History and Literature

The word history is from the Greek word "historia" meaning "a searching to find out". And defining history can be both a simple and complex venture as opinions are as varied as they are diverse because history is much more than a study of past events, peoples and places. Eminent historian F.L Whitney defines history as any integrated narrative or description of past events or facts written in a spirit of critical inquiring for the whole truth. However, Robert Y. Daniel’s definition which identifies a clear linkage between the past and present in history and submits that, “the past the historian studies and the knowledge he generates are indeed living in the present” is more particular to our study. Consequently, history becomes a going back to situate the present and project into the future or what E.H Carr terms a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. Continuing, Carr writes that:    

The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past. Our view of history reflects our view of society.

From the foregoing, it is apparent that history is necessary to the growth, development and even stability of a society - akin to knowing where you came from, to establishing where you are now, in determining where you are going to, Arthur Marwick puts it succinctly when he contends that, a society without history will have great difficulty finding its bearing. The theoretical approach of historical criticism in its most basic form is a simple examination of the techniques adopted in the treatment of history in given written texts or oral and dramatic performances. Aristotle is perhaps the first recorded critic to give serious thought to the alignment between history and literature when he posits in his Poetics 9 that poetry (literature) is “a more philosophic and better thing” than history, drawing from an earlier stated premise that:

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse - you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. (authorama.com/the-poetics. n.p)

In other words, poetry or literature possesses more noble features and loftier ideas than mere history because it has a universal appeal as opposed to the restrictive and particular appeals of history. This view has elicited diverse comments from both historians and literary critics over the years, with many of them attacking Aristotle’s assertions. However, a more careful look at Aristotle’s thoughts would reveal that the more popular consensus that he is hostile to history and its study is inherently wrong; as it does disservice to the very important role history plays in literature. Consequently, this study wants to suggest that being a philosopher, Aristotle might never have meant for his thoughts to be taken literally. Indeed, cautioning against taking Aristotle’s comments at face value, Philosophy professor, Thornton Lockwood notes in his article “Aristotle on the Alleged Inferiority of History to Poetry” that: “Aristotle compares history and poetry in order to elucidate the object of poetic mimesis rather than criticize history as a discipline” (academia.edu/2310493. n.p). In other words, since his immediate emphasis is on the subject of poetic imitations, every other subject at that very instance can only be secondary, but not necessarily second class. In his book Historicism [1], Paul Hamilton restates Aristotle’s notion that while literature lends itself to universal applications by being completely open to criticism, history by its much particularized nature requires much more than that because it is concerned with verifiable facts and records . Consequently, the superiority of one branch of study over the other is highly debatable, and can only reduce from robust scholarship; at best therefore, both notions cannot but be symbiotic in their relationship. Now, while history may be defined as a recollection of past accounts of peoples, events and places, literature would rather see history as “the human becoming in its total reach, past, present and future, integrally bound as the very essence of the human adventure and sometimes the entire cosmic adventure” [2]. Thus, while revealing man as the only totally historical creature, the indispensability of the past in fashioning out the present and influencing the future is also established. And that is where the true function of history in the development of human societies lies. Indeed, when a people have no tangible recollected past as a reservoir upon which it can draw to give itself meaning and a destination [3)] and forge a sense of identity of which it can be proud, that society is ever in limbo; it goes through a lot of motions with no true movement as migration is often the end result of their struggles. The West Indian or Caribbean society whose happenstances provide the spatial and temporal aspects of George Lamming's works fall into this category of an indeterminate history. No wonder V.S Naipaul laments thus in The Middle Passage: 

How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? .... nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies.... The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievements and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.

As things stand therefore, the relationship between history and literature is essentially a symbiotic one. They both feed on and are fed by each other. While history provides literature with usable materials (subject matters and situations for discourse), literature on its part provides a vehicle for history to be told and retold. Indeed, as Onukaogu and Onyerionwu opine: “what the literary writer does with respect to the historical materials available to him is essentially to pass it through his imaginative forge, with the outcome bearing varying degrees of fictionalization of factual events, people and places”. In the instance of the Caribbean writers however, it is apparently the politico-historical experience that is the most important element in their writings. Indeed, they are mainly concerned with telling the whole world the nature of Caribbean history and Caribbean life. For them, “literature has yet another function, in that it becomes one of the agencies which articulate history” [4]. From the foregoing, we may rightly assume and suggest that true history does not quite exist in any way or form. In other words, what we have as history, especially in our historical fictions, are subjective histories as opposed to objective versions because history, no matter the format, is always a plus and minus situation, or what Kofi Anyidoho describes as “a process of selection and omission”. According to Anyidoho: 

The past as a total experience of a people remains an irretrievable whole of which various accounts of history can only provide more or less accurate fragments. Nor is there such thing as the history of a people. There is only a plurality of histories, each offering its special permutation of selected details, each serving the ideological needs of one group or another. 

Clearly, the above line of thought pertains more to strictly historical texts as opposed to historically literary texts because of the latter’s penchant for poetic license, it is nevertheless relevant to the total scope of this paper as it gives more insight into the concept of historical realism and the objectivity or otherwise of the writer. In all however and as earlier espoused in our exploration, colonial literary writers cannot but resort to adapting historical instances to retell what has come to be known as the distorted history and culture of their people. Simoes da Silva emphasises this when he opines that “the post-colonial writer and post-colonial text are concerned primarily with subverting and recuperating notions of historical and cultural truths”. The 

West Indians and their History

The following lines below from one of the characters in George Lamming's second novel The Emigrant best describe the history and sensibility of the Caribbean people:

Hist'ry tell me that dese same West Indies people is a sort of vomit you vomit up.... England, France, Spain, all o' them Caribbean sea. It mix up with the vomit they make Africa vomit, an' the vomit them make India vomit, an' China an' nearly every race under the sun. An' just as vomit never get back into yuh stomach, these people, most o' them, never get back where they vomit them from.... And the great nations, England, and the rest.. .them stir till the vomit start to take on a new life.... Now it explodin' bit by bit. It beginnin' gradually to stir itself... it stirrin itself but there ain't no pot. And when vomit is people them get confuse.

The immediate reaction by an already frustrated and disillusioned people was mass migration to foreign lands where their identities in terms of race, nation, colour and even dialect became charged with intractable challenges. Indeed, given the 'separateness' of the people, colours and even islands, the Caribbean man found it difficult to realize personal, national and even regional cohesion. Their peculiar experience over the centuries has left them as a people without a solid past, with an ephemeral present and a nebulous future. Little wonder C. L. R James in his literary wisdom pronounced that, "we are what we are because we have been what we have been". At first glance, the Caribbean region seems to be still reeling from historical shocks and the people existing in a No Man's land, in a state of limbo, derived from a ruptured historical past. Like all Caribbean writers, Lamming draws copiously from the past of the people, writing more from his sense of history rather than from the history of the people. However, his sense of history evokes strong memories of a people's past, even though the tangibility of the history is seemingly lost in antiquity. However, the people and instances he depicts are lucid enough to give us a vivid account of the historical realties of the people; of what would have been resulting in how they now live. To close this section of our exploration, perhaps we should get a viewpoint from the ‘other’, the side of the colonising powers on this concept of reverse colonialism. A former French Prime Minister, Pierre Messmer is once quoted to have lamented that the large-scale exilic migration of former colonials, especially from the Caribbean into mainland Europe is “a trap set by history. We in France and Europe have been accustomed to colonising the world. Now, the foreigners are coming here to us” (qtd in Gary Freeman 30). Apart from personal ambition and the allure of leaving their island nations for Europe and America, these emigrations were equally predicated on massive social-economic problems that bedeviled these newly independent Caribbean nations. And the migrations are usually to the parent nation of their respective former colonial masters which they had been brought up to see as home. In the words of Claudio Jones, emigration in the Caribbean context can be seen as the express manifestation of a peoples’: “Stop-gap measure to ease the growing economic frustration in a largely impoverished agricultural economy in which under colonial capitalist imperialist relations, the wealth is dominated by a few” [5]. On the other hand, emigration becomes a reaction to the restless and rootless realities of their existence, symptomatic of their historical experiences. Little wonder C. L. R James in his literary wisdom pronounced that, "we are what we are because we have been what we have been". 

Migration and Exile in the Emigrants

George Lamming's second novel The Emigrants tells the story of the futile struggle by a group of West Indians to adjust and adapt to life in England after fleeing from their disillusioned existences in their various island nations. The Emigrants is essentially about emigration leading to exile, a major paradigm in the socio-historical development of the West Indies and a most central theme in their literary history. Indeed, emigration becomes the only option for West Indians of the next generation because the historical situation that culminated in their mass exodus to Britain as shown in Lamming’s earlier novel In the Castle of My Skin has grown worse. Effectively, the colonialists' strategy and mechanism for repression through historical distortions, social indoctrination and economic extortion is still in place, even after a few of these Caribbean islands have become independent. However, with the attainment of independence status by some of these Caribbean islands, the tool for oppression and extortion are soon dismantled. The emotional climate changes and with the reality of their poor and near hopeless socio-economic existence, exile through migration to Britain became the only available option to the West Indians. The collapse of the hastily put together and fragile West Indian Federation in 1962 further exacerbated an already bad situation and a mass exodus from 'Little' into 'Big' England became the only saving grace for a highly disillusioned and impoverished people. Here, the historical psychologist, Zeverdei Barbu's postulation on what he termed “the emotional climate” comes to full view when he remarks that "certain collective emotional states are dependent on historical circumstances, and to what extent such states may, in their turn create new historical circumstances". The collective emotional state here is one of despair and disillusionment perpetrated and perpetuated by the historical circumstance of colonialism, while the new historical circumstance is emigration leading to exile. A well-received novel, The Emigrants like In the Castle of My Skin, captures history from an indeterminate, near nebulous, point and hurries along until the book ends in an unsettled listlessness of its characters. The critic Gerald Moore describes the novel as “a restless, anguished, inconclusive book totally lacking the unity of vision and setting which characterised his [6] chronicle of Barbadian childhood (in In the Castle of My Skin)”. Indeed, one cannot but agree with Moore because The Emigrants actually mirrors the existence and interactions of a group of individuals with a dubious but common historical legacy, within that unsettling world in-between dream and reality. According to Wilson Harris, it effectively captures "the depth of inarticulate feeling and unrealized wells of emotions belonging to the whole West Indies", which hedges its inhabitants to a precarious precipice causing them to flee their land to seek fortune and fulfillment in other lands. From the foregoing, it becomes clear that The Emigrants is all about a group of West Indians' futile yet determined efforts to flee their omnipresent, indeterminate historical past in order to attain to a brighter and more fulfilling present and future. However, in their strenuous efforts to dump their island societies and their past, they end up becoming more entangled in the snare of that past - helpless and confused. The reason for this is the albatross around their neck, which is the fact that historically, they carry a stigmatized, blighted past with them which influences and determines their present and future realities. As a writer, George Lamming has always seen exile as a palliative of sort to the West Indian debacle of seeking stability, focus and direction in life. Indeed, for a while his battle cry is "to be an exile is to be alive" (The Pleasures of Exile 24). But then, on getting to England, the restlessness of the West Indian due to his historical rootlessness becomes more apparent and aggravated as he suddenly finds himself in a society more alien, more dysfunctional and even less unified than the one he has left behind. Consequently, he fails in all his several attempts to forge a cohesive Caribbean man who would have dropped his historical albatross altogether. For when hapless and helpless men congregate, they can only wallow in more helplessness since they have no new or fresh vision with which to comfort, encourage and exalt themselves. Even then, the fact that they have come to exert socio-economic pressures on the rather limited resources and amenities of England do not endear them to the indigenous Englishmen. Consequently, they are never accepted as equals in their new society and the only jobs open to them are menial ones which many of them would not dare touch back home in the West Indies. Thus, they end up more despondent in their disillusioned state and take to such vices as alcoholism and substance addiction, crime and debased sexual liaisons in an attempt at making their lives more meaningful. It is curious but instructive that the same historical problems of migration and emigration the West Indians faced in their interaction with the English in the previous century still continue till this day. What with the harsh reception modern day migrants suffer in the hands of the Europeans and the journeys they make at the risk of their lives, with so many dying in the process. Structurally divided into three parts, The Emigrants is literally written in a suspension that captures the historical listlessness of these despairing exiles that feel left out of the flow of their own societies and must seek fulfillment outside. The fatality of their truncated historical continuum follows them into their new abode and decides for them the course they must take and what they must ultimately become - hollow men. Gerald Moore succinctly captures the structure of the novel thus:

The first, 'A Voyage' begins at the literal moment of sailing from the familiar pier head into the blue horizon which has bounded all island experience hitherto. The second 'Rooms and Residents' traces the separate destinies of the voyagers when they reached London and scatter through the dark anonymous strangeness of the waiting city. In the last movement 'Another Time' the web of relationships bring them all together again for a brief moment of crisis and failure before they scatter once more.

However, by far the most profound and enduring section of the novel as Moore writes is the first section where we become familiar with the characters and their histories. As it were: “the period of the voyage is used by the characters to divulge something of their past history and express the hopes and ambitions to be achieved in the countries for which they are bound” [7]. This first section is peopled by characters whose sensibilities are in flux - they are on a floating sailing ship, which in turn is on a seemingly unflowing sea in a slowly revolving earth. This sort of lethargy, a legacy of their slavery and colonial past, which is the bane of the West Indian society, is what moves the story on like a slow-motion picture on projector slides. It is noteworthy that the journey is made on a ship because historically, it is the figure of the ship that opened up the West Indies to the ravages and emotional complexities of its latter existence. In The Emigrants, the ship now becomes "simply the vehicle that takes them from one experience to another". Again, the geography of the Caribbean ensures that all the islands are physically separate from one another, while the historical reality of colonization further worsened this dichotomy. In the Caribbean, we see various islands being governed by different colonial powers, with some even passing from one colonial master to another. For instance, George Lamming posits in his work Natives of My Person “In the historic scramble for Dolores, the island has never yielded itself to a single rule of law.... A destiny of twin conquests marked the island's history”. This geo-historical reality is reflected in The Emigrants where the characters exhibit fierce island nationalism. Indeed, very early in the book, we notice their determination to preserve the integrity of each island nation, which mirrors the isolationist, cut-off-from history and therefore reality, existence of each character and by extension the West Indian people:

"where you come from?" one of the men asked. "me born an' bred in Jamaica".... He was proud of his origin, prouder than any of his companions seemed to understand. "A pure son o’de soil... Ar’asl Kingstonian by name and nature.

Consequently, in the altercation that follows, every West Indian island - Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada - representative on the ship stands separately for itself, extoling its virtues and highlighting the vices of the others. This continues for a while until one of the more respected figures on the ship, called the Governor comes to restore order and admonishes them all as "blasted small islanders". Indeed, that is what they all are, not just courtesy of their geographical realities, but more in terms of their historical legacies. The colonial tactics of annex, divide, rule and exploit and its anti-social, vision-destroying tendency through which the West Indians are governed have effectively delineated the people from one another, even as they cannot reconcile the myriads of sensibilities within themselves. Again, cut off from his historical continuum, the Caribbean man cannot quite articulate his visions and therefore tends to be indecisive in all his actions. This lethargy occasioned by his historical albatross often portrays him as a man waiting helplessly for reprieve and succor from the condition he can barely understand. The first few pages of The Emigrants reveal this line of thought as a reality in the people's consciousness, especially as they journey into unknown England:

We were all waiting for something to happen. 

We were all waiting for something to happen. 

We waited, sure that something would happen.

 We were all going to see what would happen.

 We had waited to see what would happen. 

This mood pervades the whole novel and mirrors the lives of the characters so much so that even at the end of the book, one experiences a dissatisfaction suggestive of the fact that the waiting game is far from over. Indeed, throughout the book, we find the characters milling and drifting meaninglessly about, their frantic activities notwithstanding because "in a state of unfulfilled waiting, nothing one does while waiting has any value in itself" [8]. However, by far the strongest expression that captures the historical legacy and travail of the West Indian man through historical time and space is the one earlier alluded to and given us by the character Jamaican who likens the people to a vomit. Here, the mixed up, gloomy and therefore indeterminate origin of the West Indians is revealed as the strongest factor militating against them and accounting for their seeming perpetual existence in historical turmoil. They are neither here nor there and cannot pursue any meaningful vision to fruition due to their distorted and inarticulate history. According to Ian Munro, in various ways, all the emigrants went through a similar experience of disillusionment and loss of identity having lost all relation to their society and could no longer exist as a community after emigration has exposed the colonial illusions about the Mother country upon which their identity has been based as a fallacy.

History and Psychology in the Emigrants

The psyche and society that evolve from the European intervention in an otherwise serene, organized native Caribs and Arawak communities of people are shambolic at best and the people as disoriented as their psyche is fragmented. According to Lamming, the:

Caribbean society historically was never conceived as the coming together of a people with any design for social living. The history of our region continued to be the history of extreme contradiction: the contradictions between men perceived only as an instrument of production, and labour experienced as the basis for social living.

Psychologically, Lamming’s second novel reveals the effective debilitating influence of life in England on a group of West Indians “who have grown up and being conditioned elsewhere, partly by the false notions of what modern England is like,” The effect is rather disheartening for it reveals the West Indians’ further severance from both their immediate past society and their ever-confused selves. This totally new, alien and often hostile society and people did not help matters, as the emigrants become acutely disoriented in a white society which rejects them and in which they remain awkward like perpetual fugitives. In the novel, the society depicted in the ship just prior to the actual voyage shows the confused psyche of the West Indians, while revealing their desires and intentions. Generally, they all imagine England to be the El Dorado, except for veterans like Tornado who cautions them. Mr. Higgin wants to be a trained cook, Miss Bis, a secretary and Collis, a writer. On the ship, they form a loose society as they jealously maintain their independence and space from one another through their vehement island nationalism. However, their expectations undergo severe reality checks when the experience of the English society dawns on them. However, the reality that is life in England soon ensures that they come together in a detached way. Indeed, identifying a common enemy as it were, in the English man and his society, the West Indians seek a basis for social unity. Lamming captures this in The Pleasures of Exile when he writes that:

It is here ‘in London’ that one sees a discovery actually taking place. No Barbadian, no Trinidadian, no St. Lucian, no Islander from the West Indies sees himself as a West Indian until he encounters another Islander in a foreign country.

Lamming’s prognosis above, on the advantages of emigration for the West Indian would have been faultless if we did not witness a gradual and rather destabilizing deterioration in the psyche and social formation in England as depicted in The Emigrants. At first, they form a close-knit social group, making the barber’s shop and the clandestine saloon their rendezvous, nevertheless, the inevitably disintegration of their pseudo-unity and the attendant crack in their personalities are the high point of their stay in an alien society. They could not form a cohesive society in the West Indies, and they failed woefully in attempting to do same in England. Consequently, by the end of the novel, the little cohesion that would have ameliorated their socio psychological trauma in England fritters away because according to Ian Munro “the emigrants no longer exist as a community after emigration has exposed the colonial illusions about the Mother Country upon which their identity had been based”. The English society on the other hand is not totally shielded from the repercussions of the encounter with the Caribbean that culminated to the exilic phenomenon. They do not want this mass deluge of West Indian emigrants but could not simply legislate a ban on them. In our earlier discourse we examined the idea of reverse colonialism through which some critics explained this situation, as the exasperated sentiments in the English society now parallels the West Indian sentiments under colonial rule. The encounter between Collis and an English man, Mr. Pearson clearly illustrates this when a telephone call intrudes into the rather uneasy meeting between them: Then the phone rang and Mr. Pearson answered it. Collis felt the change which had come into Mr. Pearson’s voice when he replied…. Nothing was the same after that call. Mr. Pearson had taken his seat, but he was more reticent.

The belief that we have come from somewhere is closely linked with the belief that we are going somewhere. A society which has lost belief in capacity to progress in the future will quickly cease to concern itself with its progress in the past. Our view of history reflects our view of society.

The call reports the misadventure of some West Indian casual worker in a factory because Mr. Pearson’s irritation is so palpable when he returns from answering the call that he blurts out to Collis “why do so many of your people come here”. Indeed writes Paquet, in The Emigrants:

all points of contacts with the English world are negative. In each case both the emigrants and the English are trapped by inherited colonial attitudes and postures, and the result is invariably destructive to the emigrant psyche.

In England as in the Caribbean, we are faced with a situation where skin colour determines your class in the society. This mutual colour and class resentment between the English and the West Indians affect their psyches in various ways, given their diverse social upbringing. According to Coulthard:

In all West Indians, skin colour or shade is an inevitable factor in the formation of their psychology … It is natural, therefore, that the novelist, as an observer of society, should take into account this factor when he sets out to depict the social and psychological patterns formed by this society.

On the whole in The Emigrants, even when the West Indian survives the mental rigours and desperation of living in England, it is often at great cost. This is because the unrelenting exigencies of life in the English society, away from the bulk of his own kind, have made him ill adjusted to living in an organized social formation. He now feels out of place and ends up living a fragmentary, isolated existence, keeping to himself socially. But then the English share in the blame too, for when the only society the West Indian has been brought up to believe in and even see as home, shrinks away and sees him as unwanted and inferior on arriving in England, he becomes irredeemably lost and confused that the trauma precipitated by a disrupted historic continuum is worsened.

To sum up the concept of histories in George Lamming's The Emigrants within the context of the history of the West Indies, it is apparent that the visions of one's past consciousness can profoundly influence and indeed determine one's present realities. Consequently, we have been able to establish that a broken and distorted past vision or history will, like a disturbed nightmarish sleep, produce a paralytic bewilderment in the lives and times of a people. And even though the novel deal with fictional realities, the truth of these historical experiences cannot be totally lost on the people concerned or anyone who takes an interest in the history of the West Indies. Indeed, George Lamming mix of the empiricism of narrative facts and the artistry of narrative fiction is most adroit, as his works remain the most definitive in exploring the Caribbean experience in history.

1. Hamilton, Paul. Historicism. Routledge, 1966.

2. Simon, Piere Henry. L'esprit et l’histoire. Free translation, Collins, 1954.

3. Gordon, David. Self-determination and history in the Third World. Princeton University Press, 1971.

4. Cudjoe, Selwyn. Resistance and Caribbean literature. University of Chicago Press, 1980.

5. Daniels, Robert. Studying history: How and why? Eaglewood Cliffs, 1972.

6. Fraught, Richard, editor. Black society in the new world. Random House, 1971.

7. Freeman, Gary. “Caribbean migration to Britain and France: From assimilation to selection.” Caribbean Review, vol. 11, no. 1, 1982, pp. 25–33.

8. Lamming, George. “Introduction.” In the castle of my skin. Schocken Books, 1983.

9. Coulthard, G.R. Race and colour in Caribbean literature. Oxford University Press, 1962.

10. Anderson, Michael. A handbook of contemporary drama. Pitman, 1972.