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M. A. II English P.G3 E3 Af & Carib Lit Title.Pmd HI SHIVAJI UNIVERSITY, KOLHAPUR CENTRE FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION M. A. Part-II : English Semester-III : Paper G3 E3 African and Caribbean Literature Semester-IV : Paper C-10 Critical Theory-II (Academic Year 2019-20 onwards) KJ M. A. Part-II English Paper G3 E3 African and Caribbean Literature Unit-1 In the Castle of My Skin by George Lemming 1.1 Introduction In the Castle of My Skin is the first novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming. It was first published in London in 1953 by Michael Joseph and later on it published in New York City by McGraw-Hill. The novel is ‘Bildungsroman’ novel, as it describes psychological and moral growth of the protagonist, G, from his youth to adulthood life. The novel is set in the 1930’s–40’s in Carrington Village (it much like Creighton Village in the novel), Barbados, where the author was born and raised, therefore, it is also considered semi-autobiographical novel. The novel unfolds the everyday events in the life of a young boy and gradual changes in the village and society where he lives. Laming uses of ‘shifting perspectives’ and ‘unreliable narration’ to recount the boyhood makes the novel modernist fiction. Though the novel is Bildungsroman, its aim is not to explore the gradual development of the protagonist, but to expose the legacy of colonialism and slavery in Caribbean village society during the mid-20 th century. Writer narrates the story of a sensitive and intelligent young boy, well nurtured by a protective mother. He grown up with his slave peers and adverse surroundings, but proves himself unlike them by choosing the different path of his life, only because of his intelligence. With life story of the G, Laming documents the colonialism and its effect on society. Through protagonist G’s observation and experiences in his small town, Laming masterfully exposes the effects of race, feudalism, capitalism, education, the labour movement, violent riots, and emigration. G’s town is representative of Caribbean society as a whole. Lammings other works explores Caribbean protagonist as migrant, travelling to London, United States and other nations, getting enlightened by the ideas of freedom and adverse effect of slavery, and ultimately, fights to free his native land from the colonisers. However, in this novel he focuses on protagonist 1 limited perception of his personal, domestic village life. As the novel is written in the nine/fourteen years protagonist’s restricted point of view, we have limited scenario of significant sociocultural changes in a tradition-bound part of Barbadian island. 1.2 Author Biography: The distinguished Barbadian novelist, essayist and poet, George William Lamming, was born on 8 th June, 1927 at Carrington Village, near Bridgetown, Barbados into a materially impoverished female-headed house. He is a child of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between his birthplace and his stepfather’s home in St David’s Village. He was raised by his unmarried mother and by Papa Grandison, his mother's devoted godfather. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys’ School and later on Combermere High School on a scholarship, where he studied under Frank Collymore, editor of the Caribbean literary journal Bim . Frank Collymore encouraged Lamming to read the books and write something during his early school life. As a result, Laming became a regular writer of Bim. At the age of nineteen, Lamming left Barbados for the nearby island of Trinidad, where he obtained a teaching position at El Colegio de Venezuela. In Trinidad he worked as a teacher from 1946 to 1950 before settling in England. In Trinidad also he continued his involvement as a writer with the journal Bim. Lamming’s feeling that Caribbean society was stifling his artistic ambitions, compels him to emigrate to England in 1951, where his creative writing flourished in a large extend, especially, prose and poems. In England, for a short time, he worked in a factory and in 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. However, after this enterprises Lamming became a leader in a Caribbean renaissance that took place in England, along with other exiles like V. S. Naipaul. Along with fellow writers, Derek Walcott, Samuel Selvon and VS Naipaul, his prose and poetry presented on the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programmes. During 1960’s decade, he fully involved in his writing, and had published four acclaimed novels. His first novel, In the Castle of My Skin , an autobiographical bildungsroman, published in 1953, own a Somerset Maugham Award in 1957. This novel was appreciated by the late French Nobel laureate, Jean-Paul Sartre and by African-American novelist Richard Wright. His study of decolonization continued in his next three novels: The 2 Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960). The Emigrants explores miserable situation of Caribbean immigrants in post-World War II England. Through of Age and Innocence , Lamming explores a microcosmic perception of race and ethnicity in colonial and postcolonial Caribbean societies. Season of Adventure is the story of middle-class girl, Fola Piggott. The novel depicts the ‘complex political and cultural world’, and the failure and ensuing collapse of the first republic of a newly independent Caribbean island of San Cristobal. During this period, he had published a collection of essays, a non-fictional work, The Pleasures of Exile (1960). It is his study of cultural identity, which examines Caribbean politics, race, and culture in an international context. After the successful writer and an activist, in 1967 he preferred to enter in educational field to spread his views regarding the creative writing, Marxist ideology and Caribbean voice. At the University of the West Indies, Kingston he worked during 1967-68 as a writer-in-residence and lecturer in the Creative Arts Centre and Department of Education. (1967–68). Since then, he has been a visiting professor in the United States at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University, and a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Meantime he wrote two novels, Water with Berries (1971), (a political allegory based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest ), and Natives of My Person (1972). After these to two novels Lamming published nothing any new important work, however after the 1990’s there are three major non-fictions published: Coming, Coming Home: Conversations II– Western Education and the Caribbean Intellectual (1995), Sovereignty of the Imagination: Conversations III – Language and the Politics of Ethnicity (2009) and Caribbean Reasonings–The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation (2010). These nonfictions focus his enduring concerns of ‘political self-determination’, ‘racism’, and ‘the distressed relationships’ between the European colonizer and the peoples they colonized and enslaved. In general, in Lamming’s works there is a reoccurring theme is Caribbean search for identity, as it is clearly revealed in his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin and also its subsequence novels. However, in these explorations of identity Lamming comes not only to writing of the West Indian, Caribbean psyche, but of humans in general. In short, he preaches his Marxist ideology, and tries to tie together collective history through the shared humanity of his characters. 3 Lamming was honoured by various awards: In1957, ‘Somerset Maugham Award’ for In the Castle of My Skin , in 2009 ‘The President's Award’, in May 2011 the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), awarded Lamming the first ‘Caribbean Hibiscus Award’, in 2012 ‘ALBA Cultural Award’, in 2013 ‘Clement Payne Appreciation Award’, and in 2014, he won a ‘Lifetime Achievement Prize’ from the ‘Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards’. 1.3 Historical Context British Colonization During the 16 th century and early 17 th almost all African continent and other Islands were unknown to the world, however, when Elizabethan reign encouraged Britisher to find out new lands for trade and resources, one by one continents and remote islands were becoming visible. Captain Gordon, one of the British explorers, was the first outsider for the Caribbean island, who landed with his fellows on Barbados in 1620, however he was not in a mood to settle on that adverse island. After the five years later another British explorer, Captain John Powell, who in his journey homeward from Brazil stopped on the island in 1625. Basically, he was tradesman and had crucially identified that this fertile island is apt for plantation and most important, as he realized, that on the Atlantic, or east, coast of the island there were no safe natural harbours or landing places than this. As a result, he had decided that the British explorers and colonizers had to set up settlements on the "leeward" shore of this island. He was return on the island on February 17, 1627, with a party of eighty settlers, financed by himself and four other merchants, and had established the first colony in Barbados. Therefore, Powell was called “father” of Barbadian settlement by the English. The subsequent capital of the island, and the city, Bridgetown was the first place, where settlers were established their first colonies. This very city is so identical in Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin , where the riots take place. The people of Barbados island always lived largely in the rural areas, as befits an island had an almost entirely agricultural economy. Consequently, the early settlers by Powell were not interested to spread Christianity or to find a “New Jerusalem”, but mostly they are thinking to enrich themselves by plantation and the trade of natural resources. Like a crafty fox, without disturbing the natives, silently, the settlers had planted tobacco by clearing the woodland.
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