Renowned Caribbean novelist
George Lamming, a Barbadian author who placed the legacy of colonialism at the center of his lyrical novels and essays, acquiring a reputation as one of the finest Caribbean writers of his generation, died June 4 in Bridgetown, his country’s capital. He was 94.
His death was announced by Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados. “Wherever George Lamming went,” she said in a statement, “he epitomized that voice and spirit that screamed Barbados and the Caribbean.”
Lamming’s da ughter, Natasha Lamming-Lee, said he had been ailing but did not cite a cause.
Along with novelists and poets such as Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, V.S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Derek Walcott, Lamming helped define a new West Indian literature in the middle decades of the 20th century, exploring issues of history, politics, language and freedom at a time when colonial rule was giving way to independence.
Raised on a former sugar plantation outside Bridgetown, he wrote books that highlighted the experience of people who were marginalized because of their race, language, gender or income, and spread a message of liberation and inclusion in his essays and speeches.
Like Naipaul and many other Caribbean writers of their generation, Lamming launched his literary career in London, where he wrote his semiautobiographical first novel, “In the Castle of My Skin” (1953), at age 23. He later examined the experience of migration in “The Emigrants” (1954), a grim, fragmentary novel about West Indian expats in England, and in his essay collection “The Pleasures of Exile” (1960), which a New York Times reviewer described as “a neo-Gothic piece with ideas arcing like flying buttresses.”
“My subject,” Lamming wrote in the latter, “is the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language.”
In addition to his daughter, Lamming-Lee of Silver Spring, Maryland, survivors include his longtime companion, Esther Phillips; seven grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren. His son, Gordon, died last year.