George Lamming is a Barbadian novelist, essayist and poet and an important figure in Caribbean literature. He has also held academic posts including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University and has lectured extensively around the world.
Background
Lamming was born on June 8, 1927, in Carrington Village, Barbados, a small community just outside the capital. Bom to a poor single mother who married later during his childhood, Lamming still managed to develop a sense of security, reliance, and privilege, largely passed on by his stem mother.
Education
As a child, Lamming went to the Roebuck Boys School at Carrington Village. He obtained a special scholarship to attend the Combermere School, an elite college preparatory school, where he was educated under a British system where most of his classmates came from affluence and privilege. In his book Conversations, Lamming explains that while at Combermere he was mentored by Frank Collymore, his English teacher. Collymore was the editor of BIM, a literary journal for Caribbean writers, which published Lamming's early poems. Collymore guided and encouraged his creative process and was a guide for many other writers of Lamming's generation.
Career
After graduation from high school, by at age 18, Lamming moved to Trinidad and started teaching at Colegio de Venezuela, a boys school in Port-of-Spain established by the Venezuelan Ministry of Education for the children of Venezuelans living in Trinidad. During this time, he continued writing poetry and worked on his short stories. He also continued recruiting writers for BIM (Dryaton and Adaiye, 1992). Among his early works were the poems "The Rock" and "The Boy and the Sea" (1951) and the short stories "David's Walk" (1948) and "Birthday Weather" (1951).
In 1950, anxious to explore new horizons and take advantage of opportunities, work on his writing, and distance himself from the colonial oppression and the perceived cultural staleness that permeated the West Indies, Lamming emigrated to Great Britain and started a new life. Arriving in post-war London, Lamming worked as in a factory worker until he was able to secure a position as a broadcaster with the BBC Colonial Service in 1951. His work there is regarded as some of the best broadcasting being done by West Indians in London at the time. He shared the airwaves with many other young Caribbean writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Stuart Hall.
Lamming's literary production flourished in England. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, was widely acclaimed in literary circles and received the Somerset Maugham Award for literature in 1957 and is considered one of the classics of West Indian fiction. Lamming has stated that one of the reasons for the book's success is that it is an account of childhood and adolescence in his native Barbados. Because everyone has undergone this stage, people tend to identify well with the book (Dryaton and Adaiye, 1992). The book's importance lies in the fact that it explores the identity conflicts created by black and white cultures that were so typical of West Indian people growing up at that time.
Lamming has been thought of as an existentialist writer (Saakana 1988). The early literary production of Lamming explores the themes of decolonization, poverty, lack of cultural identity, identity crisis, racial conflicts, migration, oppression, and exploitation. These themes are contextualized within the very real dynamics witnessed by the author as a black man growing up in Barbados who had to coexist with the white powers of the British colonial government. All of the work from this early period is to a large extent autobiographical and focuses on the colonial realities that the West Indies and the Caribbean experienced as a result of British and French colonialism and political exploitation by Great Britain and France. His works present beautiful but troubled landscapes of peoples and islands trying to come to terms with the realities of economic, social, and political subjugation.
It is his ability to re-create the West Indian experience through language that has brought such levels of acclaim to his work. In the early 1970s, Lamming published Wafer with Berries (1971) and Natives of My Person (1972). These novels further explored the themes of colonial identity, this time with a focus on the more modern Caribbean realities of the 1970s such as gender relations, violence, and political dissatisfaction with the post-colonial period. Other important works by Lamming are The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), and A Season of Adventure (1960), and George Lamming: Conversations: Essays, Addresses and Interviews 1953-1990.
Lamming has lectured and held teaching positions at prestigious universities. He was a writer-in-residence and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1967 and 1968. He has also taught and lectured at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Cornell University, the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania, and the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He has traveled to India, Australia, West Africa, and several other countries. At the request of the Barbadian government, Lamming organized the first Labor college in Barbados.
Personality
One of Lamming's greatest assets as a writer is his masterful use of language. For Lamming:
Language is at the heart and horizon of every human consciousness. It is the process which enables us to conceive of continuity on human experience; the verbal memory which reconstructs our past and offers it back as the only spiritual possession which allows us to reflect on who we are and what it may become. It is not inherited. Every child, in every culture, has to learn it as his or her necessary initiation into society. It is, perhaps, the most sacred of all human creations.
Quotes from others about the person
Lamming is considered one of the most representative Caribbean writers of his period. His storytelling draws more on the individual and collective realities of the islands than on the fiction. In his recent book, Caliban's Curse (1996), critic Supriya Nair has undertaken an in depth analysis of Lamming's work. She suggests that he has been a leader in the integration and revisionism of Caribbean history into his work and has been instrumental in the diffusion of knowledge and history about the Caribbean through his prose.