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#OtD 28 Jul 1937, rioting broke out in #Barbados against the arrest of trade unionist Clement Payne, part of a wave of Caribbean labour unrest. Barbadian novelist, George Lamming (who was 10 at the time), depicts the riots in his brilliant 1953 novel, In the Castle of My Skin.
Uprisings actually occurred throughout the Caribbean at the time: Trinidad, Jamaica, St Lucia &more. For Lamming, the literary significance of these revolts were huge, saying "the major thrust of Caribbean literature in English rose from the soil of labor resistance in the 1930s"
Lamming returns to the significance of the 1930s in Water with Berries (1971), which unlike In the Castle.. was written in and deals with the context of post-independence neo-colonialism managed by local elites
In one passage, Teeton (a revolutionary) speaks to Jeremy (a govt bureaucrat) about an anti-colonial intellectual called 'Flamingo' from their country of San Cristobal (Lamming's fictional Caribbean island which frequently recurs in his novels)
For Jeremy, Flamingo "thinks the Thirties were yesterday" to which Teeton responds, "He also thinks the slave is very much with us today"
This passage is part of Lamming's extended engagement with Fanon, in this case The Wretched of the Earth's on the national bourgeoisie for whom decolonialisation merely seeks to "transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period"
Jeremy's attempt to diminish the contemporary relevance of the 1930s struggles underscores his status as national bourgeoisie. Teeton and Flamingo, on the other hand, represent the criticisms of anti-colonial radicals on the shortcomings of post-independence Caribbean governments
