George Lamming (1927-2022)
Lamming had a significant impact on younger generations of writers. Among these was the poet Esther Phillips, who would rescue him in her home when Atlantis Hotel was sold, and who would be his partner in the winter days of his life. The importance of the body of work of speeches and lectures which he had begun in 1960 was collected and recognised in collections such as Conversations (1990) and its successors. One of Hilary Beckles’s finest acts as Principal of the Cave Hill campus was to create around George a centre at Cave Hill, where he could sit in his office and edit a relaunched Bim.
But George never ceased fighting. He felt urgently that the regional ambitions for the Caribbean which his generation had lived for were at risk, and worse that a new kind of alienation and re-colonisation had come in a region where all attention was turned to the celebrity mediocrities of the United States, and where to get from Barbados to Jamaica one had often, first, to fly to Miami. He continued to make speeches which made politicians cringe, and challenged his listeners to want more than the power to consume.
Lamming received many honours at home including the Companion of Honour of Barbados in 1987 (he, with Kamau Brathwaite, having indicated privately that they could not accept a knighthood), and an honorary degree in 1980 from the University of the West Indies. Internationally he won many distinctions including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1955), Somerset Maugham Award (1958), the Langston Hughes Medal (1998), Fellowship of Institute of Jamaica (2003), and the distinction of which he was perhaps proudest, The Order of the Caribbean Community (2008).
George leaves behind him a daughter, seven grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. He leaves behind him too for us a rich legacy. It is now our hard and bitter work to make sense of his life and our loss, and to rescue from the waste of mortality all his generous and heroic ambitions. As he said himself once in a ritual of mourning, the Ceremony of Souls is never at an end. Wherever we work for the liberation and unity of the Caribbean, the spirit of George Lamming will be our companion.