In the Castle of My Skin

I read this for my Caribbean literature class. I am a first generation American. All of my family was born in Barbados. I appreciated this book so much because it really gave me a closer look into my roots. I am going to share this book with my Daughter hoping she will have the same experience.

Lamming's "coming of age" novel depicts the life of a precocious adolescent, G, who is trying to understand the colonial, grown-up world. The innocence of G is balanced against the decadence of his environment. Read also, Michael Anthony's The Year in San Fernando and Austin Calrke's, Growing Up Stupid Under Union Jack to fully understand Lamming's achievement.

George Lamming, along with other Caribbean writers such as V.S. Naipaul and V.S. Reid, broke through the Victorian box of post-World War II, pre-independence British colonial writing. Their styles are all different but their message is generally the same: trying to grapple with the major issues of politics, race, and self-worth. Lamming's description of G's life (which can be paralleled to James Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") draws the reader into the decadent colonial world of the pre-World War II Barbados. Lamming's style haunts and amuses but ultimately almost confuses; read this carefully to understand the true meaning of the book.

"In the Castle of my Skin" is a highly poetic account of growing up in the black community of Barbadoes. Lamming gives us a vivid picture of G's family, his friends, his school and village life. Interwoven with G's everyday experience is his awareness of what it means being black and being poor in a somehow secluded island community. Lamming's teatment of racism is sober and sensitive. It's the more effective because it shows how inseparable its perception is from the growing awareness a young black boy has of himself. There is much more violence in this as in many a bloody battle. In it's poetic language,the vividness of its characters and scenery,the deep psychological insight and the sober and just treatment of the growing awareness of differences in the context of Carribean history this novel is a masterpiece of universal literature.It certainly can be read as "the portrait of a young artist"; The reference of the main character's initial to Lamming's first name George seems pretty obvious. But if a portrait, its an excellent one!

George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin" skilfully depicts the Barbadian psyche. Set against the backdrop of the 1930s riots which helped to pave the way for Independence and the modern Barbados, through the eyes of a young boy, Lamming portrays the social, racial, political and urban struggles with which Barbados continues to grapple even with some thirty-three years of Political Independence from Britain. Required reading for all Caribbean people. The novel also offers non-Barbadians and non-Caribbean people insight into the modern social history of Barbados and the Caribbean.

Mr Cameroon clearly has as little sense of historical context as he has literary judgement. When this novel was written in the early 1950s there was scarcely anything which could be called Caribbean (let alone African) literature. This masterpiece (which has generated almost 40 theses, essays, books, and other critical works) opened the way for later writers. Ngugi wa Thiongo of Kenya, for example, pointed to CASTLE as the origin of his own ambition to describe the world he knew. Lamming's description of the fabric of life in the urban villages of Barbados, of the shadows of the plantation, the school, slavery and the colonial experience, the island feeling of separateness and boundedness, has never been equalled in Caribbean literature. This is a masterpiece which will still be read a hundred years from now