SOURCE: “Possession as Metaphor: Lamming's Season of Adventure,” in Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2, August, 1992, pp. 1-29.

In the following essay, Rohlehr examines the political metaphors and instances of allegory in Season of Adventure.

The tendency to employ ecstatic possession as metaphor of the descent into the unconscious mind of the individual and the group, has become quite common in both Afro-Caribbean and Afro-American literatures. Texts such as Brathwaite's The Arrivants, Scott's An Echo in the Bone, Toomer's Cane, Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Salkey's A Quality of Violence and Lamming's Of Age and Innocence and Season of Adventure illustrate the point. This essay seeks to explore Lamming's use of the possession metaphor in Season of Adventure.

The idea of interior descent is one of the most ancient in literature, stretching back to the time when the poet was vates or seer, prophet...