Glowing accolades to Barbadian literary great Professor George Lamming continue to pour in from across the Caribbean and outside the region.
Lamming who passed away June 4, would have been 95 tomorrow. He spent more than half a century as a writer and lecturer at several universities and institutions across the globe including North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and India. Among the late Combermerian’s celebrated prose was the critically acclaimed and highly influential In the Castle of My Skin. Dr Patricia Rodney, widow of the late Pan-Africanist Dr Walter Rodney who was murdered in his native Guyana in 1980, five days after Lamming’s 53rd birthday, remembered Lamming with fondness.
“Barbadian literary giant, par excellence Professor George Lamming has transitioned. If you have not read his works, take the time to do so – you will be better for it. His acclaimed works include In the Castle of My Skin, The Emigrants, Of Age and Innocence, Season of Adventure, Water with Berries, Natives of My Person, and The Pleasures of Exile. George Lamming was a poet, novelist, essayist, orator, lecturer, teacher, editor, social commentator and tireless activist, for which he received numerous awards, accolades, and distinctions.
He received a Citation for the Order of the Caribbean Community in 2008. The George Lamming Primary School, located at Flint Hall, St Michael, named in his honour, opened on September 2, 2008. The George Lamming Pedagogical Centre at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus Department of Creative and Performing Arts, was named in his honour in 2009.
Lamming was a close friend of Walter Rodney and remained a dear friend of the Rodney Family. He delivered Walter Rodney’s Eulogy.
He wrote the foreword to A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. More recently, in 2014, Lamming was Chief Judge of the Inaugural Walter Rodney Creative Writing Awards.
During one trip to Barbados, we all met at a hotel, and in addition to Rodney’s grandkids, we had a friend with us. The Rodney grandkids were all about Uncle George, not truly recognising his magnitude. It was not lost on their nine-year-old friend, who attended the St. George Primary School in Barbados.
She was totally overwhelmed. She was star-struck and said she could not believe she was sitting in the same room and on the same couch and talking to George Lamming, the “great George Lamming.“ Her voice was quintessentially Bajan, and the expression on her face! That moment has always remained imprinted on our minds.
So, yes, a state funeral is apropos for this national hero. Moreso, his voice, his name, and his words should always leave us awestruck. You transitioned just shy of your 95th birthday, but know that you have left this planet stamped with your legacy. May you rest in peace Uncle George. The Rodney Family.”
Adding his voice to tributes paid to Lamming was Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of The University of the West Indies.
“Professor George Lamming, Caribbean and global literary luminary, Philosopher King of Postcolonialism, and social justice activist, transitioned in his native Barbados — the castle of his skin — on Saturday June 4, 2022 at age 94.
The news punctured the peace of mind of the academic community at The UWI, where he was Professor in Residence at the Cave Hill Campus. It was there in his office at the George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, that we last met and occupied ourselves for a few hours with one of Miles Davis’ last statements: that time is never enough to exhaust the ever giving, producing, creative imagination of the dedicated intellect.
George was a phenomenal philosopher who erupted in the literary world early in life with the publication in 1953 of a classic novel of anti-colonial consciousness — In The Castle Of My Skin—written during his 23rd year of life. From his Bridgetown Village, he traversed the intellectual universe and provided it with a pedagogy of liberation that underpinned Pan-Africanism, socialism, and a 20th century humanism that included feminism, dialectical materialism, and the Caribbean cultural revolution. His embrace of Cuban socialism became a template for his support of Maurice Bishop and Walter Rodney in their quests to detach the neo-colonial region from the scaffold of rejected imperialism.
As a craftsman of literary forms, his citizenship within The UWI community was celebrated as an expression of Caribbean civilisation at its finest. He was a brother within the hood, and a comrade in the intellectual struggle to win our freedom with dignity and self-determination.
A fierce but gentle and subtle debater and conversationalist, our hero was all too human in his love of humour and the culture of laughter. Always with a twinkle in his eyes, he communicated a deep compassion for sincere friendship and solidarity with those in the struggle.
His special love of The University of the West Indies for its mandate and role as a regional freedom vehicle, drove him to offer constant critical insights into its contradictory omens and at times its torn and tortured realities and identities.
He was in this sense the quintessential Caribbean progressive intellectual who transcended theory and grounded his existential engagements within the masses at the grassroots. He was a soldier of the Caribbean soul, forever building solidarities wherever liberation circumstances were erupting.
Within this context, our crusading citizen would expect of us to soldier on in his physical absence without fear or doubt about the future. For decades he illuminated the progressive paths with his papers and speeches.
We know he will be there at the rendezvous of the Caribbean victory. His life was dedicated to no other cause. He knew no other world. Until then, I simply say, “Bye George”, from all of us at your University of the West Indies.” (PR)
