RACE, POLITICS, & CULTURE

‘Conversations’ of George Lamming
‘The most urgent cultural and political task of education,” he said, “is to deepen and nourish the regional consciousness in each territory. A genuine national identity will only be experienced,” he said, “when there is a liberated regional Caribbean of one people…’

WHEN THE University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus) six weeks ago honoured, for the second time, George Lamming, the iconic Caribbean novelist and thinker, it coincided with the release in Barbados of his latest in a trilogy of publications on ‘Conversations’. The publications, two of which are published in English and French, constitute largely a series of inspiring — at times controversial — public discourses across university campuses and various regional and internal educational, cultural and political fora chosen by Lamming to address very topical and sensitive national/regional issues.

Perhaps the most quotable of West Indian writers on the political history, culture, race, class and nationality in the English-speaking Caribbean, Lamming was honoured on June 23 by the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus) with the naming of ‘The George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, in the complex of the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination.

The UWI had first honoured him in 1980 with an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree. The naming ceremony coincided with the release of his ‘Sovereignty of the Imagination’-Conversations 3’. The trilogy spans a period of 17 years, starting with the first publication in 1992 that offered a most valuable collection of Essays, Addresses and Interviews from 1953 to 1990.

Published by Karia Press in the United Kingdom, it was jointly edited by Andaiye, of Guyana, and Richard Drayton, Guyanese-born citizen of Barbados. It is a 300-page work that concluded with a strong appeal on behalf of the Caribbean, the unity of which he stands as a formidable consistent advocate:

“The most urgent cultural and political task of education,” he said, “is to deepen and nourish the regional consciousness in each territory. A genuine national identity will only be experienced,” he said, “when there is a liberated regional Caribbean of one people…” That was in 1986.

In his ‘Coming, Coming Home (Conversations 2)’, nine years later, based on two lectures published by ‘House of Nehesi’ in St Martin, and dedicated to the memory of the renowned historian, Gordon Lewis, who, he noted, had made “this archipelago his home,” Lamming was to stress at a lecture sponsored by the UWI’s Department of West Indian History and the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados:

“I do not think that there has been anything in human history quite like the meeting of Africa, Asia and Europe in this American archipelago we call the Caribbean. But it is so recent since we assumed responsibility for our own destiny, that the antagonistic weight of the past is felt as an inhibiting menace. And that is the most urgent task, and the greatest intellectual challenge: How to control the burden of this history and incorporate it into our collective sense of the future…”

Now, in ‘Conversations 3’, focused on ‘Sovereignty of the Imagination (‘Language and the Politics of Ethnicity)’, published earlier this year by ‘House of Nehesi’ and dedicated to Andaiye and Eusi Kwayana (both of Guyana), Lamming argues with customary eloquence:

“The concepts of Race, Nation and Ethnicity constitute a family of constructs of largely European origin, which served to influence the attitudes we should adopt to any encounter with difference. European racism was a form of ethnic nationalism that invested the colour line with a power of definition which neither Asian nor African colonised could have escaped…”

Today’s relevance
At a period when issues of race and nationality are being discussed, at times quite passionately and not constructively in member states of our Caribbean Community, the relevance and value of Lamming’s ‘Sovereignty of the Imagination–Language and the Politics of Ethnicity (in ‘Conversations 3’)’, can hardly be missed — especially by nationals of our multi-racial societies.

Based originally on a lecture sponsored in 2004 by the Humanities Department of the UWI (St Augustine Campus), Lamming argues that all labour and the relations experienced in the process of labour constitute the foundation of all culture. “It is through work that men and women,” he contends, “make nature a part of their own history…

“And so,” he declared, “there can be no history of Trinidad or Guyana that is not also the history of the humanization of those landscapes by African and Indian forces…”

As Lamming sees it — and today’s divisive social and political elements and groups in, for instance, countries like Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname could take note: “If African labour and the cultural dimensions of that labour constitute the first floor on which this Caribbean house was built, then the second floor and central pillar on which its creative survival depends is the total democratic participation of the Indo-Caribbean presence…”

Hailed by Professor Rex Nettleford in his introduction to ‘Convesations II (Coming, Coming Home’)’ as one of the Caribbean’s “finest intellects and foremost literary artists,” Lamming suggests in his essay on ‘Language and the Politics of Ethnicity (Conservations 3)’, that

“difference in religion, difference in modes of cultural affirmation, require a new agenda of perspectives, a wholly new way of looking at the concept of nation, of finding a way to immunize sense and sensibility against the virus of ethnic nationalism in order to educate feeling to respect the autonomy of the others’ difference to negotiate the cultural spaces that are the legitimate claim of ‘the other’, and to work toward an environment that could manage stability as a state of creative conflict…”

In his introduction to ‘Conversations 3’, the Jamaican scholar, Anthony Bogues, Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Brown University, USA, observed that “the tight relationship between politics, knowledge, language and the spaces of freedom in Lamming’s writings makes him one of the most important political novelists in Caribbean literature; one who also understands that the brutal histories of slavery and colonialism did not crush nor erase creativity.”

For Nettleford, himself an outstanding cultural icon of the Caribbean, “the Lamming essays (as reflected in the ‘Conversations’ trilogy) are themselves part of the current (regional) discourse which targets the historical, cultural and scientific implications of the pan-hemispheric encounters that will continue to be of global importance well into the 21st Century…”

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