming got the title of the novel from a line in a poem by Derek Walcott in which the persona addresses white persons separated from him by colour and class, declaring “you in the castle of your skin, I among the swineherd.” But he reverses it, placing the black peasant in the castle of his skin, restoring some dignity to him since his black skin is the only castle he would possess.

Of note in The Pleasures of Exile is Lamming’s savage, rather hasty and unfair dismissal of VS Naipaul.

“His books can’t move beyond a castrated satire... no important work can rest on satire alone. When such a writer is a colonial ashamed of his cultural background and striving like mad to prove himself through promotion to the peaks of a ‘superior’ culture... then satire is nothing more than a refuge. And it is too small a refuge for a writer who wishes to be taken seriously.”

However, in Conversations, a much later work, he speaks much more highly of Naipaul and his critical analysis of A House for Mr Biswas is full of praise. What makes The Pleasures of Exile outstanding, though, is that in 1960, it was an important pioneer in the development of post-colonial criticism. It must have influenced the rise of this critical discourse in Britain and around the world. Lamming outlines, not only what West Indian writers have gained from the English, but the contribution made by West Indian writers to English fiction. Adjunct to that, is his famous statement that “English is a West Indian language.” Most important in his ground-breaking post-colonial discourse is his use of Prospero and Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which is now widely used by writers and critics as an archetypal metaphor for colonialism and slavery.