W est I ndian Fiction

Abstract

In his 1960 essay, The Pleasures of Exile , Barbadian writer George Lamming listed the postwar rise of the West Indian novel as the third most important event in British Caribbean history – after the “discovery” of the islands by Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth century and the abolition of slavery, which led in the nineteenth century to the arrival of East Indians in the Caribbean and made it one of the world's most cosmopolitan areas. This statement evidences the central role played by fiction in the development of a regional sensibility and in the attempts of the West Indian community to come to terms with its painful, century‐long experience of colonialism and exploitation. The rise of the West Indian novel as a “method of investigation” (38) was further linked by Lamming to the migration to England in the mid twentieth century of a number of young male writers, among them Andrew Salkey, Samuel Selvon, and himself. Their presence in the so‐called mother country facilitated the international circulation of their works and triggered an unprecedented upsurge of creativity, with long‐lasting effects on the following generations of writers. This does not mean, however, that there had not been any fiction produced in the West Indies in the early twentieth century, but the novels and short stories published before the 1950s suffered from a relative absence of visibility. And even if they paved the way thematically for the writing that was to come, they lacked, to some extent, the originality, political commitment, and vigor that later became the hallmark of the fiction from the anglophone Caribbean.