Quote by George Lamming: “Emigration is a disease. It's a wound that doesn't heal easily.”

This quote poignantly describes the profound and lasting pain of leaving one's homeland. It suggests that the experience of emigration isn't just a physical journey but a deep emotional injury that leaves a persistent ache, making it difficult to fully recover or feel complete again.

Reflecting the mass migration from the Caribbean to Britain in the post-war era, Lamming captured the profound sense of displacement, loss, and the psychological impact on individuals searching for new opportunities.

Barbadian novelist and essayist who left Barbados for Britain in 1950 and whose debut novel In the Castle of My Skin is a landmark of Caribbean literature. His 1960 critical work The Pleasures of Exile examined Caribbean writers' experience of displacement and the colonial literary inheritance.