Mimesis and disillusionment in George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin"

George Lamming portrays his characters in In the Castle of My Skin as a people who are deeply alienated by slavery's "middle passage" experience. Since the actual middle passage failed to destroy the peasants' cultural tropes, the Empire perpetuates the middle passage process through its education and religious systems. As a sign that this alienation is absolute, the peasants are portrayed as weak, and yet ever dependent on the English landlord for stability, identity, and sense of purpose. In the midst of this dependency the peasants find that they are locked in a mimetic world where their desire for freedom and identity can only be met by imitating the very source of their alienation. The satisfaction that they derive from imitating the landlord---and the English in general---is never sufficient to stop their search for freedom and identity, even as they achieve some level of replication of the landlord's power. But their quest for meaning in a colonial world is dashed when the representatives of the new black elite who have taken over from the landlord deny them political and economic freedoms, proving that any mimetic interaction with the oppressor, when replicated in a new political era, produces the same oppressive results.