George Lamming starts with the fact of putting the reader inside the frame of

his image. He refers the main characters Caliban and prospero in

Shakespeare the Tempest (here is a brief account about them )

 Prospero functions as a god on the island. manipulating everyone within his reach.
Prospero appears callous and cruel, especially in his treatment of Ariel and Caliban
 Calibn The offspring of the witch Sycorax and the devil. Prospero has made
Caliban his servant or slave, and in response, Caliban plots to murder Prospero for
rejecting him

“ In the beginning” George lamming starts by a passage from the play

The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again.

( analysis of the dream according to cliff notes ,

Caliban is more than a wild beast of the island, and his personality is more
complex than his brief scenes have thus far disclosed. The plot to murder
Prospero is Caliban's rejection of civilization. He finds no alternative to
brutality, if it will free him of the oppression of civilization. The natural beauty
of the island permeates Caliban's world, but he is able to separate this beauty
from the violent acts that he plans. In Caliban's world, there is no incongruity in
the existence of both poetry and barbarity. ( for the sake of better
understanding )
 To start with, Lamming‘s essay “in the beginning “discovers caliban only a
languageless and inarticulate savage in the tempest. He believes that language
is a powerful tool so that Caliban was colonized and excluded by .

The writer believes that caliban as a slave to the language that he inherited
from the European.

The exile of cannibal has given him a powerful transformation .here, Prospero
is afraid of Caliban. Caliban in this respect plots to murder him not because of
the fear or hatred but for a deep sense of betrayal. (Outcasting him)

Lamming attempts a postcolonial allegorical reading of shakespaear’s the

tempest to dismantle or expose the British colonial ideology and reconstruct
the Caribbean identity before the world. In the tempest , caliban is a kind of
foolish and aggressive monster. “Cannibal” itself comes from the word
‘Caribbean”. (point of view of different critics)

After that, the author points out to his visit of an English family, specifically his
conversation with their son. He was impressed by the spirit of curiosity and
concreteness of that child. The latter brings a map in order to see the location
of the author’s island in the Caribbean that was colonized by Europeans and
Americans searching for raw materials as gold; which leads that exiled piece of
land to turn into islands.

He insist on the fact that human heroes and victims of an imagination and a
quest shot through with Gold .

Then, he tackles the issue of legend as the natural language of children. He

imagines three boys; Singh, Lee and Bob. Each one represents a land. Singh is
from India, Lee is from China and Bob is from Africa. Thus, they belong to three
different parts of the world. In other words, they are characterized by the
diversity of cultural and religious complexions. However, they speak the same
idiom and have something in common which is living the same history.

The three boys describe the state of the world before human interference.
They agreed upon the fact that the world was controlled by nature before men
make arrangements. So, they belong to the tribal system. The tribe boys live in
peace and serenity before the coming of kings. Nevertheless, the tribe boys will
never win back that peace as kings declare war against them. The fighting
starts. The peace turns into a terror. The bullets begin to talk. There is only one
tune which is the tune of guns.