Natives of My Person, a 1971 novel now reprinted by Allison & Busby, is certainly George Lamming's most ambitious and probably his most significant work to date. It is above all an attempt to come to grips with the peculiar history of the West Indies, peculiar not just because most of its inhabitants were brought there unwillingly as slaves, but also because though now in many ways a backwater, three hundred to four hundred years ago it was at the center of a world geopolitical struggle primarily between the Spanish and the English; the victors in the struggle—the English—no longer live there, moreover, even though they are responsible for the presence of its current population. Unlike the Spanish and the Portuguese, the English were also slow to intermarry and antagonistic to the creation of mixed races and populations, and for these reasons the “British West Indies” are, in population at any rate, no longer very British.

Lamming explores these paradoxes through the story of a seventeenth-century voyage of exploration and settlement, an attempt by the ship The Reconnaissance to settle the island of San Cristobal. The voyage Lamming depicts is not a synecdoche for the larger process, however, for this was not a typical voyage. It was an attempt at an alternative: it did not take on slaves, and waiting for it in San Cristobal was a sister ship full of women, some of them the wives of the crew of The Reconnaissance. Of course, some pattern of settlement such as this would have been necessary if the English were to have settled the West Indies, not conquer it and settle it with slaves; but the attempt fails, and this failure for Lamming helps—if only negatively—to define the essence of colonialism, the lust to dominate. The colonizers in this vision didn't want the equal partnership of marriage, preferring instead the hierarchical society of slavery and domination. Thus Lamming's critique of colonialism proceeds by depicting the failure of a promising alternative to the actual shape things took, and his particular interest is the psychosexual dynamics he sees operative in colonialism.

Now, I don't think Lamming has the whole story here; Protestantism in particular seems to escape him. Still, Natives of My Person is a serious, engrossing work that will make any reader reflect on colonialism and its heritage. However, I'm not sure this means that Natives of My Person is a totally successful work of fiction. It wavers uncomfortably between historical fiction and more allegorical modes of writing. This might be said to be the typical generic space of the literature of colonialism and exploration, as both Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick shift analogously between realistic and allegorical registers; but Conrad and Melville establish concrete, believable situations and characters as a basis for their allegories, whereas Lamming—with much less success—tries to combine the two modes, to write a narrative that is historical and allegorical at the same time. In attempting the narrative of a voyage that is more than just a voyage, Lamming encroaches on what has become, in Caribbean literature, the particular domain of Wilson Harris, and his book approaches—though it never reaches—the symbolic density of Harris's fiction. Lamming's gifts lie elsewhere, I think, and it is as an effort of the historical imagination that Natives of My Person should be read and admired.