Immigration as a Recuperative Process in The Emigrants

Abstract

George Lamming is a postcolonial author who has his roots in the Caribbean islands in which he could witness harmful impacts of colonialism on the native population. Instead of losing his hope to resist the colonial legacy, he attempts to develop his anti-colonialist discourse through producing literary texts in which he aims to raise \xa0awareness of the native peoples concerning their cultural and psychological destruction that emerged because of a long history of colonialism in the native land. His fiction underscores the demographic diversity of the Caribbean islands which points to a variety of cultures, races and ethnic descent exists as a result of immigration from other countries. Lamming believes that these various groups in the Caribbean can establish their political order by concentrating on their common and identical experiences as well as sufferings in the colonial period since all of these native people occupy the same inferior status in the eyes of the white colonisers. His novel The Emigrants places the experiences, plight and psychological restructuring of the Caribbean immigrants in the European metropolis at its centre. The aim of this paper is to prove that being an immigrant in London and experiencing oppression and racism strengthen the immigrants ’ sense of identification with the Caribbean. Thus, this process prompts them to rescue themselves from the colonial domination by returning to their native land where they think they belong to.