In a novel he was working on late in his life, he imagined Christopher Columbus arrested by natives in the West Indies, 'stripped naked' and his hands and legs in chains.' Pleads Columbus: 'My errors have not been committed with intention to do ill.' 'Natives of My Person' was an imagined voyage on a slave ship whose captain no longer believes in their mission. Lamming revisited and reinvented not just his personal history, but the distant past, which he saw as a battle for decolonization of the mind.

'I became a West Indian in England,' he said during a 2013 interview for the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados.

He lived for more than a decade in London, but would think of it as a cold and alienated place, where no one asked after each other and one could feel entirely alone even when living closely to hundreds of others. Lamming's novels ' The Emigrants' and 'Season of Adventure' drew upon his years in England, and his disenchantment with the British culture he had been conditioned to emulate. 'The Village sings, the Village dances, and since the word is their only rescue, all the resources of a vital oral folk tradition are summoned to bear witness to the essential humanity which rebukes the wretchedness of their predicament.' 'The Village, you might say, is the central character,' Lamming wrote in an introduction to a 1983 reissue of the novel. But it's also a eulogy- for villagers left homeless, for trees cut down, land sold off and buildings razed, for the way of life being dismantled. 'In the Castle of My Skin' was structured in part as a coming-of-age story about a boy who begins drifting from his peers when he's admitted into a more exclusive high school.

Published in 1953, the novel is a semi-autobiographical narrative based in a Caribbean village uprooted by colonialism and profit taking. Lamming received his greatest acclaim for 'In the Castle of My Skin,' its title drawn from an early poem by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. In novels such as ' In the Castle of My Skin' and ' Season of Adventure' and in the nonfiction 'The Pleasures of Exile,' Lamming explored the Caribbean's complicated legacy - as a destination for enslaved people abducted and shipped from Africa, as a colonial proving ground for England and as an uneasy neighbor of the United States, practitioners of 'the deceptive magic of the dream of milk and honey.'

George not found skin