George Lamming

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George Lamming photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1955

George Lamming (born 8 June 1927) is a novelist, essayist and poet, who is the most famous writer to emerge from Barbados[1] and one of the Caribbean's most important novelists.[2] "Each of his novels is both complete in itself and part of a continually developing vision linked to the changing political scene in the Caribbean, with its urgent problems of political and psychological decolonisation, and to Lamming's evolving understanding of the human condition."[3] He is a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University.

Biography

Early life and education

George William Lamming was born on 8 June 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write.

Career

Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he 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.[4]

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 the like of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright,[5] the latter writing an introduction to the book's US edition.[6] Lamming was subsequently 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.[7]

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, Kingston (1967–68).[8] Since then, he has been a visiting professor in the USA at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University, and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia.

Lamming is the author of 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 1960 collection of essays, The Pleasure of Exile, is a pioneering work that attempts to define the place of the West Indian in the post-colonial world, re-interpreting Shakespeare's The Tempest and the characters of Prospero and Caliban in terms of personal identity and the history of the Caribbean.[9]

In May 2011 the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) awarded him the first Caribbean Hibiscus Award in acknowledgement of his lifetime's work.

In April 2012, he was chair of the judges for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.[10]

Published works

  • In the Castle of My Skin (London: Michael Joseph; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953)
  • The Emigrants (London: Michael Joseph; New York: McGraw Hill, 1954. London: Allison & Busby, 1980)
  • Of Age and Innocence (London: Michael Joseph, 1958; London: Allison & Busby, 1981)
  • Season of Adventure (London: Michael Joseph, 1960; Allison & Busby, 1979; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999)
  • The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960; Allison & Busby, 1981; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992)
  • Water with Berries (London: Longman, 1971; New York: Holt Rinehart, 1972)
  • Natives of my Person (London: Longman; New York: Holt Rinehart, 1972. London: Allison & Busby, 1986)
  • Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II - Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual (Philipsburg, St. Martin: House of Nehesi, 1995, 2000)
  • Sovereignty of the Imagination: Conversations III - Language and the Politics of Ethnicity (2009).
  • Editor, Cannon Shot and Glass Beads: Modern Black Writing (London: Pan, 1974).
  • Editor, On the Canvas of the World (Port of Spain: Trinidad & Tobago Institute of the West Indies, 1999.
  • Caribbean Reasonings - The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation, edited by Anthony Bogues, Ian Randle Publishers, 2010.

Uncollected short stories

  • "David's Walk", in Life and Letters (London), November 1948.
  • "Of Thorns and Thistles" and "A Wedding in Spring", in West Indian Stories, ed. Andrew Salkey. London: Faber, 1960.
  • "Birds of a Feather", in Stories from the Caribbean, ed. Andrew Salkey. London: Elek, 1965; as Island Voices, New York: Liveright, 1970.
  • "Birthday Weather", in Caribbean Literature, ed. G. R. Coulthard. London: University of London Press, 1966.

Awards

References

  1. ↑ David P. Lichtenstein, "A Brief Biography of George Lamming", Literature of the Caribbean.
  2. ↑ Brown University, Africana Studies.
  3. ↑ Ian Munro, "George Lamming", in Bruce King (ed.), West Indian Literature, Macmillan, 1979, p. 126.
  4. ↑ Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (2000), p. 62.
  5. ↑ "George Lamming", East-West Center.
  6. ↑ George Lamming interview by Erika J. Waters, The Caribbean Writer, 7 December 1998.
  7. ↑ Michael Hughes, "Lamming, George, A Companion to West Indian Literature, Collins, 1979, p. 69.
  8. ↑ Gerald Moore, "George (Eric) Lamming Biography".
  9. ↑ "George Lamming (b. 1927)", Books and Writers.
  10. ↑ "Lamming laments Rodney amnesia in Guyana", Stabroek News, 1 May 2012.

Further reading

  • Anthony Boxhill, Critical Perspectives on George Lamming, Passeggiata Press, 1986.
  • Dalleo, Raphael. “Authority and the Occasion for Speaking in the Caribbean Literary Field: George Lamming and Martin Carter”. Small Axe 20 (June 2006): 19-39.
  • Dalleo, Raphael. Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
  • Forbes, Curdella. From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming And the Cultural Performance of Gender. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2005.
  • Joseph, Margaret Paul. Caliban in Exile: The Outsider in Caribbean Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
  • Munro, Ian, "George Lamming", in Bruce King (ed.), West Indian Literature, Macmillan, 1979, pp. 126–43.
  • Nair, Supriya. Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.
  • Pouchet Paquet, Sandra. The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1983.
  • Saunders, Patricia. "The Pleasures/Privileges of Exile: Re/covering Race and Sexuality in The Pleasures of Exile and Water With Berries. Alien-Nation and Repatriation: Translating Identity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.
  • Simoes da Silva, A. J., The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: George Lamming's Fiction as Decolonizing Project, Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.

External links

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