George Lamming, a Barbados novelist and essayist who was one of the last generations of Caribbean writers to track the regional transition from colonialism to independence, was the capital of his country on June 4. He died at his home in Bridgetown. He was 94 years old.
Death was confirmed by his daughter, Natasha Ramming Lee. She did not provide the cause.
Ramming’s early work, like the work of contemporary VS Naipole and Samuel Selvon, was due to his experience as a young man in London, who published his first novel, “In the Castle of My Skin,” in 1953. It has been filtered. Hundreds of thousands of Caribbean people who emigrated to Britain after the government ruled that they were British citizens in 1948, part of what became known as the Windlash generation.
For Mr. Ramming and others, the rapid collapse of the British Empire was a moment of soul quest and response. What did you mean by being Barbados? Can the former colonial subject create an identity independent of its colonists, not to mention society as a whole? And what was the place of art in that vision?
Richard Drayton, a historian at King’s College London, said, “They seek the right to talk about themselves and their societies and landscapes and explain the world in which they created themselves with the accuracy and care of insiders. I think it was. ” Mr. Ramming’s friend said in a telephone interview. “It’s for itself, not for the entertainment of the British masses.”
“In the Castle of My Skin” was a significant success in winning the Somerset Maugham Award and awarding Mr. Ramming a Guggenheim Scholarship. A broadly autobiographical story about a boy who grew up in Barbados in the midst of labor and social unrest elicited Mr. Ramming’s extensive reading in existentialist thought. French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as the black writer Richard Wright, who emigrated to Paris in 1946, defended the book.
The novel, full of elaborate images and metaphors, blends the typical melange of Mr. Ramming’s fiction with poetry, memoirs, and theatrical techniques and styles.
“The water was getting higher and higher until the ferns and flowers on our balcony were flooded,” he writes. “My mother immediately brought a bag to absorb it, but it rained overhead in the gaps in the roof, and the carpet and flowers and fern epergne were liquid, left behind in black in mourning for herpes zoster. It was a glittering curve. “
In an introduction to the US version of this book, Wright wrote: As an artist, he has the courage to be quiet and stubborn, in which new writers occupy his position in the literary world. “
Mr. Ramming used his prize money to travel to Ghana and the United States and to return to the Caribbean Sea. Those trips brought him into contact with the African diaspora and strengthened his sense of political commitment. This is an aspect of his work that sets him apart from Walcott, Naipole, and many others in his cohort. He attended a groundbreaking black writer and artist conference in Paris in 1956 and became a close friend of Marxist literary critic CLR James.
Writer Caryl Phillips said in a telephone interview that “he is very different from others in that he puts himself in what can be called a kind of Afro-global diaspora tradition.” ..
At the same time, Mr. Ramming was also absorbed in English literature — Thomas Hardy was one of his favorite poets — and he was involved in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, especially the relationship between the wrecked wizard Prospero and his slave Caliban. I was fascinated. He felt it was a metaphor for the relationship between colonization and colonization.
Through his work, Mr. Ramming tried to complicate the relationship. It was a hierarchy and also a dynamic that colonized people could overcome his or her double consciousness or alienation experience to create space for his or her own identity and freedom. ..
“Double consciousness must be seen as a strategy, not as a prison,” he said in a 2002 interview with the magazine Small Ax. “He is in my consciousness, as I am in him. And I have the power to give him meaning. It is the same as he puts meaning in me.”
Achieving that vision required political struggle, and as his career progressed, Mr. Ramming devoted more energy to his activities. He wrote the final “My Man’s Native” in his six novels in 1972. His subsequent published works were all non-fiction, in the form of essays, speeches and manifestos.
He was worried that colonialism might have led Caribbean societies to recreate the same class structure and, in particular, find a new imperial metropolitan area submissive to the United States. He traveled extensively, supported the left-wing government, and organized activists around the Caribbean.
To support himself, he began his academic career in the late 1960s, teaching and writing at institutions such as Brown University, Texas University, Duke University, and the University of the West Indies.
For him, fiction, essays, and activism were all part of the same effort.
“I haven’t changed much in the sense of what I’m doing and seeing myself as a kind of evangelist,” he told Small Ax. “I’m a kind of preacher. I’m a man who brings some kind of message.”
George William Ramming was born on June 8, 1927, in Carrington, a former sugar plantation village on the outskirts of Bridgetown. His parents were unmarried and he knew his father only from a distance. His mother, Loretta Devonish, was a housewife and later married police officer Clyde Medford.
From an early age he remembered a fragment of class consciousness. A labor dispute struck the island in 1937, killing 14 people and providing a background for “in the castle of my skin.”
He won a scholarship to attend one of Barbados’s three grammar schools. There, English teacher Frank Collymore, who also edited the island’s major literary magazines, introduced him to his writing.
In 1946 he moved to the Port of Spain in Trinidad, where he taught at a boarding school for wealthy Venezuelans. It was a culturally and politically vibrant place. He met American singer, actor and leftist activist Paul Robeson on tour and began his first encounter with Marxism and continental philosophy.
He married the artist Nina Ghent in 1950. They later divorced. Along with his daughter, he has survived by his longtime partner, Esther Phillips. 7 grandchildren. And 10 great-grandchildren. His son, Gordon Ramming, died in 2021.
Ramming returned to Barbados in 1980 and eventually moved to a hotel in the countryside on the eastern side of the island. It became the base of his work, where he met political activists and wrote his speeches and essays.
He continued to focus on Caribbean politics, but long before it became apparent, he also had the foresight on the global resurgence of white supremacism in the 21st century.
“The white world is closing the ranks,” he said in a 1998 speech at City University of New York. “The Cold War is over and a new racial hierarchy is emerging.”
