Natives of My Person by George Lamming

First published: 1972

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: Sixteenth century

Locale: The west coast of Africa and the Caribbean

Principal Characters:

• The Commandant, the enigmatic master of the ship Reconnaissance
• Pinteados, the ship’s pilot
• Sasha, the ship’s cabin boy
• The Boatswain, an experienced sailor
• Baptiste, one of the most vocal and militant of the ordinary seamen

The Novel

Although Natives of My Person has a historical setting and deals with the voyage of the Reconnaissance, a vessel ostensibly engaged in the slave trade, a specific historical phenomenon, it is only partly accurate to describe it as a work of historical realism. Its realist component is not to be found in its fidelity to period costume, living conditions, or similar revealing detail. Instead of the veneer of verisimilitude that such usages provide, the novel locates its realism in the way in which it elaborately recapitulates an outlook.

In order to focus readers’ attention on this enactment of a mindset, there are no reliable geographical or historical bearings. Two powerful nations are mentioned, Lime Stone and Antarctica. Although they are traditionally enemies, their enmity derives from a common commitment to the type of exploration and exploitation that the slave trade brings into being. In Lime Stone, the nation to which the Commandant and the crew of the Reconnaissance supposedly owe allegiance, the ruling institution is known as the House of Trade and Justice. The titular head of this house is Gabriel Tate de Lysle, a name perhaps intended to evoke the firm of Tate and Lyle, a real-life British sugar company with substantial plantations in the Caribbean. Antarctica, on the other hand, is represented by the pilot, Pinteados, and an admiral, signifying its maritime interests. In both cases, the appearance of cohesiveness that these spheres of accomplishment provide is deceptive. The activities emerge as a kind of shadow-play, the manifestations of which are not material but psychological.

Similarly, the voyage of the Reconnaissance lacks geographical specificity and nautical detail. Nor is its purpose the traditional one of adding to the coffers of the House of Trade and Justice. Although mention is made of the Guinea coast, the customary West African source of slaves for the transatlantic trade, there is very little attempt to bring that environment to life. Moreover, no slaves are taken on board. As the Reconnaissance heads across the Atlantic in the general direction of the imaginary island of San Cristobal, the object of the voyage seems less to attain a new, rewarding landfall than to unveil the turbid spirit of nascent imperialism, and the emotional and spiritual squalor that lies beneath the arrogant mask of command. In Natives of My Person, much of the romance associated with going down to the sea in ships, with enduring hardship by no means other than raw courage, and with discovering new tropical paradises, is deprived of its hortatory simplemindedness and its ideologically suspect naïvete. The result is that Lamming presents a sustained critique of such one-dimensional verities. The courage depicted has no moral fiber. No heavenly landfall materializes. On the contrary, the voyage is inconclusive and unproductive, its payoff violent and chaotic.

This outcome is particularly telling because it issues from such an explicitly controlled and hierarchical world. Since the action is located on board a ship, elements of rank, order, integration, command, and purpose thus compose the fundamental lexicon of the reality that the characters share. So great is the emphasis placed upon such elements, and so widespread is the belief that this emphasis is in the service of an immutable, historically inscribed destiny, that it becomes inevitable that challenges to the structure of life on the Reconnaissance be identified and, if possible, extirpated. One of the most accomplished and explicit means by which the author evinces the inevitability of challenge and the inevitability of its suppression is in the characters’ speech. Formal without being orotund, dramatic without being rhetorical, it is an instrument that reveals the probes and defenses used by the characters to substantiate their common reality.

This common reality, fabricated in the name of the imperial ambitions of Lime Stone’s ruling house and given direct impetus by the Commandant’s own ambition, is less durable than the mixture of unhappy personal histories and dubious motivations that the individual crew members bring on board with them. These discrete narratives of humiliation and error all have a common root in sexuality, and all pertain to the Commandant’s status both as captain of the Reconnaissance and as an intimate of the House of Trade and Justice. By seeing to it that there is no escaping the various forms of psychological enslavement that form the basis of the crew’s personal reality, and by arranging the plot of Natives of My Person so that this inner bondage is the cause of the calamitous climax of the voyage, George Lamming exposes the mortal weakness of those who sought to impose their will on the world in the name of empire.

The Characters

From the point of view of character, the shipboard world of Natives of My Person is divided into two halves, the world of masters and the world of men. In the latter world, the characters have actual names such as Baptiste, Ivan, and Marcel. Considered collectively, the crew members’ names resist the identification of Lime Stone with any specific imperial power. Many of the names have French associations. Of all the various empires to have made their marks on the Caribbean, the French was, arguably, the least prominent, so that the French emphasis becomes part of the structure of inversion upon which the novel is based.

The men, by virtue of their names, attain a certain individuality, but it is an attainment that they are not permitted to experience as empowerment. Such a condition of psychological disfranchisement is endemic to life at sea. The result is that, for all their colorfulness, the various skills of their trades, and the range of their differentiated backgrounds, the ordinary seamen are utterly dependent on the ebb and flow of surmise, rumor, and gossip that they trawl for indications of what lies in store for them. They are held captive both by the enigmatic Commandant and, more fundamentally, by a social structure that demands that they be kept in a state of lesser awareness than the officers. The effect of this dependence is that their individuality is purely nominal.

The manner in which the men are entrapped is largely social. In important respects, they are free of the sexual attachments that determine the fates of their superiors in rank, but this freedom is unable to assume a constructive form. There is no alternative available to the men to the command structure of the ship and the command economy that underlies and motivates it. Although they are implicated in the ways in which conditions develop on the Reconnaissance, they remain essentially outside the psychological penumbra that darkens the officers’ inner lives. Despite their machismo and capacity for belligerence, the men are for all practical purposes innocent, as the Boatswain’s story shows. This story, which tells of the intersection between the sailor’s life and the officer’s life, depicts the Boatswain attempting to redeem by means of sex the abjectness of a life spent unrewardingly in the service of the House of Trade and Justice. The story not only marks the beginning of the end of the voyage but also confirms the rigidity of the lines that control the social reality by which the characters are obliged to abide.

The situation of the officers is a mirror image of that of the men. They are known not by their names but by their professional occupations such as Priest, Surgeon, and Steward. These designations clearly obviate the characters’ individuality. However, their individuality, conceived in terms of marriage, private life, sexuality, thirst for power, and willingness to judge and punish, is what the officers cannot forego. The human cost of their service is what haunts and eventually destroys them. As with the men, but in a much more decisive manner that calls into question the hierarchical principles of the Lime Stone world, the officers are incapable of overcoming their attachment to the system in which they serve. Individuating elements are inadmissable in the world of the slave-traders.

What the Boatswain is with regard to the men, the Commandant is in connection with the officers. His attempts to personify for his own ends the ambitions of the House of Trade and Justice, and the fact that these attempts can be seen to be driven by a need to sublimate his sexual experiences in Lime Stone, bring to a critical, and untenable, juncture the conflicts between role and personality, between ego and id, between the amenities of land and the vicissitudes of sea. Both the Commandant and Boatswain embody to a problematic, and ultimately catastrophic, degree the tensions and contradictions to which the groups to which they belong are subject. Rather than developing a sense of the characters’ individuality, Natives of My Person instead explores its moral landscape by showing the destructive resistance of type to individuality.

Critical Context

The narrative strategy of assembling a cast of characters and sending them on a voyage can be traced at least as far back as the fifteenth century German poem Das Narrenschiff (1494; The Ship of Folys of the Worlde, 1509), and the representative nature of the characters of Natives of My Person, as well as its inevitable moral critique, align it with the tradition of such works. This tradition has connotations of plotting a course and envisaging a destination, as well as of foundering and losing one’s bearings. These two sets of connotations continually interact in Natives of My Person.

Despite the work’s allegorical potential deriving from its medieval prototype, the novel’s main critical context is indebted to more modern works. Although Natives of My Person is conceived and executed on a much larger scale than Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), its thematic debt to that work is not difficult to discern. The thematic force of the journey as an event of more psychological than geographical interest is obviously present in both works, and the insistence on the corrupting effects of power, and on power conceived of in exclusively exploitative terms, is also aired in Conrad’s story.

It is important also not to overlook the author’s declaration of his own cultural allegiances. These are suggested in his partial dedication of the novel to the African American author Richard Wright and in the title’s echo of Wright’s most celebrated novel, Native Son (1940). Apart from the inherent interest in one writer’s public homage to another, the dedication acts as a firm reminder that the issues raised in Natives of My Person have remained current, and that the human history that engendered these issues still requires the imaginative reconstruction and moral dissection to which George Lamming subjects it.

Bibliography

Boxhill, Anthony. “San Cristobal Unreached: George Lamming’s Two Latest Novels.” World Literature Written in English 12 (April, 1973): 16-28. Discusses Lamming’s Water with Berries (1972) and Natives of My Person, examining in detail the latter’s treatment of historical and colonial questions.

Campbell, Elaine. “West Indian Sea Fiction: George Lamming’s Natives of My Person.” Commonwealth Novel in English 3 (Spring/Summer, 1984): 56-65. Discusses the different nautical dimensions of Natives of My Person and relates them to the maritime tradition of the Caribbean novel.

McDonald, Avis G. “ ‘Within the Orbit of Power’: Reading Allegory in George Lamming’s Natives of My Person.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 22, no. 1 (1987): 73-86. An elaborate and complex reading of the novel’s allegorical character, which is interpreted as, ultimately, a meditation on the consequences of power as a force for coherence in the world.

Munro, Ian. “George Lamming.” In West Indian Literature, edited by Bruce King. London: Archon Books, 1979. A general introduction to Lamming’s work, concentrating on his novels. The works’ various treatments of emigration and colonialism are identified. The survey also indicates ways in which Natives of My Person can be considered the culmination of Lamming’s fiction.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. The Novels of George Lamming. London: Heinemann, 1982. Contains a chapter on Natives of My Person. Provides a broad overview of the novel’s economic, sociological, and historical underpinnings. Also has a substantial bibliography.

Peterson, Kirsten Holt. “Time, Timelessness, and the Journey Metaphor in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Natives of My Person.” In The Commonwealth Writer Overseas: Themes of Exile and Expatriation, edited by Alastair Niven. Brussels: Marcel Didier, 1976. Highlights the journey theme in Lamming’s works and considers the contribution made by the works in relation to the establishment of a specific West Indian mentality and culture.