In the Castle of My Skin | Carnival Strategies in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin
In the following excerpt, the author examines the idea of boundaries in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.
West Indian novelist George Lamming's In The Castle of My Skin takes its title from a couplet in Derek Walcott's juvenilia:
You in the castle of your skin
I the swineherd.
Walcott here invokes a conventional romance situation—unattainable mistress and infatuated, self-denigrating admirer—with the added pungency of racial overtones suggested by "skin." Lamming, however, changes the possessive pronoun, thus reversing the entire situation and seizing the castle for himself. By this sleight of hand, the naked (black) skin, with its...
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