Little Antilles have a rich literary tradition, though it is in recent times, because for centuries stories were transmitted verbally

“Love to an island is the most austere passion of all, is a love beating beyond blood, through roots and loam”.
Phyllis Allfrey, Dominica

The East Caribbean islands have inspired a great number of passions and poems. Few places in the world, have produced so many writers among a so small population. Despite many of them had to live in exile, the landscapes, language, and the people of these islands were always very much present in their books.
However, literature, is a more or less, recent phenomena in the Caribbean, as pointed out by George Lamming, the great Barbados novelist, when in the 1960’s said that the Caribbean literature was only twenty years old. On the other side, ink rivers have flowed in this region for a long time, because in the XVII century the Caribbean islands inspired missionaries, merchants and travelers, that wrote their impressions about them, and also in the XIX century, many writers went there to write a book.

The First Story Narrators
But during a long time, the literature production was scarce. Slavery, illiteracy and the continuous colonial wars didn’t offer the elementary conditions for their own literature to flourish. Besides, slaves and plantations owners were not, precisely, book lovers. About this fact, it’s significant the advice gave to the plantation owners by the poet Nathaniel Weekes in his book Barbados (1754), one of the pioneers in Caribbean poetry:

“For the glory and success of the sugar cane not to cease/ I exhort you to fertilize your rich land with good dung/ But tell me you the plantation owners/What harvest will you gather from your work?”

Slave’s culture was verbal. Their tales, stories and proverbs were kept alive thanks to story tellers. Due to the strong opposition of the masters, they never received education, so it isn’t surprising that reading books was something inexistent at that time, and even less literature production. Even in the first years after abolition of slavery, the Little Antilles were far back compared with Cuba or Haiti, for example. The little islands in the East Caribbean lacked of publishers, libraries, and, over all, readers. Amid the general poverty and illiteracy, only some clergymen and dilettante dared to produce some literature.
The exception confirming the rule is John Jacob Thomas, an self-taught black writer from Trinidad. In 1888, Thomas read The English in the West Indies, a study about the British colonialism in the Caribbean, by the Oxford professor James Anthony Froude. Irritated by the vision, full of prejudices, about the black Caribbean population, Thomas wrote a demolishing reply entitled Froude: an explanation to your fables over the West Indies (1889), accusing the professor of fatuous and being racist.

The Renascence of Literature
During the 1940’s and 1950’s, some events put the region back on the literature map. The Second World War, and the post war years, propitiated the massive emigration of islanders to Europe and US, looking for better jobs. Youngsters as Lamming or V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon from Trinidad, in London found the opportunity of new experiences.

Many of the future writers of the islands, where English was spoken, established their homes in New York and Montreal, while those of the French islands, like Martinique or Guadeloupe, opted for post war Paris. From their experiences started to surge some of the themes characterizing Caribbean literature: eradication, nostalgia, and the bittersweet reality of returning home. It was an era of political and cultural re-valorization in the islands, that were close to obtain independence, or at least, major autonomy, and that produced a strong nationalist feeling. Writers began to find their own voice, genuinely Caribbean. Many of them made mockery of the colonial system, and the values imposed by them for centuries. An example of this is the book “Growing like a stupid under the United Kingdom Flag” (1980), from Barbados writer Austin Clarke.