The Whole Complex of Feelings

As we conducted the 2015 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in Barbados, several university scholars and attendees mentioned the work of George Lamming. While his papers are housed at the university, there too was a wonderful spoken archive, conversations about the influence of the eighty-eight-year-old Barbadian writer and scholar. Lamming was a visiting professor in Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University, and he spent part of his early literary career in Great Britain. The 2015 CCWW moved through those same spaces, and our approach captured some of the ideas Lamming presented in his essay collection, The Sovereignty of the Imagination:

The way we see, the way we hear, our nurtured sense of touch and smell, the whole complex of feelings which we call sensibility, is influenced by the particular features of the landscape that has been humanized by our work.

The fiction of the participants sometimes showed the influence of place on characters as they reshaped landscapes and contemplated the changing idea of home. The interior landscapes were similarly built, using the “complexity of feeling” to shape a character’s imagination and feelings. The writing often sought a depth-of-field that balanced the interior and the physical world. Our discussions often focused on each writer’s style choices and personal approach. While writers often drew from shared histories and cultures, they recognized the role of imagination sovereignty and the rigor it requires. The result should be, as Lamming described, “the very flexible and varying ranges of language.”

Both the USA and Barbados workshops encouraged a mixture of openness and questions as we considered the complexities of feeling and language used to measure them. Many writers will draw from history and a shared cultural memory, but those pieces are shaped through the rigors of process. We design the workshop to offer layers of questions to elevate that narrative shaping. Our approach shared space with Lamming’s ideas that challenge each author to build and sharpen the world through visual sharpness and layers of feeling. “This is the mark of cultural sovereignty—the free definition and articulation of the collective self, whatever the rigor of external constraints.”

The multiple sites of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop engage writers in spaces that are home to some and new to others. But as Lamming’s ideas have suggested, the writer builds a homeland in the imagination and connects that space to their history, their present moment, or other connections. Just as Lamming considered home, his aesthetic, and cultural history, writing about his world and moving through it, the writers and their fiction show the various junctions and a compelling array of narrative sites and language.