Ariel over the airwaves: George Lamming’s rituals of revenant history

Abstract

This article, from the perspective of discussing the role of ghostly presences in the text, takes the opportunity to reconsider George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile. Published in 1960, Pleasures offers a nuanced reading of the global networks of literary political connection in its time and can be classified through both its locations and scope as “world literature”. Tracing and testing out key interrelations between three of the central organizing episodes – the Haitian ceremony of souls, the history of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices broadcasts and, briefly, Shakespeare’s The Tempest – it argues that Lamming is intimately concerned with mapping the characteristic inequalities of colonial cultural traffic on the eve of decolonization across the anglophone Caribbean. It seeks to negotiate a new pathway through the text, focussing on how Lamming deploys and works through ghostly conversations with history and between various communities. The Pleasures of Exile provides its readers with a variety of voices – spectral, airborne and mobile in their different ways – which act as the revenants of Caribbean history and allow us to fully realize the materially uneven and psychically traumatic history that Lamming announces.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• George Lamming
• ghosts
• radio
• Caribbean Voices
• The Tempest

Notes

1. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/broadcastinghouse/community/comm_outside.shtml.