ABSTRACT
The language of imperialism had a particular impact on the Caribbean. In the colonised countries of Africa there had been a conflict between the indigenous and imposed European languages, but the Antillean had no such choice. As Frantz Fanon argued in Black Skins, White Masks, language was the central issue in establishing a Caribbean identity. The Caribbean popular arts emerged out of the workplace, religious meetings, and folk celebration, and bear the mark of their origins. Caribbean language suddenly found a narrative voice of its own'. Selvon, who consistently distanced himself from all literary movements, wrote by instinct. Creole forms vary across the Caribbean, where even today a Trinidadian may find it hard to understand demotic Jamaican. Glissant has argued that the slave's Creole speech was an act of refusal against the prison of the master's tongue, and writing in the Caribbean must continue to embody the creative tension between the oral vernacular tradition and its literary development.
