Alienated consciousness in the Caribbean novels

Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
ONE of the common threads visible in most Caribbean literature is the pervading sense of a divided consciousness that emanates from years of slavery, colonialism and oppression, which stifles social mobility, creativity and any potential for growth.
The issue of a divided consciousness is explored in two of the foremost ground-breaking classics- Miguel Street (1959) by V.S Naipaul and George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin.

Both classics exposed the debilitating situation afflicting the Caribbean people.
Miguel Street is a dramatisation of life in the Trinidadian ghetto, some kind of a shantytown street in Port of Spain.

The life in Miguel Street is marked by social malaise – poverty, squalor, violence, corruption and ignorance that demobilised most inhabitants into resigning to their fate.

Similarly, in “In the Castle of My Skin”, the main character G undergoes various changes.
His community is born out of slavery and the plantation system is only given some semblance of order by colonial rule and the notion of imperial responsibility.

Lamming explores the painful process of awakening of the boy and the village, the individual and the community. Thus the superseding concern in the novel is the condition of the colonised.

Institutions like education and religion become the apparent instruments of the culture of colonialism.
The education system produces in G a fractured consciousness that effectively cuts him off from his environment.

While in “In the Castle of My Skin:, there are some prospects of escape from the grinding poverty by going abroad, nothing of the sort happens in Miguel Street where such attempts are doomed and a mere exercise in futility.

In fact, most characters in Miguel Street barely attain any formal education and any such attempts are viewed in exaltation as a potential exit from the slum life.

Another peculiar difference of the two texts is that Lamming was of African descent while Naipaul was Indian whose ancestors had landed in the West Indies as chattel labourers.

Naipaul focuses on the condition of not just blacks in Miguel Street.
He also focuses on Indians whose sense of rootlessness and alienation was not so different from the other inhabitants who were not white.

Naipaul uses Miguel Street as a microcosm of the general conditions prevailing in most of the poverty stricken inhabitants of the island.
But what is witnessed in both “Miguel Street” and “In the Castle of My Skin” is a direct product of history.

Winds of change swept through the West Indies in the 1930s as a result of political agitation forcing the British colonial office to announce in 1944 a policy leading towards self-government for the West Indies, the abolition of the Crown Colony Administration and the adoption everywhere of adult suffrage.

Both communities in “Miguel Street” and “In the Castle of My Skin” are emerging from a repressive past, one of slavery, colonialism and degradation.

Both communities are a reflection of the broader context of Caribbean life drawn from the social, racial or political environment of the West Indies in a state of transition from colonial to dominion status and reflect the challenges arising from this transitional phase.

Both novels deal with the problem of social adjustment within a society only becoming conscious of itself with the prospects of nationhood calling forth the desire for self-definition and an independent cultural life although this seems a painstakingly unachievable task.

Miguel Street conjures the life of a society based upon the degrading fact of colonialism, a world without “scientists, engineers, soldiers or poets,” in Naipaul’s own words.

We witness the inspection of colonised condition especially through Bogart, a person without a name (only nicknamed after a famous film star), without roots, who attempts to escape the futility of the “little room” in which he whiles away his time playing patience.

Divided consciousness is exemplified by the fact that inhabitants of “Miguel Street” and “In the Castle of My Skin” are in the West Indies not by choice but circumstances beyond their control.