Name: In the Castle of My Skin
Rating: 3 (2 reviews)
ISBN: 9780472064687

George Lamming

An autobiographical novel of race and class by one of the leading Black writers of the 20th century

In the Castle of My Skin

Marion

You could go where you like if you had a clean record. You could say what you like if you know how to say it. It didn't matter whether you felt everything you said. You had language, good, big words to make up for what you didn't feel. And if you were really educated, and you could command the language like a captain on a ship, if you could make the language do what you wanted it to do, say what you wanted it to say, then you didn't have to feel at all. You could do away with feeling. That's why everybody wanted to be educated. You didn't have to feel. You learnt this and you learnt that, and you knew a Jack for a Jack and Ace for an Ace. You were alright. Nothing would ever go pop, pop, pop in your head. You had language to safeguard you.

But though we were nearly all black, we all used the colour as a weapon against interference.

They had the unlettered man's respect for the written word. There was something formidable, even sacred about a book.

 Three hundred years, more than the memory could hold, Big England had met and held Little England and Little England like a sensible child accepted. Three hundred years, and never in all that time did any other nation dare interfere with these two. Barbados or Little England was the oldest and purest of England's children, and may it always be so. The other islands had changed hands. Now they were French, now they were Spanish. But Little England remained steadfast and constant to Big England. Even to this day. Indeed, it was God's doing. The hand of the Lord played a great part in that union. And who knows?

You could never tell. One day before time changed for eternity, Little England and Big England, God's anointed on earth, might hand-in-hand rule this earth. In the '4 war they went side by side together, and they would go again any time. Big England had only to say the word and Little England followed. Big England had the strongest navy, and Little England the best fishermen in this God's world.

Together they were mistresses of the sea, and whenever, wherever, the two met on the same side, war or peace, there was bound to be victory.

I started this book twice in the winter and couldn’t get past the first chapter, decided to give it another try because as my friend Aisha says “we do it for the canon!”

In the words of David Williams who wrote the spectacular introduction to the 10th edition of this book “

The overarching concern of In the Castle of My Skin is the condition of the colonized. Within its ambit the narrative trains a critical eye upon a number of institutions that keep colonialism viable. One such is an education system which will eventually produce in the narrator a fractured consciousness that effectively cuts him off from his environment

Reading this I was surprised at how similar the “civilizing colonial mission” was in the colonies of the British empire. I was born 30 years after Uganda's independence but I went to a former mission school and the school parades in this novel are all so familiar to me. 

I enjoyed the nature of storytelling and world building using various characters in a small village in Barbados, something Lamming refers to as the “

To read this book is understand the psychic effects of colonialism as theorized by Fanon, from older people in the village and their deference to white people as well as viewing their colonial administrators as benevolent patriarchs responsible for their welfare.

The most heartbreaking part of the novel is seeing how the villagers and other post colonial subjects around the world become victims of a historical process in which one kind of oppression succeeds another. From the white settler class and their land dispossession eventually on independence the villagers are dispossessed by the Black Bourgeoisie.

I hope to find more George Lamming books, they are hard to come by in SA

I started this book twice in the winter and couldn’t get past the first chapter, decided to give it another try because as my friend Aisha says “we do it for the canon!”

In the words of David Williams who wrote the spectacular introduction to the 10th edition of this book “The overarching concern of In the Castle of My Skin is the condition of the colonized. Within its ambit the narrative trains a critical eye upon a number of institutions that keep colonialism viable. One such is an education system which will eventually produce in the narrator a fractured consciousness that effectively cuts him off from his environment.”

Reading this I was surprised at how similar the “civilizing colonial mission” was in the colonies of the British empire. I was born 30 years after Uganda's independence but I went to a former mission school and the school parades in this novel are all so familiar to me. 

I enjoyed the nature of storytelling and world building using various characters in a small village in Barbados, something Lamming refers to as the “collective character of the village” 

To read this book is understand the psychic effects of colonialism as theorized by Fanon, from older people in the village and their deference to white people as well as viewing their colonial administrators as benevolent patriarchs responsible for their welfare.

The most heartbreaking part of the novel is seeing how the villagers and other post colonial subjects around the world become victims of a historical process in which one kind of oppression succeeds another. From the white settler class and their land dispossession eventually on independence the villagers are dispossessed by the Black Bourgeoisie.

I hope to find more George Lamming books, they are hard to come by in SA

In the Castle of My Skin

Reviews

Highlights