The emigrants

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The emigrants

Jacket front has an illustration of three Afro-Caribbean faces, framed by an outline of a house on the left and a group of roofs with chimney pots above them. A photograph of the author, George Lamming, is on the jacket back.

About this item

Title:: The emigrants

Identifier:: PR9230.9.L25E61954

Permalink:: https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d3pk2m

Type:: Image

Notes:: Denis Williams was the jacket designer. Novel of first wave of West Indian emigrants to London. Following the huge success of Lamming's first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants revisits the themes of immigrant identity and cultural displacement. In his second novel, immigrants from several Caribbean nations - including Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, and Jamaica - travel to London seeking better opportunities. Part one recounts the voyage, for which the author offers a rite of passage narrative; as the characters cast off the old for the new, they share past experiences and future ambitions. The first section ends with their arrival in England. The life they encounter as peripheral citizens serves as a harsh counterpoint to their life as imagined aboard the ship and this betrayal of hopes makes their dissolving identity all the more difficult to watch. Despite their presumption that they would be welcomed as belatedly arriving British citizens, identities that they had been colonially indoctrinated to assume, the group members are disoriented by their reception as outcasts. On a technical level, the narrative begins as the ship enters the port of Guadeloupe on Good Friday. It shifts from a third person omniscient narrator to a first person narrator; although not totally clear, this narrator seems to be the character Collis, a writer whose biography mirrors Lamming's. Occasionally the third person plural intervenes. The book makes use of fragmentation, jumps between character, and uses a great deal of vernacular language and stream of consciousness. Although similar to books like Lonely Londoners, the novel does not engage the whimsical play of a calypso and Carnival aesthetic, and this accounts for what appears to critics as a profound difference in tone with regard to a more palatable contemporary regional fiction. Following his entrance into academia in 1967, Lammings professional endeavors were directed at a more academic audience; however George Lamming is still principally known as one of the establishers of a uniquely Caribbean aesthetic.