SOURCE: “The Tyranny of History: George Lamming's Natives of My Person and Water with Berries,” in Ariel, Vol. 10, No. 4, October, 1979, pp. 37-52.

In the following essay, Tiffin examines the underlying themes of enslavement and empowerment in Lamming's Natives of My Person and Water with Berries.

I had felt the wind rocking me with the oldest uncertainty and desire in the world, the desire to govern or to be governed, rule or to be ruled forever.

Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock

In the West Indies a concern with the slave past and the disorienting effects of colonialism on contemporary man's individuality underlies works as different in tone and technique as V. S. Naipaul's novels and Derek Walcott's poems. This literature of disorientation has developed from simply registering the state of being “divided to the vein”¹ to investigating the fundamental nature of the human personality and its legacy from...