In the Castle of My Skin Read online

  George Lamming

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  IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN

  Contents

  Author’s Introduction

  In the Castle of My Skin

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  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN

  George Lamming is a Barbados-born novelist, essayist and poet. Currently Honorary Professor at the Errol Barrow Centre for the Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies, Lamming has taught at universities around the world, including holding posts of Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke University and Visiting Professor at Brown University. His books include The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958) and The Pleasures of Exile (1960).

  To my Mother & Frank Collymore

  whose love and help

  deserved a better book

  Author’s Introduction

  The reading of fiction involves a certain conspiracy of feeling between the writer and his reader. They have both agreed to accord every act of the imagination the status of an absolute truth. And the world of fiction must work towards this end. It may be helpful, therefore, to alert readers to the kind of device which this writer has employed in the creation of that world; and especially since his methods denote a break from conventional practice.

  In the Castle of My Skin introduces us to a world of poor and simple villagers; and the village functions both as place and symbol of an entire way of life.

  The village was a marvel of small, heaped houses raised jauntily on groundsels of limestone, and arranged in rows on either side of the multiplying marl roads. Sometimes the roads disintegrated, the limestone slid back and the houses advanced across their boundaries to meet those on the opposite side in an embrace of board and shingle and cactus fence … There were days when the village was quiet: the shoemaker plied lazily at his trade and the washerwomen bent over the tubs droned away their complacency. At other times there were scenes of terror, and once there was a scene of murder.

  But the season of flood could change everything. The floods could level the stature and even conceal the identity of the village. With the turn of my ninth year it had happened again. From the window I looked at the uniform wreckage of a village at night in water … I went away from the window over the dripping sacks and into a corner which the weather had forgotten. And what did I remember? My father who had only fathered the idea of me had left me the sole liability of my mother who really fathered me.

  This world is not really the creation of individual wills. There is no privacy since the secret of each household can never escape communal scrutiny. I know your business and you know mine. The mother of the novel is given no name. She is simply G.’s mother, a woman of little or no importance in her neighbourhood until the tropical season rains a calamity on every household; and she emerges, without warning, as a voice of nature itself.

  Then she broke into a soft repetitive tone which rose with every fresh surge of feeling until it became a scattering peal of solicitude that soared across the night and into the neighbour’s house. And the answer came back louder, better organized and more communicative, so that another neighbour responded and yet another until the voices seemed to be gathered up by a single effort and the whole village shook with song on its foundation of water.

  I cite that passage in order to introduce readers to a characteristic of this type of fiction which has caused some difficulty for the conventional critic of the novel. And what I say now of In the Castle of My Skin is also true of other Caribbean writers. The book is crowded with names and people, and although each character is accorded a most vivid presence and force of personality, we are rarely concerned with the prolonged exploration of an individual consciousness. It is the collective human substance of the Village itself which commands our attention. The Village, you might say, is the central character. When we see the Village as collective character, we perceive another dimension to the individual wretchedness of daily living. It is the dimension of energy, force, a quickening capacity for survival. The Village sings, the Village dances; and since the word is their only rescue, all the resources of a vital oral folk tradition are summoned to bear witness to the essential humanity which rebukes the wretchedness of their predicament.

  In this method of narration, where community, and not person, is the central character, things are never so tidy as critics would like. There is often no discernible plot, no coherent line of events with a clear, causal connection. Nor is there a central individual consciousness where we focus attention, and through which we can be guided reliably by a logical succession of events. Instead, there are several centres of attention which work simultaneously and acquire their coherence from the collective character of the Village.

  The Novel has had a peculiar function in the Caribbean. The writer’s preoccupation has been mainly with the poor; and fiction has served as a way of restoring these lives – this world of men and women from down below – to a proper order of attention; to make their reality the supreme concern of the total society. But along with this desire, there was also the writer’s recognition that this world, in spite of its long history of deprivation, represented the womb from which he himself had sprung, and the richest collective reservoir of experience on which the creative imagination could draw.

  This world of men and women from down below is not simply poor. This world is black, and it has a long history at once vital and complex. It is vital because it constitutes the base of labour on which the entire Caribbean society has rested; and it is complex because Plantation Slave Society (the point at which the modern Caribbean began) conspired to smash its ancestral African culture, and to bring about a total alienation of man the source of labour from man the human person.

  The result was a fractured consciousness, a deep split in its sensibility which now raised difficult problems of language and values; the whole issue of cultural allegiance between the imposed norms of White Power, represented by a small numerical minority, and the fragmented memory of the African masses: between White instruction and Black imagination. The totalitarian demands of White supremacy, in a British colony, the psychological injury inflicted by the sacred rule that all forms of social status would be determined by the degrees of skin complexion; the ambiguities among Blacks themselves about the credibility of their own spiritual history.

  All this would have to be incorporated into any imaginative record of the total society. Could the outlines of a national consciousness be charted and affirmed out of all this disparateness? And if that consciousness could be affirmed, what were its true ancestral roots, its most authentic cultural base? The numerical superiority of the black mass could forge a political authority of their own making, and provide an alternative direction for the society. This was certainly possible. But this possibility was also the measure of its temporary failures.

  I was among those writers who took flight from that failure. In the desolate, frozen heart of London, at the age of twenty-three, I tried to reconstruct the world of my childhood and early adolescence. It was also the world of a whole Caribbean reality.

  Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in 1950. We simply thought that we were going to an England which had been planted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is the measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interest like the islands we had left. It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time.

  Today I shudder to think how a country, so foreign t
o our own instincts, could have achieved the miracle of being called Mother. It had made us pupils to its language and its institutions, baptized us in the same religion; schooled boys in the same game of cricket with its elaborate and meticulous etiquette of rivalry. Empire was not a very dirty word, and seemed to bear little relation to those forms of domination we now call imperialist.

  The English themselves were not aware of the role they had played in the formation of these black strangers. The ruling class were serenely confident that any role of theirs must have been an act of supreme generosity. Like Prospero, they had given us language and a way of naming our own reality. The English working class were not aware they had played any role at all, and deeply resented our arrival. It had come about without any warning. No one had consulted them. Occasionally I was asked: ‘Do you belong to us or the French?’ I had been dissolved in the common view of worker and aristocrat. English workers could also see themselves as architects of Empire.

  Much of the substance of In the Castle of My Skin is an evocation of this tragic innocence. Nor was there, at the time of writing, any conscious effort, on my part, to emphasize the dimension of cruelty which had seduced, or driven by the force of need, an otherwise honourable black people into such lasting bonds of illusion. It was not a physical cruelty. Indeed, the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence. No torture, no concentration camp, no mysterious disappearance of hostile natives, no army encamped with orders to kill. The Caribbean endured a different kind of subjugation. It was a terror of the mind; a daily exercise in self-mutilation. Black versus black in a battle for self-improvement:

  Each represented for the other an image of the enemy … and the enemy was My People. My people are low-down nigger people. My people don’t like to see their people get on. The language of the overseer. The language of the civil servant … Not taking chances with you people, my people. They always let you down. Make others say we’re not responsible, we’ve no sense of duty … Like children under the threat of hell fire they accepted instinctively that the others, meaning the white, were superior, yet there was always the fear of realizing that it might be true. This world of the others’ imagined perfection hung like a dead weight over their energy. If the low-down nigger people weren’t what they are, the others couldn’t say anything about us. Suspicion, distrust, hostility. These operated in every decision. You never can tell with my people. It was the language of the overseer, the language of the Government servant, and later the language of lawyers and doctors who had returned stamped like an envelope with what they called the culture of the Mother Country.

  This was the breeding ground for every uncertainty of self. In the riot scene of the novel, a group of men armed with knives, and ready with stones, have ambushed the white landlord on his way home. There is a clear intention to kill him, but the act of political revenge is delayed by argument about its timing. Should we strike now or a little later? Their deliberations go on and on, and betray a latent ambivalence which is finally resolved by the arrival of their labour leader who pleads with them to withdraw. The landlord escapes, unharmed.

  When I read this scene some twenty years after its publication, I was surprised by the mildness of its resolution. From the distant and more critical vantage point of London, the past now seemed more brutal. I wondered why I had allowed the landlord to go free. Was it the need to make the story conform to the most accurate portrayal of events as I had known them? No white man had been killed by rioters in Barbados in 1937. But I had taken greater liberty with other facts and done so in the interest of a more essential truth. Now I had begun to think that the most authentic response to the long history of shame and humiliation which had produced the riots demanded that the white landlord should have been killed.

  The novelist does not only explore what had happened. At a deeper level of intention than literal accuracy, he seeks to construct a world that might have been; to show the possible as a felt and living reality. So for a long time I remained haunted by the feeling that the white landlord should have been killed; even if it were presented as the symbolic end of a social order that deserved to be destroyed.

  The novel was completed within two years of my arrival in London. I still shared in that previous innocence which had socialized us into seeing our relations to Empire as a commonwealth of mutual interests. The truth is there was never any such reciprocity of interests, and the various constitutional settlements which would gradually lead to the recent status of independence had a decisive influence in preserving much of the social legacy of the colonial period. Today the region is witnessing with alarm what is, in fact, an upheaval too long delayed. But the tactical withdrawal which the British now so proudly call decolonization simply made way for a new colonial orchestration. The Caribbean returns to its old role of an imperial frontier, now perceived as essential to the security interests of the United States.

  It is interesting for me to reflect on the role which America was to play in shaping essential features of the novel. If England dominated our minds as the original idea of ultimate human achievement, the United States existed for us as a dream, a kingdom of material possibilities accessible to all. I had never visited the United States before writing In the Castle of My Skin; but America had often touched our lives with gifts that seemed spectacular at the time, and reminded us that this dream of unique luxury beyond our shores was true. This image of America had not changed. Almost everyone had some distant relation there who had done well. I had never heard of anyone being a failure in the United States. And Christmas was evidence of this when postal orders arrived with money and gifts of exotic clothes.

  But the United States had also provided the character, Trumper, with a political experience which the subtle force of British imperialism had never allowed to flourish in the islands. After his sojourn in the United States as a migrant labourer, Trumper returned home with a new ideology, and the startling discovery that his black presence had a very special meaning in the world. He had learned the cultural and political significance of race.

  Europe had trained black men to wear those white masks which Frantz Fanon wrote so bitterly about, and which the racist culture of the United States would tear asunder. America was really the extreme example of Europe, stripped naked of all pretence about having a civilizing mission in the dark corners of the earth: a vast, energetic extension of that demonic Europe which the novelist Joseph Conrad had so maliciously identified as a Heart of Darkness in Africa.

  They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

  Conrad, a child of Europe, understood the cultural racism of his own ancestry. Africa, a human continent to its own people, existed in Conrad’s consciousness as a proper symbol of the demonic force which had driven his own white race to raid and vandalize every corner of the globe.

  And so, in the United States, the black man was forced to recognize himself as a different kind of creature. Trumper embraced this new status, and on his return home offered it to the astonished villagers as the only foundation for a free human dignity among black people.

  You’ll hear ’bout the Englishman, an’ the Frenchman, an’ the American which mean man of America. An’ each is call that ’cause he born in that particular place. But you’ll become a Negro like me an’ all the rest in the States an’ all over the world, ’cause it ain’t have nothin’ to do with where you born. ’Tis what you is, a different kind o’ creature. An’ when you see what I tellin’ you an’ you become a Negr
o, act as you should, an’ don’t ask Hist’ry why you is what you then see yourself to be, ’cause Hist’ry ain’t got no answers. You ain’t a thing till you know it.

  This stark and bitter message of Trumper, pan-African in character, is supported in argument by the recorded music of black people: ‘Let My People Go’. The voice of Paul Robeson becomes his weapon.

  It is difficult to write soberly about the persistent influence of race in the formation of human thought. It holds a unique place in the consciousness of black people wherever they may be; and this is unlikely to change until Africa becomes a black continent whose sovereignty is the product of her own institutions and is protected by an economic and military strength that can defy any intruder. The cordiality which exists between African countries and their former French imperialist masters, and the harassment of Angola by apartheid South Africa are an odd and cruel sequel to the various declarations of African independence. It is as though nothing had changed except the flags and the expanding scale of western robbery.

  There is a sense in which the Afro-American has acquired a critical awareness of this racial drama. He sees through the language of negotiation and diplomacy imposed upon African and West Indian leaders, and is often appalled by the terms of our accommodation to white privilege. But he doesn’t often see with the same clarity how the process of colonization may have divided black majorities into conflicting social strata, pruning away from the main body or trunk of our human tree those elitist branches that are trained like termites to work corrosively on its roots. The overwhelming torment of race has made it difficult for Afro-Americans to perceive how central is the conflict of class in the ultimate liberation of black countries. On the other hand a false preoccupation with social status seduces the black West Indian into wishing the racial component away.