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Transcript of an interview with George Lamming
LOCATION: East
Coast, Barbados
DATE: 1989
Well, after that, there is a number of
journeys. I mean the first in fact, most critical one was the journey from
Barbados to Trinidad.
My particular relation to the
Caribbean region was to a large extent formed and shaped in Trinidad through
the Trinidad experience that got me to realise that there was a cultural area -
a unit that was just not Barbados. It was the whole region and I think it had
to do with the time I went to Trinidad.
I'm arriving in Trinidad at the time
when Williams is not yet in politics, but he is a very seminal influence in
making Caribbean history a reality. We had grown up without that dimension and
then not only as writer of something about Capitalism and Slavery, but actual
articulator in person, bringing together of young people to look at documents.
I always make the point that the first
time I heard of the Cuban poet, Nicholas Guile and the French poet, Aime
Cesaire, was through Williams who was telling me that if you are going to be a
writer of and for the region, you've got to make this contact. This was before
Williams came into politics.
So that by the time I got to England,
this seed was very firmly planted and then it blossomed there in a way because
it was one of the ironies of history that here we were separated by imperialism
- Jamaica from Barbados, Barbados from Trinidad and so on, but it was really at
the metropole at London that we came together, so I first got to know Jamaica
and Guyana and other territories at London and then that was really an
extension of that learning to be a Caribbean person.
Then from the fifties, 1955 was my
first return to the region. When I went, right through the region and it was as
a result of a visit to Haiti that was so critical, that I was then very
conscious of the weight of Africa in this region. It was in Haiti that one saw
this and then perhaps my most illuminating experience then of the complexities
of our situation was a long visit to Guyana which really in a sense made the
first anti-imperialist breakthrough when Jagan and Burnham were in that
election in 1953 and had then run into crisis.
One started to see the kind of
challenge which confronted us in getting people who had come into the region
with different cultural traditions who had now been in a sense reshaped by this
landscape.
How did you get those people to create
a solidarity that was so coated and reinforced by their differences and not
fragmented by those differences and the novel of Age and Innocence is really based to a large extent on the
Guyanese experience; the collapse of that movement of the 1950s. From then on,
there have always been this movement and I think it was true of a number of the
writers that although those early books were written outside of the Caribbean, this
preoccupation with the Caribbean was never eroded by distance, by living
elsewhere.
A very good example of it, although
the persona appears to be different is every book that Naipaul writes in
fiction is really about Trinidad even though it may be set in Africa somewhere.
It is a Trinidad experience. It is informing the organisation of that narrative
and of those problems that I think, I would say that from about the beginning
of the sixties, I entered into the region not just as witness and observer, but
in a sense as a certain kind of activist and that started I would say as a
result of an invitation I had received from a group of people who were then
known as the New World Group.
The New World Group is a very, very
important chapter in our cultural history which was founded by Lloyd Best in
very close association with James Milette, with the Economist, Gorge Beckford
of Jamaica, Girvan of Jamaica, Thomas of Guyana and I would say that one of the
great contributions they made was to change the agenda of this course that
whereas we talked about the Caribbean as it reacted to Colonial power and so
on; if you go through all of those issues, you would see for the first time,
that the Caribbean is being put at the centre of the agenda and although they
were academics, the kinds of issues that they dealt with, then pulled the
non-academic into it.
The big discussion on sugar was really
initiated by the New World and the sugar planters. All sort of people got
involved in that. Involved around the question of what was the future of sugar
that we needed and so on and so forth and ass we came into these independence
arrangements, what they did was to ask me to come out from London, first to
Guyana and then to Barbados because they wanted to get at two special issues
which were known as the Guyana Independence issue and the Barbados Independence
issue and I did these then, one, Guyana issue in association with the poet,
Martin Carter and then we came here and did the Barbados issue. What was very
interesting about these issues, if you got them, is that we saw the
independence of Guyana not as a Guyanese affair. This was a matter that
concerned the whole region.
We did the same thing with the
Barbados issue. The Barbados issue was edited from this house. I'd rented this
house for the year and we did that. Every West Indian writer and intellectual,
whether resident here or abroad contributed to those issues and when you were
asked questions about alternatives and so on, I would say that we have been on
an alternative road for some time, that is, the foundations of that road were
laid. Alternative means that you were no longer talking to the society as it
was presented to you from outside, but you were in fact identifying for
yourself what you thought were the settled issues of this region and analysing
for yourself what were those issues.
This interaction then, continued
through the seventies which was very marked by the emergence of ideology in
political combat and you saw that
shift in Jamaica in the seventies
where there never seemed to be philosophy; any profound difference between the
two parties, but from about the seventies when terms like socialism, later the
legacy of the return of Walter Rodney, articulating the meaning of that power.
For the next decade or so, we were
very much involved in struggles that could be called ideological, which took
complete form or tried to take complete political from with the Grenada
revolution which started in 1979 and then ended in that tragically suicidal way
in 1983. For some time, I was very close to Maurice Bishop during that period
and to the Minister of Culture and Education, Jacquelyn Creft and what had also
developed as a part of that agenda was the role in which the communications
media would function in the re-discovery or the re-creation of what we call the
Caribbean.
Throughout all of the education
system, the school really presented you to yourself by an external eye and what
many people within the political culture were trying to do was to find a way in
which the society could return itself to itself through its own mediators and
in this area we find that there was a lot of deficiencies.
Some time in the sixties, I was
lecturing to students on the need to hasten what I call the regionalisation of
the media. To give a concrete example...........
What I've forgotten to emphasise
really is that the writer sometimes does not know where the influence is and
what comes to be called his work begins. My relation to Trinidad ... the visit
to Trinidad in the middle and late forties - prove for me to be very decisive.
I don't think that I would have been the kind of Caribbean person that I am
today if I had gone from Barbados, directly to London. It was that intervening
stop to Trinidad where I lived for about four or five years and although we
tend sometimes to look back at that kind of doldrum period and so on, it was
really a moment of great liberation for me after Barbados.
I cannot recall that there was very
much of a cultural movement in Barbados that was indigenous, so that I am going
to be in Trinidad when the Little Carib was about to be born and that Little
Carib served as a kind of soil that made everybody with any kind of creative
instinct gravitate towards it. So I think that without knowing it at the time, if
you look at some of the novels where The Season of Adventure is a very good example which really, probably
the first example of a novel that is really dedicated to.....
Yes, I was saying we never really know
how we are influenced in the production of work and if you look at Season of
Adventure, whch is probably
the first novel and probably the only one which is in a sense devoted to the
elevation of the steelband not only as a moment of great culture and triumph,
but also showing the way in which cultural activity can be so decisive in
political life.
In Season of Adventure, the republic collapses to a large extent, due
to the intervention and demonstration of the Government and I think then much later
when I got to Jamaica and saw the Jamaica Dance Company, not many people
realised the extent to which the Little Carib in Trinidad was almost the mother
of the Jamaica Dance Theatre and it would be very difficult for me to think of
the cultural history of this region …
My mother, stepfather lived in
Trinidad, but since I've been back here in a more settled way from the
eighties, in a way, Barbados has been like a base because for six months of the
year, I am somewhere else and a lot of that time, that somewhere is in some
part of the region responding to requests to lecture, give various talks and
seminars either to workers' groups or to schools or universities. Whenever I
think of the media in the region, I am really taken back to my earliest experiences
of the media, which really was in England when I arrived there in the fifties.
I worked for a number of years with
the BBC Overseas Service and especially with the programme, people would know
of Caribbean Voices, but what came home to me was the very vital way in which
you could help a society to hear and see itself through that media and that was
due to the fact that I had been engaged a lot in what was known as a
documentary feature.
BBC was very strong originators of
that particular form and I then had a personal interest in writing for and
working in the radio. I never really had an opportunity to do it. One occasion
was in Guyana around the time of the Independence of Guyana and I made a radio
programme. It was about a series of five from the Literature. That is taking
extracts of various writers and so on as a sort of tribute to the people of
Guyana and then some time in the seventies, I attempted to do a documentary on
the history of labour in Barbados through the bringing together of these voices
across to three generation. This is really what in a way sometimes depresses me
because I think that in order for the writers to function in this society, a
way would have to be found to make them very central to the media, very central
to radio, very central to television which is after all based on words and the
other proposal which I had made and you see the beginning of it. I think I may
have mentioned it earlier, the regionalising of the media, it should become
normal for a third or whatever programmes, radio that have been heard in
Trinidad be made in Jamaica or Barbados.
The same for Barbados - a third or so
other programmes that have been made in some other island. In a way, what radio
and television would be doing at a popular level was really in a sense what the
New World Group was doing at the level of that kind of analysis and the other
thing that could be done really is that you can't make radio from studio.
I mean if you're really going to make
effective radio, as happens also with television, you really have to go out and
in fact make people who are the subject of the theme become the articulators of
the theme. Now I think that for the future, it seems to me that there is no way
the literature of the region would become a part of the consciousness of this
region unless that literature gets translated into film.
And that is what we really have to
work on. Selvon, Naipaul, Lovelace should be as normal viewing to Trinidad and
Caribbean audience as the imported stock is today. So I think that I do not
believe it helps to intensify attacks on the imported stock because the
responsibility is really upon us to replace it by what is already there and
this requires simply first of all improving the technical skills of those who
work in that area and pooling the intellectual human resource of the whole
region. We have no deficiency in that area or deficiency in the areas of
communication and collaboration.
Let me put it this way. Quite often
people do not know what they have. It's only when they try to examine
themselves in a particular situation that they discover that they have this
resource and I think that it is a result of, in a way, the privileges of family
and going across the region that I came to realise that over the years, that
there was a Caribbean reality which was there, which touched different
territories in different ways, but which had not yet come fully into the
consciousness of each territory.
I think of cricket for example and
when you look at the history of the West Indies team, it's very difficult to
think of the emergence of a great batsman like Kanhai without the fact that
Walcott went to work in Guyana for Bookers. Last year, I was at a conference
for the Indian presence in the Caribbean and they brought Ramadhin and I was
very struck to hear him speak about the importance that Worrel as a leader and
captain had to do with helping him adjust from that present background in South
Trinidad to the mystery of Lords and just a month ago, I was attending a
conference in Guadeloupe and all the discussion just change the language would
have been the exchanges taking place in Trinidad and more and more, it comes
clear to me that what you call being Trinidadian or what I would call being
Barbadian will never be fully realised if you wouldn't even be the kind of
Trinidadian you should be and so that becomes an essential part of that
Trinidad consciousness.
So the evolution of each territory
depends very much on the forging and the incorporating of that Caribbean
reality into the consciousness of each. Some of the writers know it. Some of
the people who analyse society would know it, but some of the people who would
sometimes know it better than others are traders.
We have a
tremendous kind of huckster trade that moves between Grenada and Haiti; between
Grenada and Trinidad; between Dominica and Barbados and they are the most
Caribbean. They are much more Caribbean than the academics and quite often,
they are much more sophisticated in languages. Quite often they speak more
languages than the average academic. If there is any reason at all for working
as a writer, it is in the full knowledge that we are only perhaps a Chapter One
of the new meaning of Caribbean civilisation.
If it were possible to put bricks or
something right across here, right across the Ocean, the first piece of land
that you would touch would be Dakar in Senegal.
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