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BOOK REVIEW 
HAIRSTON

The characters are raceless categories who answer to names like, Baptiste, Pierre, Marcel, Ivan, Duclos, Steward, Surgeon, Sasha, and Priest. They are men whose conversation expresses little about themselves, their feelings, emotions, longings, desperations. They are quite calm about whatever peril might interrupt their shipboard peace. Apparently, all of this is to some purpose that is symbolically revealing of man and his relationship with forces of which he has no control. But the Commandant, with all his profundity and brooding speculations, throws little real light on the matter. If he does it somehow gets washed overboard in an inundation of poetical language laced with metaphors and descriptive detail. I'm sure some important statement has been made by all this but I'm afraid it was too subtle for my powers of comprehension. I finished the novel without finding out what the destiny of these strange souls was all about and how it illuminated a point about our contemporary predicament. Of course, Mr. Lamming is not responsible for my ignorance and I will concede him the benefit of the doubt that my reaction to his novel was more my failing than the work. But one unmistakable impression struck me upon completing it: that somehow the novel is not addressed to me!

What I am saying is that this novel is not addressed to a black audience. Perhaps this is a harsh and unfair criticism to make but somehow it seems very relevant to the purpose of art in a world which has sought to impose its imperial standards on the black man's sense of esthetic appreciation. Granted, a work of fiction ought to be accepted on its own terms but those terms, I submit, ought to be more or less commensurate with the interests and taste of its audience. This is essential if the artist wants to communicate effectively, if he wants to clarify the truth being communicated. Natives Of My Person is rendered in a language and style that are simply too European to excite the interest of readers who are pretty turned-off by the symbols of white culture. This is not to say that such a style of writing is invalid but I am afraid that today's black audience is demanding a different form of expression, one that draws its esthetic conceptualizations and ideas from their experiences. We are, alas, clamoring for gods in our own image—at last!
    
Being a Western writer, George Lamming could hardly be blamed for writing from a European frame of reference. Indeed, the Afro-American, West Indian, African writer is probably too thoroughly washed in Western cultural waters to come out with anything less than an Anglo-Saxon glow. Nevertheless, one would hope that writers

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-17 11:33:20