In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming

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In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming: Episode 1

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - In the Castle of My Skin by George Lamming, Episode 1

A lyrical coming-of-age novel set amid the collapse of colonial rule in Barbados.

On the day of G’s ninth birthday, a storm rages through Barbados and floods his village - a village defined and controlled by a social hierarchy reflecting the  British Empire.

In the Castle of My Skin is the first and much acclaimed novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, originally published in 1953 by Michael Joseph in London. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright, the latter writing an introduction to the book's US edition. 

It's an autobiographical coming-of-age novel - set in the 1930s and 40s in Carrington Village, Barbados, where the author was born and raised - and follows the events in the life of a young boy named G, taking place against the background of dramatic changes in the society in which he lives. 

The book's title comes from a couplet in Derek Walcott's early work Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), "You in the castle of your skin / I the swineherd."

Lamming wrote:
"Migration was not a word I would have used to describe what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in 1950. We simply thought we were going to an England that had been painted in our childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is the measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interest like the islands we left. It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time (...)

Much of the substance of my first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, is an evocation of this tragic innocence. Nor was there, at the time of writing, any conscious effort on my part to emphasise the dimension of cruelty that had seduced, or driven, black people into such lasting bonds of illusion. It was not a physical cruelty. Indeed, the colonial experience of my generation was almost wholly without violence. It was a terror of the mind; a daily exercise in self-mutilation. Black versus black in a battle for self-improvement."

Abridged by Florence Bedell
Read by Paterson Joseph

Produced by Clive Brill
A Brill production for BBC Radio 4

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