Maybe I’ve told this story before:
When University of Miami got James Michener money after he wrote the execrable “The Caribbean,” they didn’t know what to do with it (Michener had a lovely habit of profit-sharing with the subjects of his novels, but somehow hesitated to give this money to UWI). They improvised a set of summer workshops for and by Caribbean writers. I got a scholarship to attend the first one in the summer of 1991: Kamau Brathwaite led the poetry workshop, and George Lamming led the fiction one. It was breathtakingly intimidating, yet I made some friends for life. I enjoyed thinking that the profits from Michener’s book were funding its many corrections.
The following year or the year after, they added seminars for scholars of Caribbean literature. Lamming ran the critical seminar for scholars this time, and another writer told me that she would return to the hotel where the workshop leaders were housed to find him sitting in the lobby, sipping a drink, and reading madly in Black feminist scholarship and more in order to keep up with the grad students and other scholars who were peppering him with questions based on their understandings of the then- (maybe ever-) emergent field of Caribbean/postcolonial literatures.
My love and respect for him grew even more, which I did not think was possible. After all, this was George Lamming. His life in Caribbean literature, not just as an author but as an editor and promoter and performer (he was the BBC voice of the Englishes-speaking Caribbean as early as the 1950’s), would have been an adequate textbook for such a seminar. Instead, he wanted to keep up with the next generation, and if it meant sitting in the dark bar, contending with what we know is the often deliberately impenetrable prose of academia, his mind and heart were open to it.
So happy 88th birthday, George Lamming. In the Castle of My Skin is a more intimate touchstone to me, but in the family of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Especial thanks for recognizing, naming, and sharing The Pleasures of Exile.
nose to windowpane 