Caliban in exile
The Pleasure of Exile
George Lamming (Michael Joseph, 21s).
Mr. George Lamming is always just ahead. He is not only the most sensitive and dangerous of the West Indian novelists. He is also one of its most formidable and elusive intellects.
No West Indian writer would put pen to paper to describe the discovery of his own “Negro-ness” (the French word, negritude, is better, but there is, significantly, no English equivalent) without first having to write his way round Lamming’s first novel, In The Castle Of My Skin.
And now here he is with the book every other exile would have written first. It is a bloody frustrating experience.
Mr. Lamming moves mostly indirections and allusions. These are sketches of exile, loosely composed in no chronological order, marked off by comments, some of which are deep and moving, some of which are a bit pretentious and innocent. The structure, if there is one, is provided by his developing awareness of the complex relationship between the colonial artist and the metropolitan culture: that is, the history of Lamming’s own sensibility.
A more arbitrary—and less successful—framework is provided by his use of the figures of Prospero and Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest—a typical use of poetry to retell the story of colonial enslavement and liberation.
Prospero sands for “England abroad”—not the England of wigs and plume-hatted Governors—but the whole process of cultural imperialism which has cut the West Indies off from a meaningful relationship with its African past. Caliban, the unspeakable monster who made a pass at the magician's daughter, the black outcast, is the West Indian writer.
The power of Prospero over this slave is wielded, not by the tyranny of the colonial police, but by the terrible magic of the Gift of Language. Mr. Lamming is Caliban himself, come home at last from over the water, to break the wand. Caliban has the gift of tongues. When he recites, even the ICA quivers. The central chapter of the book is called, “Caliban Orders History.” It is an appropriately ominous note.
But then, the solicitous social worker asks politely, what the hell is Mr. Lamming doing here at all? Why is the flower of Caribbean culture huddled in some frigid bed-sitter in London, W.11? In the first third of his book, with many twists and asides, Mr. Lamming sets out to answer that question. Caliban must capture the citadel of Prospero itself before he can be really free.
Mr. Lamming is only working his way through what he hopes is the last twist of the dialectic: that terrible double relationship which makes the West Indian hate and love English culture in about equal portions.
Behind him lies, not the sunny scenarios of the Caribbean travelogue, but a culture and society bearing upon its face the deep impression of Prospero’s long regime: a culture at once “liberated and Victorian, revering “the great masters of English poetry” and yet deeply philistine, profoundly proletarian in composition and yet rigidly middle-class in character—a “new nation” still as old as colonialism and slavery itself: free—yet still “in chains.”
It is not until he stands in the ghastly amphitheatre of Paddington Station and asks himself the question. “Boy, what the hell you doin’ here any-at-all”? that the whole thing makes sense. “The West Indian writer hungers for nourishment from a soil which he (as an ordinary citizen) could not at present endure.”
Mr. Lamming might be of the last generation of writers who have to do it this way: but that depends upon what sort of place “that acre of ground in the New World which keeps growing echoes in my head” turns out to be.
The long rambling sections—scenes, sketches, bits of dialogue and reminiscence—are, properly speaking, the first literary commentary of its kind to be written by a West Indian.
The ICA, the catacombs of the BBC’s Colonial Service, Notting Hill, David Pitts campaign in Hampstead, encounters with the English passim, are only a few of the incidents which provoke his asides. The approach here is sometimes too fragmentary, but almost all his comments illuminate one or other of the predicaments of the colonial sensibility in exile.
The book turns, however, around a long and rather over-literary analysis of The Tempest and then, for two or three long chapters, gathers—not pace, of which there is too much—but depth. These are the chapters in which Lamming recounts the magnificent story of Toussaint L’Overture, the Haitian revolutionary, and via the book, Black Jacobins, engages the most formidable political intellect the West Indies had produced—C.L.R. James.
These chapters lend a kind of oblique historical perspective to the book, and the absence of this elsewhere is a noticeable weakness.
C.L.R. James and his protege, Eric Williams, are the political symbols of Lamming’s developing sensibility, and though, elsewhere, he handles the politics of post-colonial countries with a marked naivety, in the analysis of James’s development, and his account of Eric Williams’s “university in the square” in Trinidad, Lamming is on native ground.
In the final section, Lamming describes his first visit to Africa. Here the poignancy and dilemma of permanent exile is complete. For Africa is, to him, a wonderful experience, and he is deeply bitten by the “freedom feeling” but he is a traveller in a foreign country.
So that, with an appropriateness which Lamming himself can hardly yet see, the last chapter is the real beginning–himself and Sam Selvon, the first of the “last” emigrants arriving at Waterloo.
Caliban in exile is a pretty resourceful bird. Mr. Lamming—who is not one to miss a final irony—calls the chapter “Journey to an Exception.”
Stuart Hall
Tribune (London), August 26, 1960, p. 11.
