Transcript of an Interview With George Lamming

7/30/2019 Transcript of an Interview With George Lamming

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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.


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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 reallybased 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.


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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.


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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 andalthough 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 anddemonstration 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 ofthis region


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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 inwriting 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 thirdor 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.


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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 youwouldn'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.


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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.

Transcript of an Interview With George Lamming

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Transcript of Transcript of an Interview With George Lamming