Quote by George Lamming: “No man is an island, but some islands are men.”

This playful twist on a classic saying suggests that while humans are interconnected, some individuals carry the weight and significance of entire communities or nations. It speaks to the idea of a singular person embodying the experiences and identity of a larger collective, especially in a postcolonial context.

Set in a Barbadian village at the cusp of significant social and political change, this autobiographical novel explored the formation of individual and collective identity amidst the decline of colonial rule.

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.