Here’s a translation of a gorgeous obituary essay by Cuban poet Nancy Morejón, A PROPÓSITO DE GEORGE LAMMING. [Many thanks to Richard Price for sharing the original essay.]
The nice author, doyen of English-speaking Caribbean storytellers and thinkers, George Lamming (1927-2022) simply died this Saturday, June 4, on the island of Barbados, his homeland. Evidently the torrential waters of the start of June needed to place an finish to his lengthy and immense life expertise and, additionally, to his distinctive literary manufacturing that started with indeniable resonance exactly in 1953 when his traditional novel Within the Fortress of My Pores and skin appeared. This work, translated by María Teresa Ortega, with a prologue by Emilio Jorge Rodríguez [1], splendidly grew to become a part of the publishing catalog of Casa de las Américas (1979) and its prestigious assortment devoted to Latin American literature, which included titles by authors such because the Brazilian Guimaraes Rosa, Jamaican Roger Mais, and the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos.
Within the years when he took on the function of advisor to Casa’s Heart for Caribbean Research [Centro de Estudios del Caribe], I discovered from his erudition and his conscientiousness, which went hand in hand. His sense of regional integration went past vested, financial, and even private pursuits. He was an amazing conversationalist, a spontaneous communicator. I as soon as heard him say: “Within the Caribbean, there may be all the time a ship that arrives or leaves.” And in addition: “The most effective economists in our archipelagos are housewives… that’s, humble ladies; I love those that work miracles for his or her households on daily basis, I like them as a result of they put their historical magic into follow.”
Lamming belonged to a sort of mental with a eager sense of the perform of literature and the humanities as autos of communication and recognition of the plural id that defines the multicultural character of the area. Not by likelihood, he was a part of the New World group, which defended the best to avant-garde artwork, though by no means separated from a morality on the service of a extra superior, extra unbiased, and higher world. With huge rigor and a proverbial literary excellence, his tales, his novels, all exude the need for freedom and regional integration in an open wrestle in opposition to colonial oppression which, in his pages, additionally acquires a continental vocation that, nonetheless in the present day, we have to perceive.
He wrote books that we are going to by no means be capable to do with out and, though fiction is the important thing to his literary expertise, the reality is that he mirrored and compiled a sum of allegories, reasonings, and debates on exile that these days represent a faculty, a way, and thus, a name to the indomitable being of Caribbean folks all through all of the archipelagos. London and Georgetown had been set of their proper place. That’s the grace and the mental restlessness that reigns in The Pleasures of Exile (1960) whose lesson Roberto Fernández Retamar revered in his additionally traditional essay Calibán (1979).
George Lamming is and can proceed to be—like Wilson Harris, Vic Reid, Derek Walcott, amongst others, together with the extraordinary musician popularly often known as Mighty Sparrow—a sacred patriarch of our tradition, particularly when fashionable tradition inhabits, in its personal proper, this unconquerable place the place essentially the most official flags of independence wave without end.
Nancy Morejón, El Cerro, June 5, 2022
[1] See Emilio Jorge Rodríguez: “George Lamming en su retorno al Caribe natal.” In El Caribe literario; trazados de convivencia, Havana: Ediciones Arte y Literatura, 2011, p. 167-74.
Translation by Ivette Romero. For unique article, see https://www.granma.cu/cultura/2022-06-08/a-proposito-de-george-lamming-08-06-2022-23-06-36
[Photo by Sally Price. George Lamming during a visit to Rich and Sally Prices’ home in Martinique, 2003.]