By Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker Abdalla   

George William Lamming, poet, novelist, essay writer, orator, lecturer, teacher, editor and tireless activist for a New World Order, entered the world of Caribbean letters as an elder statesman.

The most famous writer to emerge from the island of Barbados, the grandfatherly George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927. He witnessed and participated in much of the social and political upheaval that had taken place in the West Indies during his lifetime.

Throughout the 1930s, rapid population growth, widespread economic depression, and the shift from a primarily agrarian economy to an industrial one profoundly altered traditional Barbadian village life. Trade unions became an effective political force and organized labor led the drive for political reform, ultimately resulting in the Barbadian independence movement. All of these factors had an impact on Lamming’s life and are reflected in his works.

As a child, Lamming attended Roebuck Boys School and earned a rare scholarship to Combermere High School. In 1946 he left Barbados and traveled to Trinidad, where he worked at El Collegio de Venezuela as a teacher. During this time, he met several important Trinidadian writers, including Clifford Sealy and Cecil Herbert, and published poetry in literary magazines.

In 1950 Lamming moved to England, where he worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation as a journalist while pursuing his literary career. He quickly established himself as a writer and an intellectual. Lamming’s first two novels, In the Castle of My Skin and The Emigrants (1954), were successful and well received. In 1955 Lamming visited the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship, serving as a writer-in-residence at the University of Texas. In 1956 he was a participant in the first international Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. The following year ‘In the Castle of My Skin’ received the Somerset Maugham Award for Literature.

Lamming returned to the Caribbean and became active in various political causes, including the movement for Barbadian independence, which was achieved in 1966. He published two novels ‘Of Age and Innocence’ (1958) and ‘Season of Adventure’ (1960), and a book of essays ‘The Pleasures of Exile’ (1960), in rapid succession. In 1962 he received a Canada Council Fellowship. In 1967 he was writer-in-residence at the Mona, Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies.

After a twelve-year hiatus from writing, he published two more novels ‘Natives of My Person’ (1972) and ‘Water with Berries’ (1972). In 1975 Lamming was a writer-in-residence at the University of Dar-es-Salaam and the University of Nairobi. The following year he was awarded a British Commonwealth Foundation grant, a traveling fellowship that took him to major universities in India and Australia.

He had been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Connecticut, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and the University of North Carolina. He also acted as the director of the fiction workshop at the University of Miami’s Summer Institute for Caribbean Creative Writing. In 2004 he was named a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of the West Indies. This was followed by a visiting professorship position at Brown University’s Africana Department. Lamming remained associated with educational and cultural projects of the Barbados Workers’ Union and the Barbados Labor College while dividing his time among England, the Caribbean, and the United States.

He passed away on June 4, 2022 in Barbados.

References

Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series. Edited by H. May and J.G. Lesniak. Detroit: Gale Publishing, 1989, Volume 26.

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Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker is a poet and writer from Omdurman Umbda -Sudan. He works as an English Instructor, Trainer and Freelance Interpreter. He also has been working as a debate leader discussing various topics in many English Institutes, Centers, Academy and schools.

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