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George Lamming's Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 12 | Issue 2 Article 5 December 2015 George Lamming’s "The Boy and the Sea" : A Littoral Artist’s Experimentation with Language and a Postcolonial Examination of the Self Karima K. Jeffrey Hampton University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium Recommended Citation Jeffrey, Karima K. (2015) "George Lamming’s "The Boy and the Sea" : A Littoral Artist’s Experimentation with Language and a Postcolonial Examination of the Self," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 12 : Iss. 2 , Article 5. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol12/iss2/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Jeffrey: George Lamming’s "The Boy and the Sea" : A Littoral Experimentation Lamming’s “The Boy and the Sea” epitomizes the ways in which the littoral as trope,1 especially one’s placement in the waters bordering the shore, has the potential to symbolically impact an author’s text and his development of the character’s (and his own) coming into voice. In reflecting on this early poem, one can gain some insight into Lamming’s imaginative process for crafting an authorial language, a voice that exhibits the author-critic’s discernment of an adolescent rise to consciousness and self-actualization on (or through) the shorelines of Barbados. Using a postcolonial gaze that is informed by phenomenology, this paper presents the opening images, along with a close- reading of the poem, in an effort to show how moments at the beach reflect a symbolic catalyst Lamming employed to discover and then articulate the sense of autonomy one can gain within and against the social constraints imposed by the empire and colonization. Figure 1 (left) Figure 2 (above) These photos of Lamming2 suggest the representative social and critical inferences a reader might make when interpreting Lamming’s use of littoral 1 The term “littoral” is synonymous with “seashore” or “coastal region” (“littoral” American Heritage Dictionary 793, Oxford English Dictionary). It can be interchangeably understood as “shore, coast, strand, or beach” (“littoral” Roget’s International Thesaurus) and has particular scientific connotations within the fields of biology, zoology, and geology (“littoral” Oxford, Roget’s). Scientists, for example, are especially intrigued by the diversity of species and land formations they find when studying what is termed “the littoral zone,” a region sixteen to thirty- three feet below the low-tide level (Jones (2000)). In addition to the conventional definitions, Roget’s International Thesaurus provides the following adjectives for “littoral”: “bordering, marginal, borderline, or frontier.” These terms suggest the greater implications that the littoral terrain holds within the context of postcolonial thought, for they represent “borders,” a concept that is theorized within postcolonial studies. Thus, this project will consider the relevance of some of the “border” inferences of postcolonial studies, emphasizing how they provide open possibilities and fluid constructions for the figures on the beach as they engage in anti-colonial and postcolonial revisions of identity. 2 These two images can be found on Banyan’s website accompanying the article, “Transcript of Interview with George Lamming.” http://www.pancaribbean.com/banyan/Lamming.htm Published by Scholarly Repository, 2015 1 Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 12, Iss. 2 [2015], Art. 5 imagery in his work. Captured in the videotape Footprints (1992) and posted on Banyan’s website, the photographs were taken during a 1989 interview and exhibit George Lamming standing on the east coast of Barbados. In the first image (Figure 1), Lamming smiles at the camera as he looks inland. In the second (Figure 2), he faces the Atlantic Ocean, pointing to the horizon and the continent of Africa, as he explains in the transcript attached to the photographs (“Transcript” par. 31). Underscoring the initial “journeys” he took across the Antilles before traveling abroad to Europe, Lamming reveals how his (e)migrant identity informs his corpus: [T]here is a number of journeys. .[For him the] most critical one was the journey from Barbados to Trinidad . [because his] particular relation to the Caribbean region was to a large extent formed and shaped in Trinidad through the Trinidad experience that got [him] to realise that there was a cultural area – a unit that was just not Barbados. It was the whole region . [a region of islands connected by the sea]. (“Transcript” par. 1-2) Consequently, when he left Trinidad for London, a “seed was . firmly planted” that “blossomed” in the metropole; he would “[learn] to be a Caribbean person,” appreciating those cultural and historical aspects that united the peoples of the region, not only to each other but also to Africa and other areas (“Transcript” par. 5). Thus, when he returned to the Caribbean in the 1950s, he could better understand how people in these archipelagoes were “reshaped by this landscape” despite their different cultural traditions (“Transcript” par. 7). This initial epiphany, concerning a regional identity, occurred as a result of Lamming traversing the littoral terrains that link the islands of the Caribbean archipelago, and this movement from shoreline-to-shoreline planted a subliminal seed that would bear fruit in his work. Thus, with his statement about “journeys,” traversing from one island to another and then abroad, Lamming not only emphasizes the inextricable relationship a writer can have with his people, with the land, and with his country’s cultural history (or in this case the linked histories of the countries in the Antilles), but he also invites a discussion of his symbolic and political use of littoral imagery. This paper aims to analyze three distinct ways in which Lamming employs the placement of his protagonist on (or in) the strand. On the one hand, the use of the littoral as trope helps to isolate and define how moments at the beach can serve as intermediary moments for personal discovery to occur. On the other hand, the littoral image represents an “in-between” space that is apt for a Caribbean subject to reflect upon and define his/her postcolonial, (e)migrant (or exile) identity as a scholar and creative writer – a self-reflective examination http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol12/iss2/5 2 Jeffrey: George Lamming’s "The Boy and the Sea" : A Littoral Experimentation Lamming undertakes through his characters when he positions his protagonists within the strand. Finally, through the image of the individual on the brink between land and sea, the author experiments with the language necessary to vocalize a unique, anti-imperialist Caribbean perspective. Arguably, Lamming explores each of these tropes in much of his corpus (ex., Castle (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960), Waters with Berries (1971), and Natives of My Person (1972)), but for the purposes of this essay, I will only analyze one of Lamming’s earliest poems, “The Boy and the Sea” in an effort to introduce readers to the potential ways in which his use of the littoral as trope can be observed fulfilling the above functions. Important features worth noting are: one, how Lamming highlights an alienated or lone figure’s location on the strand; two, the ways in which the character articulates some introspection about his social condition during this moment he spends at the beach; three, how a boy (or young man, as is the case with the poet) demonstrates a mediation of personal and/or cultural consternations during his placement in this “in-between,” “border-space” (the strand for the boy in the poem, the lecture-stage for Lamming when he reads the poem in England), for it is in the midst of this “border” space that the boy/man negotiates the apprehensions and/or contradictions he must reconcile in order to gain self-awareness;3 and four, how the written text reflects the author’s experimentation with language undertaken in an effort to find and vocalize a self- actualized, anti-colonial perspective. Not only is the boy in the poem awakening to a subaltern identity, but the author, too, confronted the political and social ramifications of his colonial experience when he read the poem to a British audience. Originally published in the December 1951 edition of BIM (Paquet, “George Lamming” par. 4), the poem appears again in the essay, “A Way of Seeing,” which forms part of The Pleasures of Exile (1960), the seminal text in which Lamming refigures Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Pleasures, Lamming sheds light on his invitation to read at the Institute of Contemporary Art (I.C.A.) when he visited London in the 1950s (Pleasures 59-63). Thus, with “The Boy and the Sea,” not only does Lamming demonstrate an early experimentation with littoral iconography, but he also uses the trope also as a vehicle for expounding early, anti-hegemonic ideals 3 My use of the term “border” here is intentional. For the concept of the “border” has been articulated in postcolonial theory, particularly within the scope of “border theory,” as examined by Gloria Anzalduá (1987), Renato Rosaldo (1989), Hector Calderón and José David Saldivar (1991), Walter Mignolo (2000), Elizabeth Wilson (1990), Scott Michealsen and David Johnson (1997). In my estimation, “border theory” is relevant for this essay in that it suggests the ways in which a “border” space provides open possibilities for fluid constructions, constructions that inform and shape a “border,” or mediating, consciousness by which an individual expresses his or her awareness of the cultural tensions s/he negotiates in the juncture--in this case the strand--where representations of power or dominance and disenfranchisement or subordination meet.
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