George Lamming's Literary Nationalism: Language between The Tempest and the Tonelle

"To change your language you must change your life," Derek Walcott writes, summing up, with epigrammatic precision, the perennial relationship between language and the formation of cultural identity that pervades West Indian literature from its early beginnings to the present. ¹ As early as 1759, Francis Williams's "Ode to Lord Haldane," despite its derivative mode and classical Latin diction, still evokes that ironic otherness of the racial outsider and the contradiction that will haunt the future of West Indian writing: a tacit acceptance of Eurocentric aesthetic norms on the one hand, the awareness of racial differences on the other. Williams adopts a universalizing stance to posit the color-blindness of art:

It is not for me, warrior dear to Mars! to extol the deeds of generals: Minerva forbids an Aethiop to do. . . . We live under the sun which drives a fire-bearing team; all eloquence deserts our hearts. Receive this then, bathed with much soot from a mouth that tries to sing. Its power comes from the heart, not the skin. Established by a powerful hand, (for the bountiful Creator gave the same soul to all living beings, nothing withheld), virtue itself is innocent of colour, as is wisdom. There is no colour in the pure mind, none in art. ²

Williams's transcendental aesthetic is separated by two centuries and by radical ideological differences from the views of Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who asserts the ethnic and cultural underpinnings of art and language. In The Pleasures of Exile, published in 1960 on the eve of decolonization, Lamming relates the issues of Caribbean otherness, identity, language, and literature to the pervasive and inevitable dynamic of confrontation between colonizer and colonized, master and slave, European and non-European others (Amerindian, African, Asian). For Lamming, the conceptual metaphor is that of Shakespeare's The Tempest; hence, the conflict between Prospero the colonizer, and Caliban the native becomes paradigmatic of the major historical opposition and the overarching dialectic of Caribbean society. ³

Lamming's essays in The Pleasures of Exile constitute one of the most powerful postcolonial interventions in the construction of genealogies of cultural and literary nationalisms. The paradigmatic importance of Lamming's revisionist reading of The Tempest derives from the self-conscious exploration of the filial relationship between European canonical discourses and the construction of Caribbean subjects as well as the subversive potential of the reading. This synthesis of historical and cross-cultural interrogations prompts José David Saldívar to describe Lamming (and Fernández Retamar) as "the supreme commentator, the one author from our America, who pulls Old World colonialist and New World colonized writing into a coherent and continuous line." ⁴ Long before the theoretical elevation of counter-discursivity as a paradigm of postcolonial writing, Lamming's essays insist on the counter-discursivity as a necessary legacy of the colonial encounter. This legacy, rooted as it is in language and discourse, can be appropriated, revised and transformed only within the context of a systematic questioning and dismantling of imperial codes of governance, culture, and self-fashioning that permeate European writing. Language, for Lamming, underwrites the colonial enterprise and is therefore central to the trajectories of decolonization and cultural nationalism.

Lamming, like Wilson Harris, is also more self-consciously "theoretical" than other West Indian novelists, as demonstrated in his essays and in the complex experimental narratives that constitute his fiction. His approach to language is complex, historically engaged, cosmopolitan, and deeply transgressive. ⁵ A number of systematic propositions about the colonial's relation to language are present in critical interventions such as the essay "The Negro Writer and His World"; other essays collected in the two volumes of Conversations; and The Pleasures of Exile. Lamming also produced four novels from 1953 to 1960, and two more in the 1970s; hence, his fictions anticipate and reiterate many of the theoretical formulations on language that appear in his essays. His seminal first...