George Lamming

George William Lamming OCC (8 June 1927 – 4 June 2022) was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He 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 lectured extensively worldwide.

Early life and education

George William Lamming was born on June 8, 1927, in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed Afro-Barbadian and English parentage. After his mother, Loretta Devonish, married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between his birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. He attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore – founder of the pioneering Caribbean literary magazine BIM – Lamming found the world of books and started to write.

Career

Lamming left Barbados to work as a teacher from 1946 to 1950 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. As he later wrote: "Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I moved with other West Indians to England in 1950. We easily thought we were going to an England that had been painted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is the measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interest like the islands we left. It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time. ...

"The emigrants were largely men in search of work. My friend and fellow traveller, the late Samuel Selvon of Trinidad, was a poet and short-story writer then halfway through his first novel, A Brighter Sun. Sam and I had left home for the same reason - to make a career as a writer. This was a journey to an expectation, and between 1948 and 1960 every West Indian novelist of significance within their region made a similar journey: Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittleholzer, Ian Carew of Guyana, Roger Mais, Andrew Salkey and John Hearne of Jamaica.

In 1951, Lamming became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. His writings were published in the Barbadian magazine Bim, edited by his teacher Frank Collymore, and the BBC's Caribbean Voices radio series broadcast his poems and short prose. Lamming himself read poems on Caribbean Voices, including some by the young Derek Walcott.

Lamming's first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, was published in London in 1953. It won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright, the latter writing an introduction to the book's U.S. edition. Lamming later said of the book: "I tried to reconstruct the world of my childhood and early adolescence. It was also the world of a whole Caribbean society." He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and became a professional writer. He began to travel widely, going to the United States in 1955, the West Indies in 1956 and West Africa in 1958. His second novel, The Emigrants, (1954), which focuses on the migrants' journey and the process of resettlement, was described by Quarterly Black Review as "very thought-provoking. It shows how adrift black people can be as they search for a political, economic and social context. It should also be read as an example of how black people have tried to use the novel to tell their own unique story in a unique way."

He lived in England for more than a decade but, as Hillel Italie notes, "unlike Naipaul, who settled in London and at times wrote disdainfully of his origins, Lamming returned home and became a moral, political and intellectual force for a newly independent country seeking to tell its own story. ...Lamming had a broad, connective vision he would say was inspired in part by the Trinidadian historian-activist C.L.R. James. His calling was to address the crimes of history, unearth and preserve his native culture and forge a 'collective sense' of the future."

He entered academia in 1967 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (1967–68). Later, he was a visiting professor in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Connecticut, Brown University, Cornell University, and Duke University and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Lamming also directed the University of Miami's Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing.

In April 2012, he was chair of the judges for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and served as chief judge for the inaugural Walter Rodney Awards for Creative Writing 2014.

George Lamming died in Bridgetown, Barbados, on 4 June 2022, four days short of what would have been his 95th birthday. His son Gordon had predeceased him in 2021; his daughter Natasha Lamming-Lee survives him, as does his long-time partner Esther Phillips.

Writing

Lamming wrote six novels: In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Water with Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972). His much acclaimed first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, featuring an autobiographical character named G., can be read as both a coming-of-age story as well as the story of the Caribbean. His second novel, The Emigrants, was a sequel to his debut autobiographical work, following the life of the same protagonist as he travels from Barbados to England in search of better prospects and opportunities.