The Pleasures of Exile

5 ideas

1. Haitian Ceremony of the Souls frames reckoning

   Lamming opens the book with the Haitian Vodou Ceremony of the Souls, in which the dead are summoned back through a priest to speak with the living, settle old debts and confess what they left unsaid. He treats his own essays as such a ceremony, calling up Prospero and Caliban so that colonizer and colonized can testify and the unfinished business of colonial history can be spoken aloud. The ritual serves as his model for how a culture confronts its past: by staging a dialogue with the dead rather than burying them.

2. The colonizer's language as prison and weapon

   Caliban's line 'You taught me language, and my profit on't is I know how to curse' names the double bind of the colonized writer. The language Prospero gives him is a gift, since it creates the capacity to think and speak in the dominant world. It is also a prison, because every expression must pass through the master's categories and values. The way out is not to reject the language but to seize it and turn it back, using Prospero's tongue to say what Prospero never intended it to say.

3. Prospero depends on and fears Caliban

   The colonizer's authority rests on the labor and subordination of the colonized, so Prospero cannot do without the Caliban he despises. Prospero's obsession with Caliban's alleged sexual threat to Miranda reveals his own anxiety and projection more than any fact about Caliban. Colonial power is therefore structurally insecure: the master is haunted by the very figure he defines as beneath him.

4. Colonial identity as a condition of exile

   To be colonial is already to be in exile, displaced from any culture one can fully call one's own, before one ever leaves home. The West Indian writer who migrates to London is only making that inner condition literal. Paradoxically, the metropolis becomes the place where he discovers he is West Indian at all, which is the ambiguous 'pleasure' of exile.

5. West Indian novel restored the peasant

   Lamming argues that the defining achievement of the 1950s West Indian novel was to put the peasant and laboring poor at the center of literature as full persons, not as background or comic types. This was possible because many of the new writers came from that same stock rather than from a colonial middle class that looked to England for its values. Because the local audience was small, this literature found its readers and its publishers in London, which bound the region's self-discovery to migration.

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