Carolina QuotesThe architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up.
George Lamming Connected to the Carolinas
Source
"The West Indian People" (1966) in Andrew Salkey (ed.) Caribbean Essays (1973)
- year
- 1966
Cite this record
“The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the s…” George Lamming. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-C52231B030. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/c52231b030
More from George Lamming
Rain, rain, rain . . . my mother put her head through the window to let the neighbour know that I was nine, and they flattered me with the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. The morning laden with cloud soon passed into noon, and the noon neutral and silent into the sodden grimness of an evening that waded through water. That evening I kept an eye on the crevices of our wasted roof where the colour of the shingles had turned to mourning black, and waited for the weather to rehearse my wishes. But the evening settled on the slush of the roads that dissolved in parts into pools of clay, and I wept for the watery waste of my ninth important day. Yet I was wrong, my mother protested: it was irreverent to disapprove the will of the Lord or reject the consolation that my birthday had brought showers of blessing. It was my ninth celebration of the gift of life, my ninth celebration of the consistent lack of an occasion for celebration...
The West Indian's education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada. Since the cultural negotiation was strictly between England and the natives, and England had acquired, somehow, the divine right to organise the native's reading, it is to be expected that England's export of literature would be English. Deliberately and exclusively English. And the further back in time England went for these treasures, the safer was the English commodity. So the examinations, which would determine that Trinidadian's future in the Civil Service, imposed Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and Jane Austen and George Eliot and the whole tabernacle of dead names, now come alive at the world's greatest summit of literary expression.