Lamming

Lamming’s view on what forces a native writer to leave the native country for the land of the former colonial power.

            In the essay ‘On Occasion for Speaking’ Lamming discusses about the Caribbean that is specific to the region and it also represents the colonies in general. He discusses that the colonized even after being set free by the colonizers still feel themselves under the rule of the colonizers and depend on them to make decisions for them. Local culture is presented as source of humiliation for them. Lamming gives the example of two different cultures that went under the colonized rule i.e. African and West Indian. African culture stick to its old norms and tradition whereas the West Indian culture was totally changed after the colonizers left and the new culture thus formed was an unknown culture. Colonialism was the very base and structure of the West Indian cultural awareness (Lamming 15).  As Baldwin says “The history of the world travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia is the beginning” (1964:14). According to him civilization started in Asia and reached its culmination in Europe. Europe determines the standard for the colonized now. “A foreign or absent mother culture has always cradled his judgment.”(Lamming 15). This absent culture had crippled the minds of the colonized and even after being set free they feared the colonizers and followed their way of life.

Lamming says that the writer leaves the native land to win the approval of the other i.e. the head quarter (former centre). The writers feel that one has to be at the centre to be in control and rule over others but in his effort to have control over others and to get approval from the centre; he becomes an exile who can neither go back to his own land and is also not accepted by the white man. For such writers the approval from the white man is of more importance and for this he tries his best to prove his worth to the other (Lamming 13).

For them the idea of England is very different from the reality. They feel that England have the supremacy in taste and judgment (Lamming 14) which the native lack. They consider the English judgment as a fact and this is the way reality is presented to them and no one even cares to check its credibility. The native are made to believe that whatever they have is worthless and not good enough to compete with them. Every thing that is brought forward by the white man is standard and their works are good. It has been built into the writers mind that literature that comes from  abroad is good literature and this perception is build in such a way that the writer feels  that he cannot write in the native setting and to write good literature he has to leave his native land.

According to Lamming one of the reasons might also be the fact that while comparing the work of a native or new writer we do not compare it to it contemporaries or any ordinary English writer, rather we compare it to the best English writer who are acknowledged for years. This is not a valid comparison and it makes the writers feel that their work will never be accepted in the native land and they should leave it to get the approval from the former power. But due to the fact that they come from a colonized land they are not accepted in that centre as well. They are caught in the middle, partly they follow the western way of life and partly they stick to their native culture. They feel themselves unfit for both the lands.

Lamming starts off by saying that exile is a bad thing and then tells us reasons that it is good in certain ways. He presents both the idea and finally leaves it on the reader to decide what is right and what is wrong.