Quote by George Lamming: “Exile is the necessary condition for originality.”

Being forced outside your native place — whether by politics, race, or economics — removes you from inherited assumptions about how things work. That distance can be painful, but it also opens the possibility of seeing more clearly and creating something genuinely new.

Lamming published The Pleasures of Exile in 1960, the year sixteen African nations gained independence and Caribbean federation movements were collapsing. He was writing from London, where many Caribbean intellectuals had gathered, and the book examined the paradoxes of being educated in the colonizer's language and then writing from outside both home and the metropole.

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.