A Review of Water with Berries

Subject:

Fwd: W is for Water with Berries by George Lamming by Matti Ron (thanks for sharing!)

Date:

2020-11-16 11:36

From:

"John R. Lee" <johnrenator@gmail.com>

 

 

W is for Water with Berries by George Lamming by Matti Ron

George Lamming has long been a central figure in the world of Caribbean literature. Born in Barbados, his early novels – In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and The Emigrants (1954) – formed an essential plank of the postwar 'Golden Age' of Caribbean writing, winning him multiple awards as well as the plaudits of Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. However, Lamming's later work remains relatively neglected, in particular his 1971 novel, Water with Berries, which follows three artists (Teeton, a painter and anti-colonial revolutionary; Derek, an actor; and Roger, a musician and vessel for Lamming's ongoing feud with VS Naipaul) from the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal as they navigate the difficulties of migrant life in London.

As is typical for a Lamming novel, Water with Berries draws on the formal techniques of literary modernism to produce its narrative of exile and estrangement: Lamming mixes different genres and creates a narrative interwoven with the contradictions of his various characters' interior consciousnesses (themselves frequently internally fragmented). Yet beyond this continued engagement with avant-garde aesthetics, Water with Berries also sees Lamming continue to pursue (like other notable Caribbean intellectuals like Aimé Césaire) his long-term interest in The Tempest. This engagement with Shakespeare's play goes back at least as far as his 1960 essay collection, The Pleasures of Exile; however, in Water with Berries, Lamming applies his reading of it to the new context of independent post-colonial nation-states.

Thus, the novel is peppered throughout with allusions to and subversions of The Tempest: Miranda, for instance, is reconfigured as Teeton's fleeting love interest, Myra, and ex-wife, Randa, while elsewhere two transitory characters enter the narrative to discuss – in typically Shakespearian fashion – the principal protagonists in their absence and proceed to cite passages from The Tempest. However, perhaps the most significant allusion to the play comes in the novel's title itself, taken from Caliban's speech in Act One during which he says of Prospero:

When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in't (Shakespeare, 1998, 1.1: 332-334)

Lamming's point here, then, is that the colonial relationship was not merely one of physical violence and subjugation of the colonised by the colonisers, but also a situation whereby such violence was intermingled with a pretence of maternal affection and, indeed, a dependence on the 'Mother Country'. Thus, Teeton perceives his lodgings to be "a separate and independent province of the house" (Lamming, 2016, p. 35) while the house remains his British landlady's, maintained via a precariously balanced "unspoken partnership" (ibid.) based on a range of affectionate but fundamentally inequitable social codes. In highlighting this, then, Lamming also highlights how even in the nominally post-colonial context, such dependence and pretence of affection continues to keep Caliban "In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o' th' island." (Shakespeare, 1998, 1.1: 343-344)

This postcolonial engagement with The Tempest is combined by Lamming with an extended engagement with the work of the Caribbean anti-colonial revolutionary, Frantz Fanon. This manifests in a number of ways, but perhaps the most significant is in Fanon's pronouncements on anti-colonial violence in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a "cleansing force" which "frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect" (Fanon, 1963, p. 94). Thus, while there exist various fleeting moments which indicate post-racial possibilities or attempts at convivial civility, these moments remain fragile and their potential unfulfilled. As Lamming explained in a 1973 interview: "There cannot be a parting of the ways. There has to be a smashing" (Lamming, 2011, p. 164). However, with regard to gender, it should be noted that Lamming's text suffers from a paucity of vision all too common amongst male authors, whereby emancipation is frequently imagined at the expense of women's subjugation; in Water with Berries, the "smashing" which Lamming envisions as necessary in breaking the colonial relationship thus frequently manifests in violence, often sexual, directed towards women in the novel. Thus, despite its radicalism with regard to issues of race, colonialism and even class, Lamming's novel falls down somewhat in extending that radicalism to the cause of women's liberation.

Yet despite this, Water with Berries remains a deeply important literary engagement with anti-colonialism, in significant part because Lamming's postcolonial vision is one firmly rooted in a diasporic Black politics. Indeed, while Lamming set numerous novels on his fictional San Cristobal, in Water with Berries it exists only on the periphery of the narrative, the vast majority of the text's action taking place in Britain thus centring the struggles of migrants in Britain over those of anti-colonial national liberation. To this end, then, it is also significant that the novel's revolutionary conspirators do not return to San Cristobal but remain in Britain to defend Teeton's innocence.

However, what makes this espousal of a postcolonial diasporic Black politics particularly interesting is that Lamming stands in stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, such as Sam Selvon or VS Naipaul, who cast a much more sardonic (and, at times, even actively hostile) eye over the Black radical politics of the period. At a time when, by the 1970s, 40% of Black people in Britain were now British-born and that this burgeoning Black Britishness was looking within Britain (rather than 'back home') as the primary stage for their politics, Water with Berries must then be read as an older migrant author of the Windrush Generation making space for a politics of the diaspora, albeit one still deeply infused with the concerns of anti-colonial social movements.

As Lamming's novel concludes: "They were all waiting for the trials to begin" (Lamming, 2016, p. 276) These trials being not only those of Teeton and other characters in the novel, but also of the Black diaspora in the so-called 'Mother Country'.

Works cited:

Fanon, F. (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Lamming, G. (2011) '"A Future They Must Learn": An Interview With George Kent', in Bogues, A. (ed.) The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, pp. 149-170.

Lamming, G. (2016) Water with Berries. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

Shakespeare, W. (1998) The Tempest. Edited by Skiba, Laurie. St Paul, MN: Paradigm Publishing.

 

 

Alison Donnell, Professor and Head of School, SFHEA

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing,

University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7TJ

Email: a.donnell@uea.ac.uk

Pronouns: she/her/hers

https://www.uea.ac.uk/literature/people/profile/a-donnell

 

 

Gold (Teaching Excellence Framework 2017-2021)

World Top 200 (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020)

UK Top 25 (The Times/Sunday Times 2020 and Complete University Guide 2020)

World Top 50 for research citations (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2020)

Athena SWAN Silver Award holder in recognition of advancement of gender equality for all (Advance HE 2019)

 

 

 

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