#BTEditorial – Lament for Lamming

With the death of George Lamming, just days shy of his 95th birthday, a seminal chapter in the history of postcolonial English literature of the Caribbean has closed.

Space does not permit but the most cursory tracing of the lines and edges of a remarkable life in the service of the people and places of the Caribbean. What we attempt here is to bring attention to the gravity of our loss and the imperative to create a lasting, meaningful memorial in acts present and future.

Far from being “well-known locally, regionally and internationally”, as one Caribbean newspaper described in philistine terms, George Lamming was among the very last of the Grand Old Personages of modern West Indian writing – Edgar Mittleholzer, Samuel Selvon, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Frank Collymore, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, John Figueroa, Andrew Salkey, Michael Anthony and Sylvia Wynter. Of this list, only Anthony and Wynter yet live.

These brave men and women were the “Caribbean Voices” broadcast by the BBC Empire Service in the late 1940s and 1950s. This landmark programme brought colonial and English ears to the lingo and lyricism of Caribbean writing for the first time in a way that not even modern teaching of literature in Caribbean schools has sustained.

Before the programme’s creation by Jamaican broadcaster Una Marson in the war years, and its further stewardship by English producer Henry Swanzy, there was no such thing as “West Indian Literature”, save the essays and novels of the white Jamaican journalist HG de Lisser, the very first to introduce a descendant of enslaved Africans as a central character.

But Lamming was among the first of these descendants to be actually heard, in their own voice, from their own perspectives, their own minds and hearts and souls, with pride and prejudices all their own but so long denied light and air.

This was the brave new view of an old world that a man from Carrington Village brought to global attention. But for him and for us it was meeting ourselves again, revisiting the self-image with a new mirror, no longer distorted by the patronage, tolerance or disdain of the white ruling classes.

The essays, poetry and eventual fiction of George Lamming was an early declaration of independence through a statement of identity every single Caribbean artist worthy of the title has delivered for the last 75 years: “Look at me. This is who I am. This is why I must be.”

Lamming was deeply political but not tribalistic and partisan. He understood in ways even many of his contemporaries could or would not, the ultimate power of the word in both adverting to and shaping a civilization 400 years in the making.

For him, the role of the artist is not as mere aesthete or virtuoso. The republican sentiment, the blow against colonialism and its rotting effect on the psyche can be found not merely in his philosophical essays but in his poetry and prose, the most celebrated and enduring of which was his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin.

In this semi-autobiographical tome, as in some of his poetry and most of his essays, Lamming’s journey to manhood resembles the corruption, dysfunction, and paucity of both resources and resolve that was colonial Barbados and the Caribbean, and for too long afterwards, the post-independence Caribbean that is not sufficiently postcolonial.

He wielded his raging pen the way a generation of young West Indians brandished clubs and swords in the mid-to-late 1930s during the widespread strikes and revolts against poverty and social exclusion, the last violent cry of the formerly enslaved.

Witness his ode to fellow literary traveller Clifford Sealy of Trinidad, in a poem that used Sealy’s birthday to draw parallels between their painful, deprived, upbringing in these divided islands and the state of the colonies since. Lamming left Sealy in Trinidad to journey to the UK.

“My birth records a similar story:

The freezing bastardy, the huddled tenant,

Where children carry parent’s pains like a uniform

Articulate on in their loyalty to life…

“Those who start life without a beginning

Must always recall their crumbling foundations,

Rushing past affliction of the womb’s unfortunate opening…

“What new fevers arise to reverse the crawl

Our islands make towards their spiritual extinction?

“We must suffer in patience whom life received

On Islands cramped with disease no economy can cure…

“Hoping (if possible) for a people’s new birth.”

In verb and verse and voice, polishing his gifts of insight and inquiry, going beyond his beloved English master and literary patron, Frank Collymore, George Lamming sought to expiate the long-stifled cry of a depressed people, a schizophrenic culture and their political betrayal.

From his earliest polemical essays to his very last days of speaking in ever sonorous tones, his clarion call was for a Caribbean civilisation to release itself from old shackles and yokes forged in new metals – the substituting of American for British colonialism – the depravity that produces a new and persistent underclass and the continued lack of reverence for reading and writing.

What we must do is transform Lamming’s lament into a final triumph of a culture that creates rather than consumes, that fosters invention over importation and that rises from the castles of black and brown skin to the citadels of the cranium. No mere literature festival (for we have none yet), not just a primary school (where young minds are housed under a dome of uncertainty), no more prizes for mediocrity, mendacity or mendicancy. We need no “multitude’s monotonous cry for freedom and politics at the price of blood”.

We need to revisit the words of this sage who once lived among us, understand their deeper meaning and strike our own blows not from the displeasure of exile but for a future in which circumstance of birth neither condemns nor venerates; in short, a republic of the mind and soul.