Percorsi alla ricerca del sé e dell'altro nella letteratura d'esilio anglo-caraibica

"The pleasure and paradox of my exile is that I belong wherever I am" (George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 1960) The above quoted words of the Barbadian writer George Lamming tellingly encapsulate the experience of numberless colonial subjects who migrated to Britain in the early 1950s. Indeed, for Lamming, as well as for many other intellectuals belonging to the so-called “Windrush generation”, the experience of migration is a deeply contradictory one, as it is strictly linked to their being “exiles”, “foreigners”, “outsiders” in a land which, nonetheless, they call “Mother Country”. In their perspective, exile is not just the result of geographical circumstances. Crossing the Atlantic is a way of going back over the many diasporas which shaped the Caribbean, as well as of retracing and deconstructing the processes through which hybrid, post-colonial identities came into being. For writers such as Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul, Wilson Salkey, Roger Mais and Michael Anthony, exile becomes a conscious choice and a starting point for redefining the fine line between self and other, here and elsewhere, colonizer and colonized. Exile as a paradoxical experience of alienation and reconnection is the main theme of this paper. By focusing on George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), a collection of essays, autobiographical anecdotes, historical reflections, as well as on V. S. Naipaul semi-autobiographical novel A Way in the World (1984), this paper investigates how representations of exile in Anglo-Caribbean literature convey theories of language, of discourse and of representation through which the writers fashion themselves as producers of alternative hybrid discourses.