In The Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

The novel, In the Castle of my Skin, by Bajan writer, George Lamming, is filled with many sections of long minute details. The reader might feel a gnawing irritation at the attention he gives to what seems to be unnecessary information. The reader’s patience will be challenged by the sometimes long and drawn out descriptions of conversations and daily activity. After critical confrontation with his or her inner self, the reader will realize that Lamming is honoring the complexity of his Caribbean heritage as he works the double entendre and criticism embedded in the calypso style into the Europeanized version of the novel we, the colonized, take for granted.

The genius of Lamming’s novel seeps into the mind. This genius is his ability to take you into the world of those often ignored and use their positions to highlight the social and political consequences of domination; in order to do this Lamming slows us down and demands that we look and listen –look and listen to these voices as they confront the hypocracy of the two worlds they are required to live in, untangle and change.

The reader is confronted by the reality of what is taken for “ordinary,” or better yet, in brutal honesty, the reader, often expected to be the educated middle class, the Fanonesque reader, is confronted by the daily life situations of the people considered to be the working lower class, the poor, and therefore, inconsequential. These are the voices that are often believed to be so simple that others speak for them and declare their reality.

Lamming’s breaks the paradigm that knowledge of the world can only be examined by the educated.

by Bacchus