Dear Editor,
I join with others in lamenting the passing of George Lamming, the iconic man of Caribbean letters and literary giant in his own right. Indeed, he was more than a pioneering voice of Caribbean letters. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, would remain long with me after I first read it in my teens and would re-read it in my early twenties all his novels being reflective of the creative possibilities with Caribbean peoples slowly coming out of colonialism. I would bring this sensibility with me as a student of Canadian literature in the early 70’s, especially when I read Canadian poet Earle Birney’s poem “To George Lamming” in the course’s main text and felt an immediate contiguity or closeness, though I was living in the Lake Superior region.
George Lamming was more than the so-called first generation of Caribbean writers, I believe. He was also known and interacted with other Canadian literary figures, not least key novelist Margaret Laurence. And Lamming had told me about having been invited by Canada’s Tamarack magazine’s editor, William Toye, in the 60’s, to write for a special issue on the Caribbean which ultimately became the book, Pleasures of Exile, an important post colonial text. I last met Lamming about twenty years ago at the University of Miami (Coral Gables) where he was the resident Creative Writing instructor, and where I’d been invited by the Lamming scholar Prof. Sandra Paquet to lead a colloquium on Canadian literature, and to do a reading, which Lamming attended. I recall our conversation before and after, and his advice to younger writers, like well-known Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat. Then, he’d suggested that I invite him to Canada he as a remarkably gifted speaker, especially on his favourite subject, the “Conquest of the Indies,” and about race and creole identity. “We’re all born with a racial consciousness,” he told me, in the context of simmering racial tension in the Caribbean region. After Barbados he’d lived in Trinidad (moved there in 1946), and knew organically about class struggle and ethnic people’s inner lives (what he said about Indian contribution to the Caribbean is now commonplace). He was an admirer of Dr. Cheddi Jagan.
Initially, at the February 1970 Caribbean writers and artists’ conference in Georgetown (see Salkey’s Georgetown Journal) precursor to CARIFESTA I — I so looked forward to meeting Lamming (though Sam Selvon I drew closest to). But, I got a better view of Lamming at CARIFESTA V in Trinidad, in 1992, where he was the riveting keynote speaker drawing from his authentic working class, political and trade union background aligned to his literary forte. He’d moved to London in 1950 in his literary provenance, and had enabled CLR James’s well-known Beyond A Boundary to be published, it’d been said. But for Lamming, Edgar Mittleholzer was both role model and inspiration to Caribbean writers in pursuit of literary fame at that time: “How I admired that man can only be grasped by those who know what it is to be summoned…to create a personal style of living…that ordered me to the one essential duty that would be my life,” he would write. And attesting to his uncompromising Caribbeanness, Lamming would write that one can’t be a writer without knowing Nicolas Guillén and Aime Césaire, the pioneering voices of Cuba and Martinique.
It’s his narrative technique that most endears me to Lamming, what I’ve internalized: his view, for instance, that Caribbean inflection reflected in prose rhythms “cannot be written by any English writer, as we often work with more than one layer of language…in which you know the rhythm of the wind…the smell of the sea…the texture of the stone and rock,” and that “these are not objects outside of you: they are part of your consciousness.” With his passing it may still be said that the old generation has come and now seems gone. Trinidad’s Kenneth Ramchand, pioneering literary critic, once said that there are no Caribbean novelists as such, but only short-story writers. But Ramchand no doubt meant this in an appreciative way of narrative technique aligned to the story’s tight form which marks Lamming’s excellence as novelist (and essayist). Rest in peace, George!
Sincerely,
Cyril Dabydeen
Ottawa Poet Laureate Emeritus