As Ron Ramdin explains in his landmark text, The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (1987), Black politics underwent a significant shift in the mid-1960s from the ‘tolerant and accommodationist’ groups of the immediate post-war years to a politics typified by ‘a greater militancy as reflected in the industrial struggles […] and community-oriented social and cultural organisations created to fight racism and fascism during the 1970s and 1980s’ (p. 371). This rising militancy was cemented by visits from a number of well-known Black radicals from the United States (Malcolm X in 1965; Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, in 1967; Muhammad Ali in 1971), not to mention the growing frequency of assertive street protests, such as those against over-policing during Notting Hill Carnival in 1976 and in opposition to the far-right National Front in Lewisham in 1977.

However, there was also a degree of disconnect between the Black politics of the period and some Black writers. As pointed out by legendary Black liberation activist and intellectual, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, by the mid-1970s ‘the youth had begun to emerge into the vanguard of Black struggle’ (p. 140) and, by this point, were increasingly British-born and raised. By contrast, the majority of Black writers from this period were still from the older generation of post-war migrants, many of whom had cut their teeth as part of the 1950s ‘great decade of the West Indian novel’ (Hughes, p. 90). Yet while some of this generation were supportive of this newfound militancy among young Black working-class people, such support was by no means universal: in particular, V.S. Naipaul and Sam Selvon both put to paper their ambivalence towards Black Power in their respective 1975 novels, Guerrillas and Moses Ascending.

Yet one writer with a much more affirmative approach to the radical Black politics of the time was George Lamming (1927–2022). Born to a working-class, single mother in Barbados, in many ways Lamming was the archetypal ‘scholarship boy’ outlined by Richard Hoggart in his 1957 book, The Uses of Literacy, gaining a place at the prestigious Combermere School. This education, and Lamming’s resulting socialisation alongside a different social class, gradually separated him from his background. However, like the protagonist, ‘G’, in his semi-autobiographical novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953), Lamming refused to follow those ‘who had one way or another gone to the island’s best schools and later held responsible posts in the Government service’ (2010, p. 18) or ‘the lawyers and doctors who had returned stamped like an envelope with what they called the culture of the Mother Country’ (pp. 18–19). Rather, as Douglas Mao points out, Lamming’s life would turn out to be one of ‘public recognition permitting him to serve, ongoingly, as a voice of social critique’ (p. 43).

Lamming’s social critique was one fundamentally rooted in anti-colonialism; however, Lamming was not content with the formal transfer of administrative responsibility from the British Empire to new local elites. Instead, what one reads across Lamming’s novels is an anti-colonialism inseparable from the politics of class: one need only look at the eulogies he gave at the funerals of Walter Rodney, Maurice Bishop and C.L.R. James to understand the extent of his connection to the Caribbean Marxist intellectual culture. Indeed, it is the last of these that Lamming most notes as an influence on his writing, particularly citing the idea of ‘the creative power of the mass’ (1992, p. 29) as an inheritance from James present in his novels Age of Innocence (1958) and Season of Adventure (1960). Yet In the Castle of My Skin, written before he met James, displays a similar interest in the creative power of the mass, incorporating the 1937 Barbados labour rebellion into its narrative. As Lamming once noted, ‘the major thrust of Caribbean literature in English rose from the soil of labour resistance in the 1930s [which] had a direct effect on liberating the imagination and restoring the confidence of men and women in the essential humanity of their simple lives’ (2001, p. 22). Though not always in the form of an overt narrative structuring device (as in Castle), the reverberations of the 1930s Caribbean labour rebellions can be felt throughout Lamming’s fiction.

Lamming’s relationship with James, then, was one of overlapping interests rather than Damascene conversion. But it also underlines how Lamming’s long-standing commitment to a working-class anti-colonialism was well suited to Britain’s emerging Black liberation movement, whose inspiration ‘came partly from radical Marxism and class-based politics, but was just as informed by anti-colonial politics from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent’; this politics sought ‘to present a black British identity with a colonial legacy, rather than merely colonial subjects in the “Mother Country”’ (Smith, p. 19) and to produce a ‘black self-organisation for socialism which is autonomous of, but not cut off from, the white majority’ (Farrar, p. 9). Against that political context, it is interesting to note that while most of Lamming’s novels are set in the Caribbean (either Barbados or the fictional island of San Cristobal), the publication of Water with Berries (1971) was his first literary ‘return’ to Britain since he had published The Emigrants (1954). Yet while The Emigrants depicted (and was produced out of) a freshly arrived Caribbean community in Britain on the cusp of decolonisation, Water with Berries reflects a radically different moment both for West Indians in Britain and the Caribbean itself, where decolonisation had begun in earnest. With one foot in the Caribbean and one in the diaspora, Water with Berries emanates a class-based anti-colonial Black politics which, despite Lamming’s generational separation from that aforementioned vanguard of Black struggle, was well tuned for the moment it was written in.

It should be noted, however, that Water with Berries was written at a time that was less receptive to Caribbean authors than when Lamming had published his first novel: the termination of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices in 1958, a radio programme that had been vital for Caribbean literature in the early post-war period, resulted in a general decline in opportunities for West Indian writers (the obvious exception being the award-winning V.S. Naipaul). In response, E.K. Brathwaite, John La Rose and Andrew Salkey (among others) founded the Caribbean Artists’ Movement (CAM) in 1966 with a view to remedying the ‘perceived decline in West Indian cultural visibility in Britain since the postwar literary boom’ (Brown, p. 176). However, CAM was ‘effectively finished’ by 1972 (McLeod, p. 95), beset by internal disagreements around aesthetics and CAM’s relationship to Black politics. As such, McLeod describes the 1970s as ‘something of a watershed in the fortunes of postwar black British culture, and especially as regards literary production’ (p. 94). Specifically, he argues that it ‘marks an ending of a particular moment in the history of Black British writing with many of those identified with the postwar migrant generation of writers moving away from Britain, both on the page and in their travels’ (p. 95). Continuing, McLeod explains that while it is

possible to speak of Black British writers of the 1970s, it is much harder to identify a distinctive Black British writing, formulated (contentiously or confluently) across a body of writers who interacted with each other or wrote in the cognisance of the examples of others. Black British writers of the 1970s were far more isolated figures, siloed within an often unaccommodating political and cultural landscape. (p. 96)

With this in mind, McLeod goes on to describe the thematic concerns of Black British fiction: he notes the depiction of the ‘bleak, racist social landscape of the time and the political necessity of challenging prejudice’ but also the sense that these works seem ‘much more wearied when contemplating the enormity of the task’ (p. 97). Ultimately, there is an overriding sentiment among Black authors from this period that ‘a sense of progressive, productive change for the better is difficult to discover or, when envisioned, to sustain’ (p. 98).

This concern with the struggles of Black British life, as well as an engagement with the radical politics of the Caribbean, runs right through Lamming’s Water with Berries. The novel follows three West Indian artists living in London: Teeton, a painter; Roger, a musician; and Derek, an actor. The principal protagonist of the novel is Teeton, whose living situation Lamming uses to symbolise colonial relations in this period of decolonisation: Teeton is lodging with his landlady (known only as the Old Dowager), in a room which he has come to think of as ‘a separate and independent province of the house’, explaining: ‘The house was the Old Dowager’s; but the room was his; and house and room were in some way their joint creation; some unspoken partnership in interests they had never spoken about’ (Lamming, 2016, p. 35). It is useful to read Lamming’s use of free indirect style in this passage against what Jeri Johnson, in her introduction to Ulysses, describes as the technique’s capacity for ‘representing character through pre-verbal or unspoken “thoughts”’ (p. xxi). This raises the question of what it is that Teeton (and on a deeper level, Lamming) might be getting at in his reference to an ‘unspoken partnership’: Teeton’s phrasing highlights his contradictory perception of the room as an ‘independent province’ despite the fact that the house ‘was the Old Dowager’s’ so that, by extension, the room cannot – by definition – be ‘his’ nor the house ‘their joint creation’. One reading, then, of what Lamming is illustrating is that, in the context of the accelerating pace of postcolonial independence for many Caribbean nations, the colonial relationship continues even in the apparently postcolonial era, manifesting in the enduring nature of their dependency on the so-called ‘Mother Country’. This analogy is actually reinforced later in the novel by the fact that Teeton perceives the Old Dowager’s feelings toward him in maternal terms, believing she loves him ‘as a son, as she might have loved her own offspring’ (p. 221). The structural nature of this dependency (in that a room is structurally dependent on a house) is reinforced by a psychological aspect: Teeton is simply not ready to confront the inherent contradictions in his relationship to the Old Dowager. Yet the appearance of these contradictions within their ‘unspoken partnership’ – while simultaneously not acknowledging them – suggests that those contradictions exist on the edge of Teeton’s consciousness; they are contradictions in the colonial relationship which Teeton attempts to repress, a psychological manoeuvre which Lamming highlights through his use of free indirect style.

As Anthony Bogues notes, concern with the enduring nature of colonial relations recurs throughout Lamming’s novels, many of which take place on the fictional island of San Cristobal. This concern emerges as he

begins to think about how Caribbean anti-colonial nationalism had secured a formal political independence that shattered the possibilities of West Indian federation and established nation states. In this formal constitutional decolonisation process the middle classes became the new political elite without any rupture from the forms of political rule established by British colonial power. (pp. xxv–xxvi)

However, as stated above, Water with Berries is set almost entirely within the United Kingdom, with San Cristobal existing on the text’s periphery. It does, however, remain ever-present in Teeton’s membership of the ‘Gathering’ – a group of revolutionaries exiled after their failed rebellion against the country’s post-independence neocolonial government – who plot their return from a basement ‘tunnelled deep underground’ (Lamming, 2016, p. 62). For Teeton, San Cristobal’s sovereignty was ‘no more than an exchange of ownership. There had been no end to the long and bitter humiliations of foreign rule’ (p. 39). Teeton’s analysis of post-independence San Cristobal here seems to channel another major figure from the radical Caribbean: the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon, and his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1961). In particular, strong parallels can be read with the chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in which Fanon describes the existence and function of a ‘national middle class’ within colonised nations which believes ‘it can advantageously replace the middle class of the mother country’ but whose vision of independence ‘will oblige it to send out frenzied appeals for help to the former mother country’ (1963, p. 149). Ultimately, according to Fanon, this national middle class from among colonised peoples merely seeks ‘the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period’ (p. 153).

Within the context of Water with Berries, this self-interested national middle class is depicted in the character of Jeremy, the cultural attaché at the San Cristobal Embassy. Teeton suspects Jeremy’s presence indicates infiltration of the Gathering by San Cristobal’s new government. Teeton describes Jeremy as being ‘Flexible as a worm, he seemed to penetrate the narrowest spaces’ (2016, p. 107), suggesting simultaneously the ‘spineless’ adaptability of the national middle class to neocolonial structures and the potential danger of him penetrating that narrow space of the Gathering’s subterranean meeting.

However, an interesting – and specifically diasporic – politics begins to emerge from the intellectual sparring which ensues between the two: sitting in the typically British setting of Teeton’s local pub, the Mona, Jeremy asks pointedly, ‘You like them?’ (p. 111), gesturing to the pub’s regular clientele, though the ‘them’ being referred to are ‘the English’ as a collective national entity. Interestingly, Teeton notes he ‘had come to the defence of the English with surprising ease’ (p. 112). Conversation later moves onto ‘Flamingo’, an anti-colonial intellectual disparaged by Jeremy as thinking ‘the Thirties were yesterday’, to which Teeton responds, ‘He also thinks the slave is very much with us today’ (p. 115). In this back and forth, one cannot help but read Flamingo as a veiled allusion to C.L.R. James himself, particularly when read against Lamming’s eulogy which underlined James’s ability to make ‘any historical event […] come alive’ (1992, p. 195). Like James, Flamingo is similarly able to make the struggles of the past reverberate in the present. That Jeremy wishes to diminish the contemporary relevance of those struggles, and specifically the labour rebellions of the 1930s, underscores his national middle-class status, seeking to limit the imaginations liberated by that period of unrest to the simple ‘exchange of ownership’ so castigated by Teeton for leaving intact the structures of colonialism. However, the passage’s dramatisation of the antagonism between neocolonial national bourgeoisie and Fanonite revolutionary anti-colonialism is only one aspect of its politics: returning to how Teeton defends ‘the English’ with ‘surprising ease’, it is not an abstract, classless Englishness which he defends. Rather, in the context of the passage, the people being defended are the working-class coded characters of the Mona. Though it must be noted that the Mona is no anti-racist utopia as some of its customers engage in overt racism (Lamming, 2016, p. 234), Teeton’s defence gestures towards the potential for multi-ethnic conviviality with ‘the English’ working-class. For Lamming, then, this multi-ethnic working-class conviviality is a possibility only achievable by a Black politics rooted in the diaspora, influenced by anti-colonialism, autonomous of, but not cut off from, the white majority.

The political radicalism of Water with Berries mirrors its aesthetic radicalism. This can be read in the text’s generic shifts between novel and drama, how it works with space and the distension of temporalities and its use of free indirect style to diminish narrative authority and emphasise the clashing interiorities of its characters. At some points, Lamming also uses a form of fragmented interior mono/dialogue to transcribe the fragmented interiority of the colonised subject. In one passage, Teeton meets a white woman called Myra on Hampstead Heath, who, it transpires (though this is never revealed to the characters themselves), is the Old Dowager’s daughter. However, as they talk, Teeton begins to think of his escape from San Cristobal:

But I did leave. You took up the offer to get away. It was not even escape. I might have stayed. It was your duty to stay. Whatever the consequences, he had a duty to honour his promise to the men he had left behind. Your courage was then a promise which required no oath. There was a chance you would have died. It happened to some you left behind. You knew it was more than a chance. Your commitment had accepted such a certainty. Was it, then, his fear? Was it your fear of death which, after all, is soon over? It was his fear of knowing that he would have to die. He would have to bear witness to his dying. You would have been condemned for life to the spectacle of yourself about to die. (pp. 131–2)

With this shift between first, second and third person, it is valuable to once again read Lamming against (or, rather, alongside) Fanon, in this case Black Skin White Masks (1952). Fanon explains the experience of Blackness in a white-dominated world: ‘I existed triply’, he writes, describing the feeling of simultaneous responsibility ‘for my body, for my race, for my ancestors’ (2008, p. 84). This ‘triple-existence’ can be read in Lamming’s passage above: the first-person (Teeton’s ‘body’) for self-reflection – ‘I might have stayed’ – but also the second person for the imagined direct interrogation from Teeton’s ‘race’ and the third person representing a more removed discourse with his ancestors. Under this lens, the increasingly accusatory nature of the second and third-person statements (along with their dominance within the passage as a whole) itself indicates the weight of such ‘triple-existence’ on Black interiority. Within his own head, Teeton hears the words, ‘It was your duty to stay. Whatever the consequences, he had a duty to honour his promise to the men he had left behind’, a phrasing which evokes not only his comrades in San Cristobal but also the victims of colonial abuses throughout history (whose memory he feels he has betrayed through his departure). Yet its weight is also part of what reconfigures the colonised subject as an antagonistic political subject, impelled to resolve this fragmented interiority by breaking the colonial relationship to create a post-racial, postcolonial world – beyond the unequal transference of power and resources to a national middle-class as described by Fanon (1963, p. 153).

Teeton’s interactions with Myra on Hampstead Heath also indicate the possibilities for a post-racial world, in part because of the suggestiveness of their meetings in complete darkness (where their racial difference cannot be seen) but also because of the therapeutic and altruistic nature of their interactions: on their second meeting, Myra tells Teeton of her rape in San Cristobal, the divulging of which leaves her ‘exhausted’ but also with ‘a feeling of relief’ (2016, p. 175). However, as with the fragile potential of the Mona pub as a multi-ethnic space, further meetings between the two (and the post-racial potentialities they imply) are interrupted by subsequent narrative events; that is, the discovery of a woman’s body who had died by suicide in Teeton’s room, and the Old Dowager and Teeton’s subsequent escape from London. Ultimately, purely communicative strategies for repairing the damage of colonial violence are unable to move beyond the realities of a world structured by racial hierarchies.

Here it becomes important to discuss the text’s profound engagement with The Tempest, latticing as it does the entire novel. As will be elaborated below, the title comes from Caliban’s introductory speech in the play, but Lamming also peppers his text with other references. For instance, Lamming reconfigures Shakespeare’s Miranda as Myra and Randa (Teeton’s ex-wife) and includes the recitation of quotes from the play in a passage focused on two transitory characters who discuss the protagonists in their absence (itself a typically Shakespearian technique).

Lamming’s interest in The Tempest, and the Caliban/Prospero analogy for the colonial relationship, can be traced back to at least his 1960 essay collection, The Pleasures of Exile, in which he discusses the need to appropriate ‘Prospero’s magic’ (2005, p. xviii) – that is, language and culture as a signifier of colonial authority: ‘we shall never explode Prospero’s old myth until we christen Language afresh […] until we make available to all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the unfortunate descendants of languageless and deformed slaves’ (2005, pp. 118–19). Yet as Brown suggests in his introduction to the 2016 Peepal Tree Press edition, it is necessary to read Lamming’s title in the context of Caliban’s initial speech from which it is drawn:

When thou cam’st first,

Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me

Water with berries in’t (I.ii.334–6).

According to Brown, Lamming wants to illustrate ‘the intimate, bedevilling ties of interpersonal colonial contact. […] Prospero did not just come and conquer, but instead exchanged kindnesses under the pretence of mutual affection and only later emerged as a tyrant. Water with berries thus references a loving gift from Prospero to Caliban, a gift whose fruit has, only in retrospect, turned bitter’ (2016, p. 10). Indeed, these ‘intimate, bedevilling ties’ are most clearly manifest in Lamming’s text in the aforementioned ‘unspoken partnership’ between Teeton and the Old Dowager, which suggests that the colonial relationship is not maintained solely through force but also consent: despite his utter dependence on the Old Dowager within the house, Teeton nonetheless believes it to be ‘their joint creation’ while the Old Dowager herself does indeed show a genuine affection for Teeton.

These ‘intimate, bedevilling ties’ are further evident in another passage filled with subversive references to The Tempest, in which Teeton, the Old Dowager and her (violently racist) brother-in-law Ferdinand sail on a small boat to the Orkney islands. Responding to Teeton’s questions about the boat, the Old Dowager responds, ‘it’s [Ferdinand’s] boat […] It’s his and mine […] Which means it’s also yours while you’re here. It’s ours. The boat belongs to all of us’ (2016, p. 210). This unsatisfactory response – whereby the boat initially belongs to Ferdinand, then only by two degrees of separation comes to include Teeton, and even then, only on the assumption that he eventually leaves – functions in a similar way to the Old Dowager’s house earlier in the novel. Much as how he had earlier evaded the contradictions in their (colonial) relationship, here Teeton buries discontent by thinking that the Old Dowager had been ‘so protective of his interests, that he felt no impulse to show displeasure’ (p. 211). However, Teeton now begins to perceive ‘a sense, deep and subtle and even dangerous, in which she had achieved some powerful hold on the roots of his emotion’ (p. 211). The contradictions of Teeton’s inclusion in the shared ownership of space begin to reveal themselves: the boat, then, symbolises another attempt to start afresh, but undermined by the inability to confront the colonial violence – to break the ‘bedevilling ties’ of the colonial relationship – that has brought them together.

By the end of the novel, such delicately balanced relationships collapse as Teeton and the Old Dowager ‘demolished the rules of their private game; and now she was confirming that she didn’t care about their preservation anyway. […] She was prepared to come out from behind their codes’ (p. 255). The collapse of these codes thus reveals their essential function of concealing the colonial relationship; moreover, once Teeton is ready to break with that relationship there is little that separates the Old Dowager from Ferdinand. For instance, Ferdinand is figured around an overt racism, at various points commenting on Teeton’s ‘animal claws’ (p. 248) and excoriating the racial contact that occurred as a result of the colonial project as ‘a curse’ which will ‘plague my race until one of us dies’ (p. 254). Yet with the collapse of the ‘private game’, the gap narrows between Ferdinand and the Old Dowager, the latter now also discovering an ‘animal treachery’ in Teeton (p. 259), ‘the ancestral beast […] forever in hiding, dark and dangerous as the night’ (p. 260). In the words of C.L.R. James, ‘imperialism remains imperialism’ (2012, p. 68); through the Old Dowager, Lamming exposes the imperial hauteur and colonialist race-thinking which underpin Britain’s relationship to the colonised.

In his leap from a repressed awareness to an open acknowledgement of the colonial contradictions in his relationship with the Old Dowager, Teeton however finds himself incapable of finding words to express that acknowledgement. Returning to Caliban’s relationship to ‘Prospero’s magic’, Lamming depicts Teeton’s ‘total speechlessness’, not knowing ‘what sound his tongue should make; what language he could make his own. But he wanted to speak […] he had no language; no tongue that he could call his own’ (2016, p. 256). Resolution, then, comes through unspeakable action, as Teeton finally murders the Old Dowager and burns her body. As he sails away from the island, Lamming depicts Teeton’s thoughts: ‘Calm, you are so calm. He was so calm. I am, he was struggling not to say, so calm. A trinity of voices came up from the floor of the ocean. Calm, Teeton was ready to move; and he was so calm’ (p. 274). In contrast to the aforementioned accusatory ‘triple-existence’, there is now a soothing concordance in the statements of body, race and ancestors. In contrast to the earlier passage’s shift towards and dominance of interrogatory second and third-person interior mono/dialogue, this passage sees the move from second and third to the first person and then, finally, to the voice of a more conventional third-person heterodiegetic narrator: ‘Calm, Teeton was ready to move; and he was so calm’. The clear break with the colonial relationship effected by the Old Dowager’s death has resolved the ‘triple-existence’ of Teeton’s interiority, as reflected in Lamming’s conscious use and stabilisation of competing narratorial voices.

Lamming’s textual resolution suggests that the colonial relationship cannot be ended by benevolence or even a ‘simple parting of ways’ but rather by a decisive break even with ‘a certain kind of violence in the breaking’ (2011, p. 164). For Lamming, coloniser and colonised cannot continue to awkwardly occupy the same boat, nor can independence be more than formal if an ‘independent province’ remains part of the coloniser’s house. Teeton’s decisive break in murdering the Old Dowager is therefore not one of personal enmity – as evident in his aforementioned calmness – but rather, as Lamming writes in the novel, that the ‘future had come between them’ (2016, p. 275); that is, the fragile possibilities of a postcolonial, post-racial ‘future’, glimpsed in his interactions with Myra or at the Mona, necessitated an active breaking from the ‘unspoken partnership’ of the past.

It is equally significant that Lamming’s ‘break’ is focused on both the Caribbean and the diaspora. As discussed above, diasporic politics emerges in Teeton’s conversation with Jeremy, as a representative of Fanon’s ‘national middle class’; yet this politics is evident from the very start of the novel. Lamming describes a ‘black tree trunk’ in Teeton’s room, ‘no taller than a man of average height with its twin branches stuck out on either side like arms cut off at the elbows’ (p. 32). Following the difficulty of bringing the tree trunk to his room, ‘the fight went on to keep it […]. The Old Dowager had relented; and the tree trunk remained. But she kept an eye on it just in case “things” began to accumulate’ (p. 32). The tree trunk is itself deeply symbolic: a tree severed from its roots as a metaphor for the enslaved Africans taken to the Caribbean (and Americas more generally) while the ‘arms cut off at the elbows’ alludes to the punitive amputations enacted on them.¹ Meanwhile, the Old Dowager’s keeping an eye on ‘ “things”’ lest they ‘accumulate’ suggests a reluctant tolerance of Black presence in Britain which figures that presence as a potential problem to be monitored and managed. As such, while we might read the contradictions of Teeton’s ‘independent province’ in relation to postcolonial national independence from empire, this passage can also be read as a comment on Black presence in Britain; specifically, the impossibility of ‘the house’ (that is, Britain) being a ‘joint creation’ between Commonwealth migrants and those who run the country while racial hierarchies, and the colonial logics that underpin them, continue to prevail. In the context of Britain’s increasingly stringent immigration acts restricting Commonwealth migration (in 1962, 1968 and 1971, the year of Water with Berries’ publication), the implication here is that ‘the fight’ to maintain Black presence is one rooted in the struggle against colonialism and that there can be no ‘joint creation’ while the colonial relationship is maintained (a point made all the more poignant by the 2018 Windrush scandal).

In the same vein, then, it is similarly significant that the novel closes with Teeton’s comrades from the Gathering not planning revolution in San Cristobal but struggling for justice in Britain, ‘def[ying] the nation with their furious arguing that Teeton was innocent. | They were all waiting for the trials to begin’ (p. 276). Teeton’s ‘innocence’ here must be read in the historic rather than specifically legal sense; that is, though guilty of murdering the Old Dowager, he is ‘innocent’ in relation to the broader historic crime of colonialism which it was necessary to break with. Meanwhile, the closing sentence works with a similar double-meaning of ‘trials’ as both court case, but also the struggles to come in navigating, unpicking and, ultimately, breaking with colonial logics as they manifest in Britain. Teeton’s actions, then, signal both an end and a beginning: the end of colonial subjecthood and the beginning of an assertive diasporic anti-colonial identity.

When asked in an interview whether Teeton’s revolutionary comrades would return to San Cristobal, Lamming responded: ‘I think no. […] They are not going to return. What they will have to deal with now is the new reality in the experience – that is, the world – the increasing world of Blacks in England, rather than what they propose to do about the world on the island’ (2011, p. 168). As such, while the text clearly addresses the relationship between the imperial core and periphery (not to mention the effect of that relationship on the colonised subject itself), it is also deeply engaged with the question of Black politics in Britain. To that end, it is significant that the novel both opens and closes with images relating to Black diasporic politics (in ‘the fight’ to keep the tree trunk, and the Gathering’s ‘trials’, respectively). This structure is supplemented by passages such as that in which Teeton defends the English working class with ‘surprising ease’ against the ‘national middle class’ Jeremy, indicating a diasporic anti-racism steeped in anti-colonialism and class politics. As such, while Lamming writes Water with Berries with an awareness of his relative detachment from developments in the lives and politics of British-born and/or raised Black youth, he nonetheless succeeds in writing a novel very much in tune with their radical aspirations, inspired by a Marxism and class politics informed by the anti-colonial struggles of the Global South. Lamming’s novel is therefore a fictional contribution to the Caribbean radical tradition he was himself steeped in, which like Lamming himself, sought to break with the colonial relationship and fundamentally transform society (both in Britain and the Caribbean) beyond a mere ‘exchange of ownership’.