As I reflected on George Lamming’s life, a remarkable life, on where he was born in the village of Carrington, of the island of his birth, Barbados, and then on his profound literary and personal commitments to the Caribbean, I reflected and thought about these islands of ours washed by the Caribbean Sea.
These islands, where, as Derek Walcott reminds us, “the sea is history”. And here Walcott does not mean that it is just the Caribbean Sea that has history, rather it is the entire Atlantic Ocean. Walcott means the movements on this ocean through which these islands were born at the heart of the European colonial project. Lamming was always clear about this history. He once said, “The entire Caribbean society has rested on the complex of plantation slave society.” And in this world that rested on plantation slavery, a different and distinctive form of slavery in human history emerged, not seen before, and not just because of its violence, its systems of death and humiliation.
Racial slavery, as a social system, created a society in which race determined perpetual servitude. What the Guyanese historian Elsa Goveia would call a group of people who would become “property in person”.
Born 89 years after so-called emancipation in the Caribbean, Lamming had to confront the afterlives of this kind of plantation slavery and colonialism. He had to confront the afterlives in which history moved like a sedimented deposit, structuring the everyday lives of the society. In a 2014 interview just recently published, he stated: “I have always thought that I was lucky or blessed, because from before I was in my teens, I was in secondary school, and already decided that I was a writer, and thought of myself as a writer, even before I wrote my first book.”
Lamming, we know, was a writer, a novelist, a poet and an essayist, and his six novels—from the first one, In the Castle of My Skin in the 1950s, to Natives of My Person in the 1970s—tell the story of this Caribbean. A Caribbean that begins in plantation slavery and colonialism, and a Caribbean that also begins a journey of expectation, what he calls in that 2014 interview “a journey that is still insisting on being discovered”.
This remarkable man of letters was always searching, because one of the things he was clear on was that these islands of the sea, constructed by histories of crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, had to confront who and what we are. In that confrontation about who and what we are, we had to have what he called, in conversation with David Scott some years ago, a certain kind of “sovereignty of the imagination”. This work of the imagination for Lamming was not about literature or the literary. It was about a certain kind of imagination that had to do with the political, social, and, yes, economic. And at the heart of this work, indeed of his own, I would argue, was the matter of language.
From 1956, at the black writers’ conference which he attended in Paris, and at which there were folks like Fanon, and Stephen Alexis and Jean Price-Mars from Haiti. In addition, there were figures like Césaire, Richard Wright and Léopold Senghor. From that particular conference, Lamming presented in his speech “The Negro Writer and His World” a sentence in which he says, “A name is an infinite source of control.” This was the dilemma for the Caribbean. How do we name our own reality? And for Lamming, it was a kind of dilemma which required us to have a certain form of imagination that resided in the question of sovereignty. Because it was this sovereignty which would give us the capacity to name.
In his novel Season of Adventure, he ended with a declaration: that “all the republics would fall until they begin to use the language of the drum”. And where does this language of the drum come from? It comes from, in Lamming’s words, the “people from below”. In a profound sense, this was the ground from which he operated. It was where his gaze was always focused. And we who live today; who inhabit these islands of the seas, in whom the islands of the seas are in our bones, we who are here to celebrate a Caribbean life, a life of letters, a life of remarkable audacity, intellectual and political, might have to think about this language of the drum and how we structure ourselves around the language of the drum.
Lamming—George—is now gone. He has gone to join the ancestors, CLR James, Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Walter Rodney, Alejo Carpentier, Andaiye, Rex Nettleford, among many others. And I can just imagine, as I thought about this, and about all the others who have gone to join the ancestors. I thought about them laughing and drinking Caribbean rum and debating the Caribbean. And I wonder about the keeper of the gates of this ancestral land, and what he or she must be thinking about these audacious Caribbean souls. Something, I am sure, that keeper has never seen before.
So we celebrate George, but as we do so, we should remember what he thought about himself. So I leave with these particular words he wrote in 2016, at the end of the new introduction to In the Castle of My Skin:
The catapult ones of rights have become the subject of their own history, engaged in a global war to liberate their villages, rural and urban from the old order of poverty and fear. This is the most fundamental battle of our time, and I am joyfully lucky [and you can see the twinkling in his eye when he writes this] to have been made by my work, a soldier in their ranks.
But, I would say, he was more than a soldier in their ranks. He was a soldier in the ranks of those of us who want to have a different Caribbean. He was really the anchor of our ideas. An anchor about the possibilities of what we may become, of what we, the people of these islands of the sea, might one day fashion as a different future.
Walk good, my friend and brethren. Your life and work will shine, leading us onwards always. One love.