In his essay ôThe Occasion for Speaking,ö George Lamming provides his explanation for why the establishment of a West Indian literature in the 1940s and 1950s by Caribbean writers exiled in London is of significant cultural and political importance. This analysis will provide a critique of LammingÆs theory for the migration of West Caribbean writers and its significance.
Lamming begins his essay with an explanation of the African American writer, also an exile. However, Lamming (33) maintains that the experience of the African American is quite different than that of the black West Indian, ôNo black West Indian, in his own native environment, would have this highly oppressive sense of being Negro.ö The experience is different because the West Indian, definitely black and dispossessed, never experienced the condition of being a minority because of numerical superiority to whites and expatriate whites.
Why then, Lamming questions, did the West Indian writer migrate to London or the West? The reasons stem from the particular social and cultural forces at hand in the West Indies. These forces include a number of different factors. One is that the West Indies have been run by natives for many decades and they occupy a strategic position between North and South America that has made them an outpost of democracy. This and other events, such as ColumbusÆ discovery of the West Indies, the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and ôthe discovery of the novel by West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community, gave rise to a writing community, (Lamming 37).
Despite the growing colony of writers in the West Indies due to the above social and political factors, there are other social and political factors that acted as push factors to cause these writers to go west. One reason is the high degree of illiteracy in the West Indies and the lack of connection to litera...