George Lamming: Biography from Answers.com Mobile

George Lamming

novelist; essayist

Personal Information

Born on June 8, 1927, in Carrington's Village, Barbados

Career

Taught at El colegio de Venezuela, Port of Spain, Trinidad, 1946-50; worked in factory in England, 1950; journalist and broadcaster, British Broadcasting Corporation Colonial Service, early 1950s; published short stories and poetry in England, early 1950s; published debut novel, In the Castle of My Skin, 1953; published three more novels in seven years and became established as major novelist; numerous visiting professorships and writer-in-residence posts in North America, the Caribbean, and other regions.

Life's Work

Among the most prominent writers of the modern Caribbean, George Lamming produced a body of fiction that was deeply rooted in his own experiences, yet also probed the deeper historical forces at work in modern Caribbean life. A native of Barbados, Lamming joined the post-World War II migration of Caribbean young people to Great Britain--a migration fueled by the search for new opportunities and parallel in many respects to the Great Migration of African Americans in the early twentieth century. Lamming found recognition as a writer in England and around the world. His fiction remained focused on the Caribbean, however, and in later life he returned to the region in which his fictional creations were rooted.

Lamming was born in Carrington's Village, Barbados, on June 8, 1927. Later immortalized as Creighton's Village in Lamming's debut novel The Castle of My Skin, Carrington's Village was near the Barbadian capital of Bridgetown but was semi-rural in character; under the old British plantation system it had been part of a large sugar farm. Lamming's childhood was shaped by his unmarried mother, who, despite difficult financial circumstances, instilled a sense of ambition in her only child. He also observed firsthand the economic upheavals that shook Barbados along with other Caribbean countries in the 1930s, as rural black farm workers began to move to the colonial-dominated cities to try to escape their grinding poverty. Lamming won a scholarship to attend Barbados's Combermere High School, a top institution where he was taken under the wing of a faculty member, Frank Collymore, and encouraged to write poetry.

Moved to England

With Collymore's help, Lamming landed a teaching position in Trinidad, at a boys' school called El Colegio de Venezuela in the capital city of Port of Spain. There Lamming encountered other aspiring Caribbean writers, but at the time the Caribbean islands were isolated places with few opportunities for blacks of any profession. Lamming resolved to leave for England, and in 1950 he relocated there on the same boat as another famous Caribbean novelist-to-be, the Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon. For a short time he worked in a factory, but he soon landed a job with the arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) directed toward providing programming for Britain's fast-shrinking empire.

Ambitious and productive, Lamming gained recognition in Britain for his poetry and short fiction, and in 1953 he published his weighty debut novel, The Castle of My Skin. That book won Lamming wide acclaim in Britain and was also published in the United States with an introduction by the groundbreaking novelist Richard Wright. Semi-autobiographical in nature, The Castle of My Skin traces the experiences of a boy identified as G. who, like Lamming, grows to maturity in a rapidly changing Barbadian village and leaves for Trinidad at age 18. G.'s experiences are intercut with observations of Barbadian life, narrated from the perspective of a detached observer.

That novel inaugurated for Lamming a series of novels that realistically portrayed the experiences of Caribbean expatriates like the novelist himself, yet were also undergirded by intellectual devices rivaling those employed by the most Anglicized of Caribbean novelists, the Indo-Trinidadian Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul. Lamming could describe the psychic scars of racism in direct and powerful terms. In The Castle of My Skin he wrote, "No black boy wanted to be white, but it was also true that no black boy liked the idea of being black. Brown skin was a satisfactory compromise, and brown skin meant a mixture of white and black.... There was a famous family on the island which could boast of the prettiest daughters. Their father was an old Scotch planer who had lived from time to time with some of the labourers on the sugar estate. The daughters were ravishing, and one was known throughout the island as the crystal sugar cake."

Created Fictional Caribbean Island

In tandem with descriptions of this type, however, Lamming also offered a variety of subtle literary devices intended to make specific historical or philosophical points. Some of his later novels were set in a fictional Caribbean country called San Cristobal, through which Lamming explored the new Caribbean or West Indian identity that united the peoples of the various Caribbean islands--and which Lamming found himself taking on as he continued to live in England and to travel widely around the English-speaking world in the 1950s. Lamming's novel Water with Berries (1971) is an elaborate recasting of William Shakespeare's play The Tempest, employing the island worlds of that work as symbols for aspects of Caribbean experience but also commenting upon its role as a text that had contributed to Britain's imperialist mindset.

Some critics found that Lamming's novels subordinated character development to devices like these, but many others praised his seamless integration of the personal and the historical. Lamming rapidly produced a series of major novels in the 1950s, and many observers noted that they seemed to be part of a sequence that drew on the stages of his own life and career for inspiration. His second novel, The Emigrants (1954), depicted the experiences of a group of West Indians in Britain; it accurately forecast the many social problems Britain's black residents would experience in the years to come. By the time he wrote Of Age and Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960), Lamming was recognized as a major writer. Season of Adventure inaugurated two new themes in Lamming's writing: the experiences of women in Caribbean cultures and the importance of Africa in Caribbean identity. Lamming himself had used the proceeds of a 1955 Guggenheim fellowship to live in West Africa for a time.

Wrote Documentary about Freedom Riders

In the 1960s, although he produced no new novels, Lamming experimented with other kinds of writing. He published a collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, that innovatively mixed autobiography and criticism, and thanks to a series of academic fellowships he was able to travel widely in the Caribbean and North America. Lamming became involved in the U.S. civil rights struggles of the 1960s and wrote the script for a television documentary about Alabama's Freedom Riders. A series of essays Lamming published in the late 1960s reaffirmed his commitment to the Caribbean world and to the building of new societies in the region's newly independent countries.

In 1972 Lamming published a complex historical novel of colonialism and slavery, Natives of My Person; though he was reported to be at work on other novels, Natives of My Person remains his most recent as of this writing. Lamming returned to Barbados in the late 1970s, though he continued to spend time in London and to take on university posts in places as far-flung as Denmark, Australia, and Tanzania. He has remained active as an essayist, teacher, and editor; in 2001 he published the second volume of an essay series, entitled Coming, Coming Home, that dealt with Western education and Caribbean thought. Among his many honors was the 1998 Langston Hughes Award from the City University of New York, where he served as visiting professor of creative writing. Both one of the Caribbean's great storytellers and one of the region's true intellectuals, Lamming by the century's end was the focus of a large and growing body of critical literature.

Awards

Selected: Guggenheim fellowship, 1955; Canada Council fellowship, 1962; Langston Hughes Award, City University of New York, 1998.

Works

Selected writings

Novels
In the Castle of My Skin, McGraw (U.S. ed.), 1953; reprint with new introduction by the author, Schocken, 1983.
The Emigrants, McGraw (U.S. ed.), 1954.
Of Age and Innocence, M. Joseph (London, England), 1958.
A Season of Adventure, M. Joseph (U.S. ed. University of Michigan Press, 1998), 1960.
Water with Berries, Holt , 1971.
Natives of My Person, Holt, 1972.
Essays
The Pleasures of Exile, M. Joseph (U.S. ed. University of Michigan Press, 1992), 1960.
Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual: Coming, Coming Home, House of Nesehi (St. Martin), 1995.
Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II, House of Nesehi (St. Martin), 2001.