Essentially, both black Africa’s Chinua Achebe and the West Indian George Lamming are historical writers who emerged as cultural gladiators and postcolonial operatives for their people. From their first two works, it is obvious that history and its transmission in raw and/or harvested historical or elevated literary forms have seemingly remained the basis for the foundation and development of all human societies because of its innate ability to tell the story of all peoples and societies.

In the four works of this study, we observe how both novelists have negotiated their way through what they consider as the genuine history of the African and Caribbean peoples. In their handling of the subject matter of history, they opened clear insights into how historical realities can be ferreted out of mythic oral traditions, deliberately jaundiced and fractured past experiences as well as remembered and taught history. Indeed, the styles Achebe and Lamming adopt, as well as their approaches and assertions must have made monumental statements in the corpus of world literature because they are generally considered as about the most representative voices emerging from their continents when the issues of history and culture of their people are in focus. And the conclusions arrived at indicate that both writers’ explorations into the historical pasts of their people affirm the viability and tangibility of a past the colonial masters tried to obfuscate and deny.

Cycles of History

History is past events retold in the present for the benefits of those alive today, those that will live tomorrow as well as those that will come after them. The cyclic and mythic nature of history has often led man to a situation when he is both an actor and an observer in historical occurrences often without his say so. And he is bewildered by the sheer familiarity of his history that squeezes all his experiences into one time capsule, which tends to suggest that there are no true histories but only semblance and cycles of histories to which man can do nothing to stop or manipulate; consequently, his present become his past and future history in a form of concentric cycle. The poem “Burnt Norton” explains this line of thought further and probably better:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present (6).

Indeed, Eliot’s [1] particularly deep insight into the cyclical nature of history and human existence as seen in these lines above would help us to understand and put in better perspective the way both Chinua Achebe and George Lamming have tackled the subject of history in their works. Through the poem above and indeed others in the quartet “Little Gidding”, “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages,” Eliot dwells on the interface between personal and communal historic past, present and future as well as spiritual regeneration being the bedrock of the human story. The efforts of both Chinua Achebe and George Lamming in contending with the European tell-tales about their history or lack of it and confronting head on the reality of their historical past mirror these lines above. It is also instructive that Chinua Achebe drew the poetic inspiration for Things Fall Apart from another poetic effort, one of Yeats’ poems “The Second Coming”. Interestingly, while Yeats the poet foretells the chaotic fall of the Christian civilisation and modern culture in this particular poem, Achebe the novelist uses the same poetic inspiration to hint at the fall of a civilisation predicated upon the historic clash with the Christian and western cultures.

Indeed, taking a cursory look at Achebe's Arrow of God for instance, it is obvious that it is a brilliant attempt at describing a moment in African history, a moment when the British takes over control in its attempt to interface with the Africans. And in this novel, it is the misunderstanding between the two groups of people that forms the central theme. Achebe uses the interplay and interactions of characters to unravel his plot. In this particular work, he makes an attempt to explore the internal world of Ezeulu as a king priest and even as a Christ figure in his society. In Achebe’s works, the history the white man came to interrupt had a foreground and could therefore continue in a diluted but syncretic form after the white man left. Achebe writes from a position of verifiable history.

However, in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin history is seen through the eyes of the eponymous hero Boy G, whose story opens with the abruptness of a society in a state of flux and whose very development "coincides with the chaotic movement of the world he inhabits [2]". This unsettled movement of the people continues well into his second work The Emigrants. In Lamming's works and even his interviews, he makes a resounding point that the history of the Caribbean was built on nothing and that when the white man disrupted the historical continuum of the indigenous settlers of the land, the immediate fallout is the emergence of a more or less, ahistorical people in the Caribbean. Consequently, he tends to write from what could be termed a sense of history, rather than real history.

Interestingly however, while the works of both writers are essentially historical, the question still remains whether in unraveling the overall actions and reactions in their novels, they have areas of divergence and convergence. And whether one of them had an authentically historical raw material to work with and the other a mere sense of history. Indeed, despite the existence of some clearly similar approaches in their recourse to history in locating their ethnic and national perspectives and contributing towards a definition of the literature of their people and even though divergent at some point, they ultimately converge at telling the history of their people in their own special way.

In trying to juxtapose the works of both writers with a mind to comparing their approaches to literature through history, we must necessarily tread with some caution here because in as much as the comparative approach is a well-accepted norm in the theory and practice of literary criticism, it does not imply exposing the works of these two writers to a form of contest with a view to deciding the winner. Indeed, it is not a matter of which particular writer is preferable or better appointed; but more of the impulses their particularly similar histories elicit from them and generate in their readership-as displayed in their writings and literary transactions over the years. A major emphasis then would be on the roles played by these two writers in interpreting the history and laying the foundation for the creation of an ethnic, national and even regional sensibility for their people.

The subject of historical narrative is a major forte of African and Caribbean writers, not excluding Achebe and Lamming, but according to White:

How a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian’s (writer’s) subtlety in matching specific plot-structure (including characterisation and language) with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind (85).

However, literary historical discourses as opposed to factual historical representations operate through the illusion of an imposed concatenation of events and cannot but enforce a rigorous regime of selection of spatial and temporal elements to authenticate the stories they tell. Consequently, submits Robert Young: “the use of chronology in historical writings, or in literary history, gives the illusion that the whole (narrative) operates by a uniform, continuous progression, a linear series in which each event takes its place. History is thus a process of a continuous unfolding” (45) and not just a story of the past. In other words, there is a mutual and robust giving, taking and receiving between the past and the present in their inexorable march towards the future. Expectedly, the historical materials Achebe and Lamming have to work with differs slightly given that while the latter worked more from a sense of history with remembered and taught historical materials, the former had both oral traditions and remembered history to appropriate from. This basic difference becomes both a point of convergence as well as a point of divergence for both writers when we place their works side by side.

History and the Mythic Narration: Oral vs Written

Inevitably, the debate between the oral and written historical forms as it relates to both writers’ application to the literary recreation of their peoples’ past, especially in Achebe’s works, would necessitate our making a recourse to the beginnings of orature in its purest and most pristine form. In his book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief [3] where he explores the effects of African belief systems on the progress and history of human civilisation, V.S Naipaul posits that in Africa “the absence of script and written records blurs the past … the oral story gives them (Africans) only myths” (28). This handicap of not documenting the past in a written archivable form that can be recalled in its pristine form and which is the bane of all cultures in Africa, except the Egyptian to a large extent, blights the factual re-telling of Africa’s historical past. But on the other hand, it can also be argued that since factual, non-fictional history is history as opposed to the fictions of literature that draw from history, the absence of physically archived resources may well be seen as an advantage to the rise and growth of the African literary sensibility. Consequently, posits Jan Mohamed, African writers attempt at re-assembling the past “are dominated not by a historical but a mythic consciousness” (24).

The implication of the above is that while the oral mythic based tradition because of its lack of coherent, uniform, archivable form hinders the development of a historical consciousness due to its static nature; the written, archivable and therefore uniformly retrievable form enhances the development of the historical consciousness within the society. This being so, one can actually hypothesize that Achebe’s major characters in both Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God fail because they could not come to terms with the changing vagaries of their historical continuum due to the mythic orality of their sensibility. In activating the oral mythic form and elevating it to the level of the historical in his works, Achebe engages in what post-colonial critics call revisionist history, given that the written accounts of his people were opinions of the “other”, the colonial masters. This being so, the orality of Achebe’s narrative simply resonates with the deliberately or conveniently forgotten story of his people as he “attempts to recuperate occluded voices [4]”. As it were therefore, the historiography of Africa is immanent but not apparent until Achebe imbues it enough form and life to elicit nostalgic feelings of history and culture on the part of his audience.

Achebe’s recourse to the oral, mythical and ritualistic elements in re-telling an ever present, but physically undocumented tale of his peoples’ historical experiences is perhaps his most unobtrusive strategy at revealing their socio-cultural and historical continuum. Authenticating Achebe’s narrative strategy in his book Moving the Centre [5], Ngugi submits that:

One of the most important aspects of our pre-colonial literature was the oral tradition … and it is not surprising that it was one of the most utilized by the anti- colonial forces to make statements of resistance. Hence it was the oral traditions and the artists who operated within it that were the object of colonial wrath (88-89).

With these elements, Achebe poses a successful and effective challenge to western conjectures about the (un) civilisation of the African people and their culture. And his often very detailed description of the sacred beliefs, ritualistic processes and cultural nuances of his people are deliberate exposition of communal values and therefore communal preservation of the people to the western world. In Achebe’s works, ritual serves the purpose of integrating the individual into his community in a kind of sacredness that is sacramental. And a close observation of Achebe’s works and indeed the general history of the several colonised societies would reveal that ritualistic activities become more intense and deregulated in the face of imminent threat to the community.

Invariably for post-colonial discourses as our selected works of Chinua Achebe and George Lamming are, the issue of language and its use becomes a most potent weapon of resistance to the colonial master’s ideology and a strong reminder of the ancestral heritage and history of their people. And we see this tendency openly displayed with near vehemence in Achebe histories. According to Beckmann [12], these writers (like Achebe and Lamming) uphold the notion that to:

lose a language is to lose touch with one’s ancestors. Yet this loss of the ancestral tongue is all too often a hallmark of the multicultural situation and this loss or threatened loss is reflected in the style and become a significant thematic concern (for these writers) (117)

We observe that at the beginning of Things Fall Apart, we are regaled with the nascent traditionalism of the people’s life. The nuances of their culture and especially their language are well documented and espoused to us by Achebe. The first part of the novel contains far more proverbs, parables and traditional witticism than the other two sections put together; even as the intricacies of the traditional intuitions and sacraments are carefully rendered by the author. However, we soon notice that as things begin to unravel and disintegrate for the people of Umuofia, the general fabric of their language followed suit. First of all, the narration begins to employ less and less of these language cultural markers as proverbs and witticism give way to regular usages, even as dramatic dialogues are replaced with straight narration. Soon a hybridization of the language is introduced in commerce, religion and administration when other Ibo speaking natives who act as interpreters to the colonial officers are introduced in the narrative. Soon enough, the use of pidgin English is introduced, even as choral songs give way to church choruses. In this final section of the book when things broke down irretrievably and the hybridization of cultures begin to emerge; we observe that the European colonisers’ refusal to interface with the Africans and try to understand their world view only worsened an otherwise bad situation. However, in his narration, Chinua Achebe succeeds largely in securing a space for the speech pattern and culture of his people that establishes the historicity of the mythic oral tradition and its relevance in tracing developments in the lives and times of a people. And while doing this, he does not neglect the emergence of the English language as the new, better adjusted and accepted dialectic tool to establish his assertion on the history of the African people.

In the words of Professor Cora Agatucci [6]:

Like many other "postcolonial" writers from India, Africa and other formerly colonized nations of the world, Achebe attempts to construct an image of Africa in a language that respects the national traditions of his native land while recognizing the demands of a cosmopolitan, international audience to whom Things Fall Apart is, in part, addressed. Achebe aims to reclaim his heritage and at the same time indicate directions for constructive change [6]

The language repertoire of the characters in George Lamming’s works is a variant of the white man’s English Language. It is an amalgam of the English Language, pidgin and creole combined in what is today called the Patois, defined by the Wikipedia as an: “English based creole language with West African influences” [7]. The syntax, phonetics and morphology of the language is markedly different from the English Language, even though most of its vocabulary are English words or derivatives.

Indeed, culture like language cannot stand alone to survive and sustain itself as the vagaries of history is unleashed upon it because the need to allow its moderation and modulation by another culture and language is ever present. In Achebe’s writings, the point is often made that no one culture and indeed language can stand alone over time, as every modern language today has become a syncretic of sorts, accommodating elements of other languages and therefore elements of other cultures too. As it stands, it is common these days to see a lot of African and other non-English words from French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and other cultures being generally accepted in both written and spoken English Language.

To close this section of our study, perhaps we should re-echo the words of two great critics who made the study of Achebe’s writings their immediate forte: Bernth Lindfors and Ben Obumselu. In his well-received article “The Palm Oil with which Achebe’s Words Are Eaten” where he dwells on Achebe’s use of language, Lindfors writes that: “what gives each of Achebe’s novels an air of historical authenticity is his use of the English Language. He has developed not one prose style but several and in each novel, he is careful to select the style that would best suit his subject” (4).

Achebe’s Historical Orality and Lamming’s History Illusions

Instructively, it is as though every story is first heard before it is ever told and documented. This suggestion implies that the story is transmitted to the artist by way of oral traditions or to the artist’s intuition by way of his sub-consciousness in a moment of inspirational flashes occasioned by particular environmental or experiential realities - before he tells or writes about it. Either way, there are interplays between the oral nature of the narrative and the written nature; for even the more accepted cannons of literature emerged from oral traditions. Interestingly, both Achebe and Lamming contend with this reality as they confront the question of retelling their peoples’ histories in their works. In the former’s works, obvious transactions between oral traditions and the written literate styles are obvious while the latter’s writings contain written narrative styles alone. Consequently, we see Achebe’s narrations having the quotidian familiarity of an orally told tale while Lamming’s outputs are the easy going but contrived style of the written tale. Achebe’s spatial and character considerations in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are rustic and uneducated by western standards, while Lamming’s colourations in In the Castle of My Skin and The Emigrants, even though peasant in presentation, have some form of western education and sensibilities.

Indeed, while Achebe’s prose could be described as being disarmingly simple, yet pungent in its assertions; Lamming’s effort as a prose stylist is often deliberately ponderous and even eclectic in its assertions. This reality affects the style of their narratives, the language form deployed by the characters and even the point of view. For instance, because Achebe’s societies are portrayed as manly, matured and rooted in culture, the voices we hear conveying the narratives are those of discerning adults as opposed to Lamming’s societies where the childish, adolescence and growing sensibilities reveal voices that are puerile, incoherent and erratic.

The nexus between history and the Caribbean people has never been clear cut, but the Caribbean writer’s determined effort at hacking out a history from the dense jungle of his origins has produced a believable text over the years. For while the West arrogates to itself the prerogative of determining who has history and who does not, as well as who is inside history and who is outside of it, the Caribbean writers have carved out a past from the gamut of their experiences and barged their way into the flowing river called history-because, swim they must.

Generally in the Caribbean, there are two official historical accounts for every island nation: One recorded and relayed by the Europeans in their registers and textbooks, while ''the other history is that told by any islander and held in common mind by all, but for which there is no documentary reference [8]”. Curiously, while the whole of the Caribbean could be said to have benefitted from a common historical heritage of slavery, plantocracy and colonialism, the writers and historians have never been able to develop a unified way of dealing with their past. This challenge is very glaring in Lamming’s writings as well as the works of other Caribbean writers because having no real orature to their historical beginnings, they have no resource pool to draw from. Even then, the evil ingenuity but highly effective delineation into quasi-island nations of French, English, Spanish and Dutch Caribbean by their colonial masters ended whatever hopes they might have had of dredging up a unified history.

However, argues Joyce Johnson, historical novels such as the ones written by Achebe and Lamming often seek:

To justify the relative positions of Europeans and non-Europeans within the colonial system … (but) Writing a novel with a historical focus need not imply an appropriation of the form merely to present a perception of society. Narrative and rhetorical dimensions … may remain of primary importance, for thematic preoccupations are conveyed through style as well as choice of subject-matter (72).

As a result, Lamming becomes a master of diverse prose narrative styles in his determination to ferret out a history for his people from their sheer lack of recorded and verifiable history. These techniques include the episodic plot structures, dramatic dialogues, monologues and the stream of consciousness.

Given this massive effort to rescue the past from the clutches of anachronism which their twin historical experiences of slavery and colonialism have laid upon them, the Caribbean writer had to dig deep in order to produce light from his own version of darkness. And in this nebulous world where time becomes timeless and the present merges into a past while pointing towards a future, there is no linearity to the outcome. For instance, the journey motif, which featured in all of Lamming’s works, becomes symptomatic of this excursion into the subconscious of the collective memory of the Caribbean.

Glissant calls this dislocation of the continuum and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, a non-history (Caribbean Discourse 62). But right away, he proffers a way around the challenge when he submits in his “Preface” to Monsieur Toussaint that:

For those whose history has been reduced by others to darkness and despair, the recovery of the near or the distant past is imperative. To renew acquaintance with one's history, obscured or obliterated by others, is to relish fully the present, for the experience of the present, stripped of its roots in time, yields only hollow delights. This is a poetic endeavour (16)

Like Chinua Achebe’s, George Lamming’s writings, especially his pioneer works, are born out of an urgent need to have a counter narrative to the prevailing narratives of the colonial masters. According to Simoes da Silva, who posits that Lamming’s first novel closely parallels Achebe’s and Ngugi’s first novels?

In the same way as Chinua Achebe set out in his first novel, Things Fall Apart to undermine the mythologized portrait of Africa offered in the works of western authors, In the Castle of My Skin may be said to have allowed Caribbean people to see their real selves on the page for the first time (38)

However, having no real or imagined history to fall back on, unlike Achebe with his repertoire of oral traditions, Lamming takes the liberty of starting off the beginnings of his work as abruptly as the remembered beginnings of the Caribbean projects – the sudden arrival of Christopher Columbus “who found himself mistakenly in a part of the world which he didn’t know” [9].

Taking a cue from the clear a historicity and abruptness of Caribbean history, Lamming adopts the episodic and dramatic elements to dredge and relate the history of his people. In the Castle of my Skin handles history in an episodic manner, while The Emigrants adopts both the episodic and dramatic, specifically dialogue, to both narrate and state his assertions on the history of the Caribbean people. In his first novel, the development of the eponymous hero who is the chief narrator from boyhood to adolescence is presented in staggered and episodic forms that parallel the slow and faltering development of the society as a whole. Somehow, Lamming succeeds in aligning the narrative consciousness of the hero, with his age as well as the sensibility of the people in their slow movement to enlightenment and therefore to independence. His narrative style is a direct mirror of the development of his character: episodic, stuttering and even hesitant in presentation. The non-linear progression of his narration, unlike Achebe that could be plotted is most glaring in his novels, but it is through no fault of his argues Frazer because being:

A victim of non-history and (having) no collective memory shared by the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean as the respective colonizers determine the history of each. Hence there is no sense of chronology and only recollection of pseudo-events that happened elsewhere. This lack of historical consciousness is manipulated to justify the advent of slavery as the sublimation of a people [10].

From the foregoing, it has become obvious that the greatest battle fought by Lamming and other Caribbean writers is the one to include the history of their people into the corpus of world history because the colonial masters have for all intent and purposes erased their experiences from historical discourses. The people are encouraged to deliberately forgo and forget their history while seeing the experiences of their colonial masters as their own experiences and their thoughts as theirs too. The educational system entrenched this and from an early age the children who are taught only the history of their colonizing nations were indoctrinated to see England, France, Spain and Holland as their home countries. This illusion of history is one of the major blockages the writers fought against because it made the people complacent and resigned to the negation of their history which they never laid hands on in the first place. Historical limbo now translates into a real-life socio-cultural limbo and it becomes the writers’ duty to awake the people from their stupor.

The 1992 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Derek Walcott however begs to differ here as he submits that there has never been a real contention with the past by the Caribbean people and he says this inching away from the idea of history is due to the befuddling of the past and of the people. According to him:

In the Caribbean history is irrelevant, not because it is not being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never mattered. What has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention (6).

Consequently, remarks Naipaul “the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. …. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (29). Edward Baugh, however identifies George Lamming's In the Caste of my Skin as “perhaps the first piece of creative writing in the (British) West Indies to express explicitly the quarrel with history” (66). 

In the novel, the hero’s sub-conscious awareness, development and appreciation of social changes moulds him and arouses his desire to confront his past. As we start reading the novel though, we come to terms with the realization that the interest of the boys in their historical past reflects the actual situation in the Caribbean society: The feeling of a lack of recorded history and the search for it. According to Bruce King in his article “West Indies 1: Naipaul, Harris and History,” “the narrator’s careful recording of family and village life is set within a consciousness of the island’s social and political history” [11].

At the end of the book, the hero turns his back on the version of history he is taught in the school a history of great events and great names with no tangible achievement by his own people. Indeed, in the novel, Lamming does show resistance to the colonial ethos, but he does not go all the way because of the hybridised and intrinsic bond between the colonised and the coloniser in the Caribbean. He however sowed the seed of strong doubts in the minds of his characters. The spatial and temporal dimensions of Lamming’s history seemingly chose the narrative style he adopts in all his works. He follows an almost predictable narrative pattern predicated on the prevailing mood of ennui and fractured visions pervading the worlds of his creation. His plots are hardly causally related and his characters bear relevance only in terms of an episodic reality at points in time. This emphasis on particular happenings rather than strings of related happenings, which Lamming adopts, ensures that there is no causal relationship between succeeding events. In his reaction to and interpretation of the history of his people, it can be said that Lamming responds:

With his total personality to a social environment which changes all the time. Being a kind and sensitive needle, he registers with varying degree of accuracy and success, the conflicts and the tensions in his changing society. … For the writer himself lives in and is shaped by, history [3]”

Consequently, Lamming only makes narrative sense when he juxtaposes his style with the vision of consciousness depicted in his works. His structures then tend to be as convoluting and confused as the socio-psychological chaos he explores in his novels. However, despite the seeming haphazard renditions, the episodic structure of Lamming’s works are carefully put together to mirror the seething confusion of the West Indians: The impact of their falsified brutal history, being called historical outsiders, the inevitable disorientation and dislocation of their psyche and society due to the slavery and colonial institutions and the ultimate collapse of their faith in England.

On the peculiarity of his narrative style, Lamming himself writes in the “Introduction” to the Schocken Books edition of In the Castle of My Skin that:

In this method of narration where community and not person is the central character, things are never so tidy as critics would like. There is no discernible plot, no coherent line of events with clear causal connection. Nor is there a central individual consciousness on which attention is focused … instead there several centres of attention which work simultaneously and acquire coherence from the collective character of the village (x-xi).

Indeed, the child narrator’s growing but confused sensibility parallels that of the village and by extension, the Caribbean people. In employing this device in this highly autobiographical novel, which is extensively common to West Indian writers, Lamming shows his total identification with and commitment to the plight of his people. As it were, he had to become like them to be like them, to fully articulate their sensibilities. However, in placing the narrator in perspective with the spatio- temporal framework of the novel, Lamming makes every effort to ensure its authenticity. For instance, visions of past history are rendered to us only through the experienced eyes of Pa and Ma. Equally, during the riot scene, due to juvenile exuberance, the child narrator could not coherently recount the unfolding drama through Bob and Trumper who witnessed and even took part in the riots. We only get the true account through the eyes of the village drunk-who is an adult.

Now, if In the Castle of My Skin is disjointedly episodic in its narrative structure as it attempts to unravel the historical experiences of the Caribbean people, Lamming’s second novel, The Emigrants takes the episodic narrative style to new heights. Indeed, apart from its delineation into three major sections, the whole novel is clearly incohesive and inconclusive as some critics have observed. There is neither an identifiable narrator, nor even a communal voice and it is something of a marvel how Lamming is able to organize his narration at all. In The Emigrants, Lamming successfully loses us in a maze of memories and experiences that intertwine so much in situations and characters as he grapples with the historical task at hand. Indeed, unable to use conventional narrative techniques peculiar to prose writing due to the peculiarity of the subject matter and theme he is tackling, Lamming opts for the use of dramatic dialogue to unravel his story.

In the first section during the voyage, the listless, isolationist behaviour of the West Indians in their small island mentality is captured in dramatic dialogues and monologues. These dialogues reminiscent of dramatist August Strindberg’s naturalism are lively and conversational, having the aimless chatter of everyday banter by real people in the rather dramatic lives of a people with a ruptured historical continuum. Through them, we are shown the historical situations of characters and their attitudes, as opposed to being told about them. Indeed, Lamming makes us listen to and even eavesdrop on his characters’ minds before actually meeting them, as the only way he could best explore and explain the chaotic reality of their psyche to us. Consequently, we see the characters for what they truly are – a lost, disillusioned people seeking to stabilize their lives as they voyage to England.

Generally, narration in The Emigrants is jumpy, unlike the sluggish one in In the Castle of My Skin. For while the eager exuberance of the West Indians is injected into the narrative mood in the former, the latter’s mood is of a slowly churning consciousness – an awakening of the people’s psyche to their historical debacle, so to say. However, by the third and final section in The Emigrants, when all their expectations and illusions about England and its people have been dashed, the narration slows down to a walking pace, as it echoes the present state of the West Indian emigrants. But all together in the novel, according to Gerald Moore: “Lamming cuts us adrift from any mooring, deliberately subjecting the reader to that process of stirring which the Jamaican describes during the voyage … the stirring continues to the last page” (42).

To close our rather long explorations, it is quite obvious that both Achebe and Lamming chronicle in their own ways the unofficial history of their people as opposed to the official accounts recorded by the colonial masters. Their works derive from the undocumented perspectives of the victims of that fatalistic historical encounter with the Europeans. As it were, both writers’ strategies reveal their narrative independence as they make a success of giving new meanings to the past they make come alive in the present. Indeed, as part of their narrative strategies, Achebe and Lamming become like their people in order to effectively remember their dismembered history-they immersed themselves in the past of their people, even as they draw the readers along. Clearly, while past events may be potential historical facts, it is the ones which are narrated that become real-the way these stories are told and the styles adopted by the writers become what confer reality upon them.

Evidently, both writers distance themselves from the colonialists’ assertion that years of slavery and colonialism have successfully wiped away their peoples’ historical experiences, turning them into a people with no experience other than what the white man declares to them. And even though Lamming’s efforts to secure the history of the Caribbean is strenuous due to the deliberate attempt to distort and stultify it by the slavers and colonisers, he succeeds to a large extent in detailing a believable history of his people and iterating his assertion that to move forward from their historical predicament, their history must not be rejected or ignored, but be embraced. This fictional imaginative recall used by both authors in order to reform a people understanding of themselves and probably their future, according to Black American novelist Toni Morrison, is: “critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any maginalised category, for, historically we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we are the topic” (302). This primordial, suppressive instinct of the colonial masters as well as their greed for the lucre of power and wealth overrode their basic instinct of adventure into strange lands, thus we see them practically dismantling and/or demonising every trace of a cultural existence of the African and Caribbean peoples. And what Achebe and Lamming have done in the novels under study has been to counter this attempt to deny, obfuscate and obliterate the history of African and Caribbean civilizations. We see both writers boldly venture into recalling, refining and reclaiming their historical past well aware of the fact that the colonialists have painted a distorted image of same over the years. Indeed, the courage and honesty with which Achebe relayed some cultural practices in his novels reveal this: the human sacrifices, the killing of twins, head hunting during tribal wars and the existence of the evil forest show him as a truly unbiased chronicler of the past of his people. Equally, Lamming’s forensic depiction of the lives of the West Indians in London, the recall of past African experiences and his exposé of the sordid debauchery of both black and white characters show he holds nothing back in documenting his people’s experiences. As it stands therefore, memory though relative, gives an unequal access into the historical past.

Contrastively however, Lamming’s presentation of the fallout of the historical transactions between the Europeans and the Caribbean people is more pessimistic than Achebe’s presentation of the Africans in his works. Lamming’s characters often return to their roots with little or nothing to show for their exilic experiences and the decay of the societies depicted in his works are seemingly irredeemable. These pessimistic images Lamming presents and promotes differ from the Achebe’s portrayals which tend to be optimistic in outlook. Achebe’s conclusions are often open – ended, allowing room for optimism in the future, even as the surviving characters adapt and align to the realities of their present circumstances. Indeed, rather than the decay we often experience in Lamming’s works, Achebe’s societies emerge in a syncretic form of cultural dilution.

However, in these novels explored, we observe that the historical present which both writers obviously want their works to affect, influence and mould positively is heavily hinted at because they are the tangible reality and link between the gone past and the advancing future. Consequently, in the novels’ resolutions, it would seem that in the historical transactions between the past and the future, the present is often foregrounded. Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin reveals this, because like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, it captures past history and imbues it with new interpretation while evading the present it nevertheless hints at. Consequently, we can go ahead to submit that, while debunking the myths and anachronisms about the past of Africa and the Caribbean, both writers encourage their people to unashamedly look to their past to courageously contend with their present as they contemplate their future. To quote George Lamming: “When a people in a certain political (historical) circumstance try to make a break with the past, they will return to the very past they may have rejected, returned to it to consciously disentangle it from the myths and fears that once made it menacing” (119). In other words, the present can only be fully and truly understood and appreciated in the light of the past even as the future beckons.

As it were therefore, both writers bring to the literary discourse their honest, imaginative yet dispassionate interpretations of their peoples past. They are somehow able to remove or at least ameliorate the bad taste of the colonial experience by allowing their people to simultaneously laugh at and learn from their foibles, while demystifying the myth of the white man’s infallibility and the half truths about their own primitivism. Indeed, in these works, both Achebe and Lamming succeed in a very impactful way in assisting their people to renew their acquaintance and interactions with their past in order for them to relish, in all its unfolding ramifications, the present.

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