Aboard the Reconnaissance, the vessel where Natives of My Person takes place, a member of the crew, a young and boastful carpenter, banters with a more experienced crewmember who tells the carpenter that he has much to learn. “You are too young to have much history,” he warns the carpenter. The carpenter’s pride is hurt, so he boasts of the skills and achievement of his ancestors, of the lineage of craftsmen to which he was born and he says, “I have a lot history in my hands.”
When I write about Lamming, I, too, have lot of history in my hands, and it is heavy. Writing about Lamming is difficult because it is an exercise in balance. On the one hand, there is the significant weight of history, of context. On the other, there is the pressure that the passing of time places on any piece of literature, the burden of continued relevance. Too often when we write about Lamming, it is as though we are peering at his work through the glass at a museum, always looking, never touching. Though of course a book should never be divorced from context, there is something to be said for challenging a piece of literature, dissecting it, allowing each new generation to peer within it, and to determine for themselves its meaning and value. To do otherwise is a disservice to the author.
We write about Lamming as if his work has been fossilized in amber, and in our detached reverence we see nothing of ourselves in him, and we abandon him to history. The youthful lens should be valued, because often the fear of not liking, or not understanding, a piece of literature can dissuade young people from reading it, which is the real tragedy.
Writing about Lamming is hard because, let’s face it, reading Lamming is damn hard, too. Natives of My Person is dense and abstruse. The author delves deeply into the ambitions and the motivations of the crew, officers and captain of the vessel. Each of the officers of the ship has a sordid past of infidelity, rape, incest, murder. The exploitative and corrupt lives of the crew are a synecdoche of the morally bankrupt nature of the colonial process as a whole. Through the depravity of the crew, as well as the chaotic and hostile nature of the voyage itself, Lamming evokes a mood of blind conquest and reckless ambition devoid of any idealistic or humanistic motives.
Although the colonized peoples, referred to as the Tribes, are scarcely mentioned, it is through their absence that Lamming so craftily conjures the colonial mindset. We see the colonization through the eyes of the sailors; and as they see the Tribes only as “black cargo,” so, too, Lamming writes of them with the detached observation of a farmer surveying his cattle.
In this way, Natives of My Person is wholly devoid of the usual trappings of the colonial tale. There is no brave or rebellious native, no morally ambiguous colonizer who is tormented by his actions, no forbidden love story between captor and captive. Rather, Natives of My Person is a story of ambition, greed and impenitent invasion, and in that way, it is perhaps the truest story of colonialism I have ever read.
I found myself wishing that the story would progress, that the crew would arrive in San Cristobal, that the natives would finally become real people on the page. But Lamming never acquiesces in this regard, and we remain trapped for the duration of the novel in the shallow and vile perspective of the crew. This myopic narrative perspective is clearly intentional, and as the Reconnaissance seems to be on a journey to nowhere, so, too, the claustrophobic setting aboard the ship is an apt metaphor for the colonial endeavour. In their attempts to dehumanize the colonized in conquest, the crew succeeds in only their own death, madness and dehumanization. For young Caribbean readers especially, who are so accustomed to stories in which our side of history is the focus, to be so erased is gut-wrenching: reading a colonial tale that renders the colonized invisible is really hard. But the thing is reading should not always be easy, and Natives of My Person is worth the effort.
