WATER WITH BERRIES

by George Lamming ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 1972

Like Natives of My Person (1972), another psycho/political morality play which probes the implications of a buried colonial consciousness, specifically British and West Indian. The young West Indians from San Cristobel live in London -- painter Teeton, musician Roger, actor Derek: ""the most eager of candidates for adoption. . . they had discovered a style of difficulty that promised to free them from the insecurities of their origins."" But they all become mired in the impossibilities of the mythic roles shaped by their exile. Derek flips from playing the acceptable fable of ""Othello"" into acting corpses; Roger cannot tolerate a child by his white wife Nicole who commits suicide; but it is the ""partnership"" of Teeton and his landlady the ""Old Dowager"" that becomes the metaphor for changing relationships between two cultures and two pasts. ""Their friendship had achieved the force and delicacy of a secret,"" and when Nicole's body is found in Teeton's apartment, The Old Dowager helps him to escape. Before the flight, however, there are two fantastic meetings with Teeton and a disembodied Miranda in a midnight park, where she tells her own tale of a childhood on a Prospero's island in the West Indies, a nightmare of death and rape, a symbolic negative of the portrait of the black as victim. And on another island off the British coast which Teeton and the Old Dowager and a mysterious ""pilot"" reach, the doomed, ravaged remnants of an imperial past find voices: ""That experiment in ruling over your kind. . . it could deform whatever nature it touched."" Teeton, indebted to the Old Dowager, ""drifts slowly out of her care,"" and inevitably, on the island and on the mainland, fires of hatred and destruction burn. Lamming's style has a dense sobriety which examines each instant with exquisite attention to an infinity Of possibilities behind it. A difficult, dark and multilayered exposition of societal illusion where death is the condition of reconciliation.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1972

ISBN: 1845231678

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1972

Categories: FICTION