SOURCE: “Carnival Strategies in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin,” in Callaloo, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 346-60.

In the following essay, Jonas examines the essence of the “Trickster” and shows the instances of this imaginary creature presiding over Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin.

West Indian novelist George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin takes its title from a couplet in Derek Walcott's juvenilia:

You in the castle of your skin I the swineherd. 

Walcott here invokes a conventional romance situation—unattainable mistress and infatuated, self-denigrating admirer—with the added pungency of racial overtones suggested by “skin.” Lamming, however, changes the possessive pronoun, thus reversing the entire situation and seizing the castle for himself. By this sleight of hand, the naked (black) skin, with its connotations of exposure, shame, and deprivation, is transformed into an image of impregnability, strength, and self-sufficiency. By changing the joke...