60th Anniversary of "In the Castle of My Skin" by George Lamming - Pt 1
Channel: bajanreporter
Date: 23/02/2014

I can take many angles to make a short assessment of the landmark novel by George Lamming, "In the Castle of My Skin".  Castle celebrates it 60th year of publication this year, and coincidentally, my own book which is a study of Castle has been published this year by the small but important Barbadian publishing House, Caribbean Chapters.  My book is called, "Rich Man in His Castle, Poor Ones Take the Streets: Integrating a "Canonical" novel With Popular Culture", so called because I believe that in addition to drawing on the British novelistic tradition to create Castle, Lamming drew on existing local narratives of carnival and other popular culture genres. 

Importantly, Rich Man in His Castle, Poor Ones Take the Street includes an interview by the author with George Lamming where he reflects on many things about the novel and about Caribbean society in general.  This includes drawing parallels between the Grenada situation in 1983 and what happened when the British suspended the Guyana constitution under Chedee Jagan in 1962.

This angle is Lamming's representation of the anti-colonial/national struggle in Castle, which is also at its height as a regional movement at the time.  Indeed, anti-colonialism/nationalism is a movement throughout the colonized world at the time.  It is also a time of significant ruptures in feminist thinking in the developed world.  (Cont'd) 
Margaret D. Gill  © 2013-12-11